Director's Notes:

In the 1950s, playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, recognized a parallel to the anti-intellectual fervor of the anti-evolutionists to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist Senate hearings to root out Communism in America, especially in the film and theatre communities. Lawrence and Lee chose the Scopes ‘”Monkey Trial” to explore the clash between fundamentalists and intellectuals, to make the point that man has the right to think.

Inherit the Wind is not meant to be taken as literal historical fact. Though they drew on the transcripts of the actual trial, their play is a fictionalized version of the trial. After the State of Tennessee passed the law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, the ACLU advertised for a test case, with the expectation that it would go on to the Supreme Court in appeals. The town of Dayton and John Scopes were willing so the trial was on. The authors used the trial transcripts but the fictional character names emphasize that this is more allegory than literal history. Darrow becomes Drummond, Bryan is Brady, Mencken is Hornbeck, Scopes is Cates. Rev. Brown and his daughter Rachel are purely fictitious. Bryan died five days after the trial ended of complications from diabetes.

They state in the preface: “Inherit the Wind is not history” and “does not pretend to be journalism.” They do not set the play in 1925 but instead say that “It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.” In the political climate in which the play was written and produced, those words function as a warning against repeating the wrongs of the past. The debate rages on today: Intelligent Design versus the theory of evolution.

See some video clips and photographs from the play!