Eloquent vital Scopes trial

defending the First Amendment against the Christian right ...

... because if Jews don't speak out, they'll think we don't mind

Web JewsOnFirst

Optional Member Code

Please email us
(click here)
catcher@JewsOnFirst.org

And "bookmark" us at
JewsOnFirst.org

Jews on First
P.O. Box 2283
Rockville MD 20847

310-910-9153

Eloquent, vital Scopes trial

By Wendy Rosenfield, The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 20, 2007

Things certainly seem to have come full circle in the 80 years since the script was written for L.A. Theater Works' The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial, now at the Annenberg. In 1925, the ACLU tested Tennessee's law against teaching evolution in public schools; in 2005, the ACLU challenged the right of the school district of Dover, Pa., to teach intelligent design in its classrooms. The more things change. . . .

John Thomas Scopes was a science teacher in Dayton, Tenn., when he took the ACLU's offer to pay the legal costs of anyone willing to challenge the state's legislation against evolution. When William Jennings Bryan - politician, preacher, pacifist, prohibitionist - signed on for the prosecution, attorney Clarence Darrow, fresh from his stunning performance at the sensational Leopold and Loeb murder trial, couldn't resist joining the defense.

The case became a national obsession, and when the courthouse began to crack under the weight of all the spectators and journalists, proceedings were moved outside to the lawn, where 3,000 people stood to watch.

Peter Goodchild's script, taken wholly - aside from some narration - from trial transcripts and H.L. Mencken's acerbic Baltimore Sun dispatches, is no dry, legalistic exercise.

Though the production was created as a radio show and the actors perform holding scripts as if at a staged reading, Brendon Fox's empathic direction brings an added vitality to the proceedings. The face-off with Darrow that Bryan termed "a duel to the death" appears instead as Bryan's going gently into that good night. Bryan did, indeed, die just two weeks after the trial, and Ed Asner portrays him beautifully as a man facing his own twilight and trying to elevate the cause of humanism against Darwinism's undeniable brutality.

Conversely, John De Lancie's Darrow is brusque and brash, swaggering all over the stage, insulting the judge and calling the locals "crackers." He is Darwinism incarnate, throwing down his gauntlet of irrefutable reason with little regard for the glacial shift it will take for a backwater like Dayton - 11 churches for 1,800 inhabitants - to appreciate his perspective.

They must adapt or die, and though creationism won the battle, it lost the war, as the play points out, in the 1950s, when it suddenly was in our national interest to worship science via the space race. Still, as the Dover case shows, the arguments for and against evolutionary theory keep popping up, like a baby born with gills: anachronistic, sure, but difficult to ignore.

Luckily, we have The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial and its eloquent principals to remind us why our government chose fact over faith, at the expense of neither.

Fair Use Statement: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.