The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, may 2, 1955

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Inherit the Wind (by Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee) flashes back across history to 1925 and the celebrated "monkey trial" in Dayton, Tenn. The locale, to be sure, is unspecified in the play and the names are fictitious, but there is never for a moment any pretense of fiction. John T. Scopes, the young schoolmaster who violated Tennessee law by teaching Darwin's theory of evolution, is called Bertram Gates; Henry Drummond, the lawyer who defends him, is clearly Clarence Darrow; and by whatever name, the archdefender of fundamentalism would be William Jennings Bryan.

In the theatrical sense, following history has its clear rewards even if it proves, in the final sense, a mixed blessing. In the fierce clash between Bryan and Darrow history supplies a more rousing scene than most dramatists could invent, and in Bryan's subsequent collapse a twist that few dramatists would dare to. And with the help of Peter Larkin's highly ingenious set, the play creates a graphic town picture of where once the embattled fundamentalist stood and started a ruckus heard 'round the world.

The courtroom clash is first-rate theater.

As Darrow, Paul Muni snorts and paces and glares, lifts indignant agnostic eyes toward heaven, heaps anti-Biblical fire and brimstone on the pious, and slowly reduces Bryan to a mental pulp and physical exhaustion. A wonderful example of the high hamming that is equally the forte of skilled actors and skilled trial lawyers, it makes Muni and Darrow indistinguishable. Ed Begley's Bryan is excellent also, though this is a more benign figure at the trial than the Bryan who, as H. L. Mencken watched him, "writhed and tossed in a very fury of malignancy," and not quite so benighted a figure as the Bryan who actually contested the fact that man is a mammal.

Aside from its big scene, however, Inherit the Wind loses from being more documentary than creative. It is too journalistic in tone, too diffuse and shapeless in movement. Under Director Herman Shumlin's able supervision, there are plenty of vivid snapshots and plenty of lively moments, but the play provides no sustained drama. And what does seem fictional seems all too much so: a vapid love story between Scopes and a hard-shell preacher's daughter; a Mencken who talks more like a smarty-pants cribbing from the real Mencken's prose. But if Inherit the Wind is not quite up to snuff as a play, it is often effective theater.