Goodman’s “Inherit the Wind,” with Presley Rose Jones and Thomas Murphy Molony/Photo: Liz Lauren
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“Inherit the Wind” began life in 1950 as a script so dangerously subversive that it took playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, already a successful writing team, five years before a producer in Dallas agreed to stage it. Today it still has subversive power. The Goodman’s current production with powerhouse performances by its dueling lead actors, Tony Award-nominee Alexander Gemignani and stage and screen staple and local favorite Harry Lennix, brings the material forcefully into a new American moral universe and finds ways to make the progressive morality play as strong as—or stronger than—ever.
The now-canonical play has been frozen out by the cultural chill of McCarthyism. “Inherit the Wind” championed the kind of open-mindedness that leads people to question traditional values. In the 1950s, free thinkers with unorthodox views on religion and the country’s social mainstream were targeted as un-American, and from 1952 to 1954 Lawrence and Lee’s play seemed so much like bait to America’s conservative inquisitors, who could ruin careers and shut down theaters, that no producers would risk it. Its producer in Dallas, Margo Jones, had been a pioneering director in New York and an important interpreter of Tennessee Williams (she co-directed the first production of “The Glass Menagerie”). According to Kay Cattarulla, writing in a 2005 article on Jones in Dallas’ D Magazine, the director’s Dallas theater was the country’s first nonprofit theater and was committed to doing classic plays and new works only. Jones was sent “Inherit the Wind” by a script agent who added a note that it “will take guts to do in the Bible Belt…” Guts, indeed.
Goodman’s “Inherit the Wind,” with Alexander Gemignani and Harry Lennix/Photo: Liz Lauren
The courtroom drama centers on the contest, in the fictional Southern hamlet of Hillsboro, between two lions, one, Matthew Harrison Brady, a famous politician and biblical literalist revered for his long allegiance to small-town and rural Americans and the other, Henry Drummond, an equally-famous atheist trial attorney whose national notoriety is high, in part, because he ”got those Chicago child murderers off just the other day.” The cause for the trial is the classroom science lessons of a school teacher who, in violation of state law, introduced the concept of evolution, or as Brady says, “Evil-ution,” to his students. The play, Jones knew, is a double allusion. First to the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial, the famous 1925 court battle in Dayton, Tennessee where Clarence Darrow defended a science teacher who introduced Darwin while political lion and three-time presidential loser William Jennings Bryan stepped in to represent the state. The second allusion is to the censorious crusades of McCarthy and other Cold War warriors who attacked Americans they perceived (or said they did) as communist or otherwise out-of-step with so-called American values.
Goodman’s “Inherit the Wind,” with Lawrence Grimm/Photo: Liz Lauren
The play was a hit in Dallas, despite the city’s then-recent political hard turn toward conservative politicians who were also avid witch-hunters. It was soon picked up for a New York production where it wooed audiences, earned accolades and led to a filmed version in 1960. The play has been a high-school English class staple for decades. As of this writing, seventy-three years after it was penned, “Inherit the Wind” is ranked eighteenth in sales among plays sold by Amazon (Arthur Miller’s stab at McCarthyism, “The Crucible,” is number two). One reason the play was rejected so often by New York producers in its early days is that it already seemed to them to be old-fashioned in the 1950s—full of long speeches and pedantic moralizing. Yet courtroom dramas are theatrical warhorses in which creakiness can be a virtue. Old-fashioned lawyers with histrionic bullying, clever arguments, surprising evidence and tactics, and sly emotional pandering make “Inherit the Wind” a model of the genre. Neither the structure of the show nor Goodman’s production messes with the formula. The staging is classically simple. Before the show opens we see an American stage standing in the middle of a round set. Overhead, as if in the distance, are models of small-town America’s homes, churches and shops. Two wonderful young actors, Presley Rose Jones and Thomas Murphy Molony, are the first villagers we meet. They set the show’s stakes with an argument between them over whether the girl is descended from blobs and worms, as the boy says, and whether or not her dad is a monkey. Soon after the stage floods with excited adults waiting for the arrival of their political hero, Brady, for whom they’ve hung signs and prepared their best picnic lunch. Gemignani’s Brady is bigger than life with an embracing rapport and good humor with his hosts. He makes clear his commitment to the truth of the Bible and his disdain for science that veers from it. When Brady later attends an evening prayer circle led by the town’s staunch minister, he intervenes to stop the minister, played fearsomely by Ryan Kitley, from violently making an example of his daughter. Brady physically blocks the reverend and quotes Solomon in Proverbs 11:29, “He that troubleth his own house… shall inherit the wind.” Gemignani’s Brady is big and blustery but he’s quietly noble, too.
Goodman’s “Inherit the Wind,” with Christopher Kale Jones, Alexander Gemignani, Harry Lennix and Terry Bell/Photo: Liz Lauren
The arrival of defense attorney Drummond takes the town by surprise and opens the possibility that the great Chicago lawyer might thwart a guilty verdict. What Drummond does do is make the trial as big a national news story as a Jack Dempsey prize fight, and get it covered more or less the same way. Lennix’s Drummond strikes a perfect mix of brainy, tough-minded and humane. In the most famous exchange in the play, Drummond, who has been denied the chance to put scientists on the stand, calls Brady, a self-styled expert on the Bible—which he knows chapter and verse—to testify. During this heart of the play, we get two big characters personified by two great actors working to destroy the other’s core beliefs.
As theater art, the show is a triumph. How about as a message for our age delivered by a decades-old play crafted in a different political moment? It’s tempting to say that America is rewinding the past, with the country split between those wed to traditional fundamentalisms and convinced beyond doubt in old teachings and those whose beliefs are shaped by empirical modern science and by a belief that people should be allowed their own choices. Yet we are not rewinding the past of “Inherit the Wind.” In that past the conservative forces believed heart and soul that the truth lay in their gospel and that they were commanded to act on it. Today, the most powerful strain in conservatism is committed to cynically labeling vast lies as truth and going to the ends of the political earth to get consensus on known falsehoods. The country’s most influential leader on the right is the opposite of a moral standard bearer. Across the divide, there is also a strong chill against breaking ranks and seeking consensus more broadly. In many ways, our time seems more dangerous than that portrayed in the play, because it defies understanding. But the truths of the play resonate strongly, nonetheless: “He that troubleth his own house… shall inherit the wind.”
Goodman Theatre’s “Inherit the Wind” has been extended to October 20 at Goodman’s Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn. Showtimes: Wednesdays and Fridays, 7:30pm (no performance on Wednesday, October 16); Thursdays and Saturdays, 2pm and 7:30pm; and Sundays, 2pm. Tickets are $25-$95, available at goodmantheatre.org/inherit or by phone at (312)443-3800.
