Warren's 2nd Story Theatre has never gone in much for sets. It has always focused more on the acting. But that has changed for its latest offering, Inherit the Wind, Lawrence and Lee's take on the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial that pitted Darwinism against creationism.
For this production it has gone with its most elaborate set to date – an entire courthouse.
For the time being, while 2nd Story installs sprinklers in its Market Street home, the theater has set up shop in the historic 1816 Bristol Statehouse, which has an intact courtroom. Windsor chairs have been brought in for the jury, which is made up of actors and some audience members, and the judge sits behind a true courtroom bench, gavel in hand.
In another nice touch, director Ed Shea has sprinkled the cast of townsfolk throughout the space, drawing the audience all the more into the illusion of a public trial.
Most people know Inherit the Wind from the film, which stars Spencer Tracy as brilliant trial lawyer Clarence Darrow and Fredric March as conservative populist William Jennings Bryan, three-time candidate for president.
But the play, or at least this production of it, is not as riveting as the 1960 cinematic version. Somehow the theatrical undoing of Bryan does not have as much punch as the film, even though Vince Petronio captures Bryan's, or in this case Matthew Harrison Brady's, self-assured swagger, his pompousness, as well as his insecurities.
Maybe the material is a little dated, although there is always something about this struggle that rings true. Inherit the Wind is not just about the fight over religion.
The play was actually written in the late 1940s in response to abuses by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Lawrence and Lee tried to produce it in 1950, but there were no takers. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (whose own unraveling paralleled Bryan's) was at the height of his powers. The authors would have to wait five years, until McCarthy's star faded.
We in the Northeast tend to forget that the issue of creationism still resonates among the Christian right, some of whom at least want it taught alongside evolution – 80 years after the Scopes Trial.
But there is something a little simplistic about Lawrence and Lee's (they penned Auntie Mame) version of events, something a little too black and white. Scopes, who was actually a math teacher, was talked into challenging Tennessee's anti-evolution laws by the ACLU. Bryan was not the backward-looking bumpkin he's made out to be in the playay. And the town got behind the trial hoping it would drum up some publicity.
This, in other words, is not 2nd Story's finest effort, although there is some fine acting, particularly from an utterly convincing Eric Behr as lawyer Henry Drummond, the Darrow character. Behr, a real natural, is right on top of the part, giving a performance that was remarkably free of affectation and other actorisms.
Drummond has been denied by the judge his expert witnesses, scientists who can testify in defense of Darwinism. So he goads Brady into taking the stand as an expert on the Bible.
That is when the play turns. Brady, who was something of a hero among the Bible-thumping throngs of onlookers, is held up to ridicule. Does he take it literally that Jonah was swallowed by a whale? Did Joshua really make the sun stand still? Was the Earth created in just six days?
At one point, Drummond holds up a fossil found where the trial is taking place, telling Brady that it is millions of years old, from a time when the sea covered the land. Brady counters that it had to be left from the Flood and wasn't more than 6,000 years old.
At this point we can sense Behr, who was so in control of the character, sharpening his claws as he begins to lean on an increasingly flustered Petronio. It was a nice moment.
The other standout performance came from Joanne Fayan as cynical reporter E.K. Hornbeck (in real life H.L. Mencken, who covered the trial for the Baltimore Sun). It's a portrayal the jumps out at you.
Patrick Poole did a decent job as Cates, the Scopes character, playing the part as a wide-eyed idealist, who doesn't seem to quite get the significance of the trial. Erin Olson is his uncertain girlfriend, who is torn between her fundamentalist beliefs (she is the daughter of a fire-and-brimstone preacher) and her love for Cates. She did an okay job capturing the confusion of the situation.
Joan Dillenback was fine as Brady's doting wife, and Jim Brown got the fiery preacher, Rev. Brown, right.
In a wonderfully evocative scene, Brown leads the cast in a rousing candlelight revival in a darkened courthouse.
Bob Frederikson stumbled more than once as the affable judge.
The folks at 2nd Story Theatre are clever in many ways, only one of which is their usually dandy stage productions. With this one they've taken an annoying problem — having to close down for several weeks to have a sprinkler system installed — and turned it into an advantage.
The courtroom drama Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, is being performed in the courtroom of the old Bristol Statehouse (through October 29), one town over from their Warren digs.
Talk about being made to feel part of the setting — audience members are even recruited to join the jury, and some of us sitting at the back may find ourselves sitting next to "townspeople" actors commenting on the proceedings.
The story is based on the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, when a high-school biology teacher was arrested for teaching the ideas of Charles Darwin. It was first staged in 1955, the year after the Army-McCarthy hearings in the Senate, when anti-Communist patriotism took the form of stifling free speech. Two years earlier, Arthur Miller's The Crucible had made a similar attempt after McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee succeeded in witchhunting left-leaning citizens in and out of government.
But it's the ingenuity of setting the play in an actual courtroom that's the main offering here — theater-in-the-round gone one better with theater-all-around. As a drama, Inherit the Wind certainly strikes familiar notes in these days of a Patriot Act. But the play, directed by Ed Shea, is a stagy melodrama and the production is further weakened by a couple of key roles not being reined in.
The characters are nicely set up for us. It's the day before the trial, and the teacher's girlfriend, Rachel Brown (Erin Olson), wants him to "tell them it was a joke!" But Bertram Cates (Patrick Poole) refuses. "Man wasn't just stuck here like a geranium in a flower pot," he tells her.
Arriving that day to lead the case for the prosecution is Matthew Harrison Brady (Vince Petronio), a Christian fundamentalist and twice a losing presidential candidate. The townsfolk love him and his speechifying as much as the radical right in 1925 loved William Jennings Bryan, the right-wing orator with a similar background whom the character is based on. Brady fulminates to the townspeople that the uproar the trial is causing is "an attack from the big cities in the North."
Representing such Yankee nattering nabobs is celebrity defense lawyer Henry Drummond (Eric Behr). John Scopes's lawyer was the famous Clarence Darrow, who made a career of championing the underdog and opposing capital punishment with Will Rogers-style wit. This dignified defender of tolerance and science is demonized as an agent of the devil, "maybe the devil himself," by the Reverend Brown (Jim Brown), Rachel's father.
This is where the play and the production start to break down. It's not impossible to convey convincing Bible-thumping preachers (witness John Lithgow in Footloose), but the safest way is to have them act with less uncontrolled fury and sprayed spittle than such fanatics can get away with before their cheering congregations. A theater audience is the wrong choir, one that wants to understand the minds, not the foolish rants, of such men. The same problem happens here with the character of Brady, whose puffed-up, hyperventilating, oratorically excessive surface is all we get to see and hear.
Much is made up for by the more thoughtful performance of Behr as Drummond, and not just because he gets most of the wry lines and sympathetic positions. Behr immediately establishes a person of depth and substance — qualities no less available to unsympathetic characters. He gets help from some good acting in supporting roles. Poole does well as the hapless teacher, but Olson shines as his adamantly Christian girlfriend. As the cocky reporter E.K. Hornbeck, Joanne Fayan relishes all the snappy screwball-comedy retorts she gets to deliver. (To second-grade teacher Rachel: "You feed the children of the Hillsboro from that little truck garden of your mind?")
As Eileen Warburton points out in an excellent essay commissioned by 2nd Story for this production, Lawrence and Lee wrote the play in the late 1940s, and it wasn't staged until the political atmosphere was safe enough to accept it. Minds are rarely changed as swiftly as art commands. The law that convicted Scopes wasn't repealed until 1967. A well-intentioned work like Inherit the Wind needs a lot of work by us off-stage for its intentions to come through.
2nd Story Theatre's season opening salvo of Inherit the Wind has taken the classic Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee courtroom drama out of its loft in Warren and placed it in the historic Bristol Statehouse. Here the refurbished walls resonate with the eloquence and elocution as the forces of good and evil square off to separate fact from fabrication, truth from Trinitarian dogma, church from state - all in the quaint little fictitious village of Hillsboro "not too long ago." Or is it in Bristol today?
The playwrights use the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial" as a backdrop to address the paranoia surrounding the work of Sen. Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. The theme of suppression of thought is as relevant today as it was then or during the days when Galileo defended the Copernican Theory and was branded a heretic by the church. Today it's evolution versus "intelligent design." Science versus religion. Reason versus rhetoric. Fact or faith. Take your pick and puts up your dukes; the fight rages on.
In Hillsboro, the courtroom is packed with spectators, which was also the case with the Bristol courtroom on opening night. Residents were in a tizzy, anticipating the arrival of three-time presidential candidate and prosecuting attorney Matthew Harrison Brady (Vince Petronio). Hillsboro townfolk sit among the audience drawing them into the drama and excitement as the self-righteous Brady and Mrs. Brady (Joan Dillenback) enter the fray. Brady is supported in his prosecution of truth by Assistant District Attorney Tom Davenport (Dillon Medina) and Hillsboro Mayor (Walter Cotter). The trial is presided over by the heavy hand of Bob Frederiksen as the Judge.
Always lurking in the shadows is Hornbeck (Joanne Fayan), a cynical journalist modeled after social-critic H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun who said: "The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and human. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."
A state law forbids teaching evolution in public schools, a law challenged by Bertram Cates (Patrick Poole). Cates is a shy, unassuming biology teacher, who is romantically involved with Rachel Brown (Erin Olson), the daughter of fire and brimstone preacher Jeremiah Brown (Jim Brown), the unconscious conscience of happy Hillsboro. Olson's performance as the conflicted lover displays the anguish she feels at having her belief system turned upside down by the man she loves. Poole's controlled presentation of Cates has just the right mix of self-sacrifice for an ideal and self-doubt. Jim Brown's portrayal of Rev. Brown is anything but controlled; Director Ed Shea has Brown pull out all stops, especially in a prayer meeting where Brown's electrifying account of the Creation from the Book of Genesis works the Hillsboro faithful into such frenzy they resemble more a lynch mob than a gathering of God's children.
Brady's adversary is Henry Drummond (Eric Behr), one-time Brady supporter, who is always on the wrong side of the laws of God and - humankind. Drummond has been hired by an Eastern liberal newspaper to defend Cates, or more significantly to defend the freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution. But Hillsboro and Brady will have none of it. Only the Word as it is written in the Holy Bible should be taught; anything less, and especially, anything more, will corrupt and confuse young and impressionable minds. To the delight of the audience, Petronio and Behr portray the old adversaries with equal amounts of pomp and perseverance; eliciting empathy and outrage. You alternate between hating the one and loving the other or loving the one and hating the other. Dillenback as Brady's "rock of salvation" adds an air of dignity to the old warrior when the world or his view of it deserts him and leaves him a stranger in a stranger land.
Old battles are never won; they are only fought over and over again. So it was with this one. Winners were losers and losers were winners. Nothing was really settled because the debate goes on - and on. But there is an inkling of hope in the staging of Shea's powerful final scene. The bailiff, Mr. Meeker (Joe Henderson) is closing the courthouse. Two books remain on a table: a Bible and a copy of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species." He picks up the latter, thumbs through it casually, reflects for a moment and tucks the book under his arm as he exits. This is the kind of staging that make good theater exceptional theater, and Shea is a master at attending to the details.
There is a reason why Inherit the Wind, a play about the so-called "Monkey Trials" of the 1920's, remains relevant some sixty years or so after it was written. The core issue of the play, creationism vs. evolution remains a hot-button issue, particularly in some school districts around the country a fact that tends to prove the point of this courtroom drama's defendant Bert Cates. Evolution is one really slow business and for all out technological advancement mankind hasn't really changed all that much in two thousand years let alone the past century. We're all still wrestling with the same concepts we were back in the caves only the vocabulary has changed.
The relative age of an idea doesn't guarantee its veracity, just it's comfort level, but there's no denying that some old concepts stay with us simply because they work. And that's the reason why 2nd Story Theatre's production of Inherit The Wind" is such a success. Unless you've been living in a cave lately you'll know that this production is being staged not at 2nd Story in Warren but at the historic Bristol Statehouse. A courtroom drama staged in an actual courthouse is a thing of ingenious beauty and it hits us right in our stark and spare old New England clapboard Meeting House genes. Here is one instance where Director Ed Shea seems to say "Evolution be darned-what worked for the ancient Greeks will play in the East Bay too!" and, by Jove, he's right. There is a primal immediacy to having the actors, action and issues surrounding us on all sides at the Statehouse; the experience seems to be less historical docu-drama than actual time machine.
It doesn't hurt, of course, that the play is a good one. Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, the same team who penned "Auntie Mame", have crafted a good (old fashioned?) "Play of ideas" in which each side of the debate is allowed their day in court. For make no mistake in Inherit the Wind it is ideas that are on trial here and "the right to think" is as vigorously defended as each opposing concept is rigorously cross-examined. Neither side of the debate is summarily dismissed; every idea here is precious and allowed their day in court.
A historic setting alone does not authenticity make and luckily for us Mr. Shea has filled the Statehouse with a compelling cast of characters. Patrick Poole hits all the right notes as Defendant Bert Cates, he possesses the necessary impassioned intellect but also the sense of being little more than a straw carried away in a great wind; he's an average guy caught in the tides of history and he knows it.
The forces of history are embodied by opposing counsels Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady, fictional stand-ins for Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryant. Eric Behr shines as Henry Drummond, there is a palpable intelligent design at work in his brain that shapes his ends onstage. Here we see the most famous (and notorious) lawyer of his day as a regular working guy, his mind constantly running but in a plodding, methodical way. Mr. Behr is smart enough to know his Drummond needn't be a show-boater, he's just under-dynamic enough and it works, he scarcely needs to raise his fine voice to carry the play.
As Matthew Harrison Brady Vince Petronio relishes and revels in the vain-glorious possibilities of the role to great effect. He captures perfectly a demagogue's love of the spotlight and also his feet of clay but what he projects most acutely is the tragic flaw inherent in fundamentalists of all stripes-the pride of presuming to know the mind of God.
There is a sense of sheer pious decency in Jim Brown's portrayal of Rev. Brown that nicely grounds the rigidity of the character's thought. Erin Olson gives a heartfelt performance as his daughter Rachel. As Baltimore Sun reporter Hornbeck Joanne Fayan seems an amalgamation of H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker but, although she's a fine foil, not enough of either. A certain acerbic edge is dulled by simple straightforwardness.
Director Ed Shea uses the Statehouse stage to great effect with the townspeople engulfing the audience and drawing us into the heart of the play. A moment near the end of Act One that is played in darkness has a communal effect; here Court, Church and Stage seem to be one thing simultaneously, with one beating heart.
Perhaps, in an eon or so, the debates of Inherit the Wind will seem quaint. But not so today and 2nd Story's production is compelling enough to stand the test of time.