Revisiting a classic text in a new way can help us shine a light on the present, to awaken us to truths so obvious we no longer recognize them, to surprise us with something we’ve known all along. Paradoxes (like, say, grasping the truth of the present by looking at the past) can often free our minds to see for the first time what has always been there.

So it’s no wonder that this famous novel with arguably the most famous opening sentence in all of Western literature is riddled with them. Not just the best and worst of times, but the hope and despair, wisdom and foolishness, all abiding together, in one particular and peculiar time. But it’s the less famous end of the sentence that’s truly jarring as we read it today — that these extreme conditions make that “period so far like the present.” It’s what prompted us to commission this new adaptation of this classic story.

Dickens, of course, was writing about pre-revolutionary France some 80 years after the fact when he crafted that opening line. But over 100 years after Dickens wrote that sentence, these conditions seem at least as much like our present. The generations of injustice. The violence. The extremes. Our beloved city of Atlanta, a city famous for dreams, also has the dubious distinction of having the highest level of income inequality of any major city in the country. The best of times, the worst of times. Playwright Brendan Pelsue has done the miraculous in adapting this classic story for the stage — collapsing the massive novel into a driving, riveting, and accessible evening of theatre without sacrificing any of the huge questions that the Dickens original continues to ask us.

Why does the past feel so like our present?