Audience Peeks Inside Prop. 8 Courtroom And Laughs Hard 

Midway through 8, the new play by Dustin Lance Black about the Prop. 8 trial in California, an exchange between an attorney played by Morgan Freeman and a witness played by Rob Reiner captured a level of farce previously seen only by courtroom attendees.

The pair slipped into an Abbot and Costello-style routine as the witness -- David Blankenhorn, the president of the antigay Institute for American Values -- refused to answer with a simple "yes," "no," or "I don't know" during cross-examination. "But I do know!" insisted Blankenhorn in response to Freeman's drilling as famed attorney David Boies, before launching into a long-winded reply.

"If I were to take that as an 'I don't know,' would that be fair?" asked an exasperated Judge Vaughn Walker, played by Bob Balaban, who presided over the set of a federal courtroom arranged on the stage normally reserved for the The Book of Mormon at the Eugene O'Neill Theater. Their back and forth represented one of numerous instances where the defense crumbled, often to laughter from the overwhelmingly gay sold-out audience, as the plaintiffs and their attorneys put "fear and prejudice on trial" in the words of the Boies character.

"It was a really funny trial," said Black, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Milk and the forthcoming J. Edgar, after the reading. "We found 90% of that tonight. That was surprising. I worried that we wouldn't be able to with such a small rehearsal window."

Directed by Joe Mantello, 8 premiered with a one-night-only reading by an all-star cast in New York City on Monday that according to Chad Griffin, board president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, raised $1 million for the organization sponsoring the lawsuit. The case is still tied up in appeals and has potential to reach the Supreme Court, where lawyers Boies and Ted Olson will make the argument for marriage equality yet again. On the same day as the play was bringing to light what happened in the original trial, U.S. District Judge James Ware decided that videos of those proceedings should be released to the public, but marriage equality opponents are expected to appeal.

"It's incredible timing," said Black, an AFER board member. "Judge Ware's decision was incredibly theatrical. But everything that's ever happened in this trial has been."

8 uses trial transcripts, firsthand observations and interviews with plaintiffs and their families to condense the 12 days of proceedings from 2010 into 90 minutes. Time and again, defense witnesses such as Maggie Gallagher (expertly portrayed by Jayne Houdyshell) and the attorney Charles Cooper (played by Bradley Whitford) evade questions and stammer to avoid the "Orwellian" conclusions, like "pre-marital fertility tests" and "pledges" to have children, that flow from their premise that procreation is the primary purpose of marriage.

"I don't know," shrugged a defeated Cooper at one point, bereft of credible witnesses or scientific evidence.

"You have to have a reason that's real," said Olson, the powerful AFER attorney played by John Lithgow, near the close of the play. "'I don't know' does not cut it."

Olson, the conservative who served as solicitor general under President George W. Bush, told reporters on the red carpet that truth is the message of 8.

"The amazing thing is that our opponents do not want the American public to see the truth," he said. "They don't want the American public to see the witnesses. They don't want the American public to see what happened in a trial in America. That's maybe what happens in China, or in the Soviet Union. It does not happen in America. How they can oppose this is really remarkable."

Plaintiffs Jeff Zarrillo and Paul Katami, who were played by Matt Bomer and Cheyenne Jackson, said the play accurately depicted their experience in the courtroom. Fellow plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandra Stier were played by Christine Lahti and Ellen Barkin.

"The moments when the audience laughed and the moments where the audience gasped and the times when the audience cried were the same times in the gallery of the courtroom when they did that," said Zarillo.

"There's a validation in this," said Katami. "You can't just create a fiction about a community. When it comes down to the law, the law protects us all equally."

Whitford, who belongs to a church in Pasadena that opposed Prop 8., said he and the other actors relied on advice from Black and Montello in their short window of preparation. The point of the reading was to deliver a message, which meant skipping on more refined details such as Cooper's Southern accent.

"What is striking about this is the utter lack, and this guy's not a bad lawyer, [but] there's no case against the civil rights argument of same-sex marriage," said Whitford, the Emmy Award-winning West Wing star. "All the arguments fall apart. He had nothing."

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, one of many LGBT leaders who attended the premiere, agreed about the defense's weak case. She called the reading "incredibly power."

"You can't believe that it's actually what the opponents said, but it is," she said. "I think hearing those words, you understand why the opponents fought so hard to prevent America from hearing this. They have no logical, scientific, moral or any other reason to oppose marriage equality and getting that out there, as this play is going to do, is really going to help erode the ignorance that still exists and build momentum for full equality."

Next steps for 8 include licensing to schools and community organizations with assistance from Broadway Impact, which co-presented the premiere. Future scheduling remains unannounced, but Larry Kramer, who took an uncharacteristically quiet turn as the soft-spoken civil rights attorney Evan Wolfson, a trial witness, expressed no doubt the educational initiative would be effective.

"One of the most exciting productions I ever saw of The Normal Heart was in Paris in French, done by school children," he said of his Tony Award-winning play about the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis. "A Pierre Cardin production with kids 10, 12, 14 years old. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for."