March 20, 2025: ScopesStudying: Three Plays

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

How three stage adaptations of the trial reflect the fraught relationship between art and history.

1)      Inherit the Wind (1955): Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s play, which has been itself adapted into multiple films for both screen and TV, is in many ways the most well-known representation of the Scopes trial. Which is quite ironic, since in their “Playwrights’ Note” before the text Lawrence and Lee explicitly argue that the play “is not history,” that “it is not 1925,” and that “the stage directions set the time as ‘Not long ago.’ It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.” To my mind both the play and the 1960 film adaptation are profoundly focused on contexts and questions from the age of McCarthy, making Inherit very much a counterpart to The Crucible (1953) and far more interesting as a 1950s text than a portrayal of the 1920s.

2)      Inherit the Truth (1987): As that article traces at length, Dayton playwright’s Gale Johnson’s 1980s play was overtly and entirely intended as a rebuttal to Inherit the Wind, but not so much in terms of historical inaccuracies about the trial per se. Instead, Johnson believed that the prior play had badly misrepresented both William Jennings Bryan and the town of Dayton, and sought to correct those errors with a play that is hugely laudatory toward both the man and the community (or at least its conservative Christians). I haven’t read Johnson’s play so I can’t speak to its specifics, and in any case it’s important to note that her goals are no more (or less) problematic than those of any playwright. But I’d say her use of the word “Truth” in her title is deeply problematic, and indeed extends Bryan’s embrace of mythic patriotism about which I wrote in yesterday’s post.

3)      The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial (1993): Whatever its flaws, though, Johnson’s play seems to have had at least one important positive effect: it helped encourage playwright Peter Goodchild to write a play based far more explicitly on the trial’s transcripts and histories than either of the Inherits had been. In awarding Goodchild’s play its Earphones Award, Audiofile magazine noted that, “Because there are no recordings of the actual trial, this production is certainly the next best thing.” I hear that, and using transcripts is definitely a way to guarantee a significant degree of historical accuracy. But at the same time, any actor who performs Goodchild’s roles is an actor who’s performing, not (for example) Bryan or Darrow themselves. So the relationship of art and history remains at least a bit complicated here, if certainly distinct than with either of those prior stage adaptations.

Last Scopes context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?