That’s the situation with director Doug Hughes’s revival staging of “Inherit the Wind,” the hit l955 melodrama by the writing team of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.
The play is a lightly fictionalized retelling of the story of the notorious l925 “Monkey Trial,” which took place because a Tennessee science teacher named John Scopes had informed his classes of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, thereby running afoul of his state’s law prohibiting teaching any theory that conflicted with the biblical conception of divine creation.
In recent decades, “Inherit the Wind,” a vast success of the l955-l956 Broadway season, has mainly been remembered as the vehicle which provided the great Paul Muni with his final stage role, playing Henry Drummond, the play’s version of Clarence Darrow, the celebrated and feared Chicago lawyer who journeyed south to defend the embattled teacher.
Christopher Plummer, here almost completely transformed from the public image created by his lengthy succession of Shakespearean characters, is staggeringly fine as the new production’s Drummond, giving a performance destined to rank with the very best work of his career.
The prosecutor, Matthew Harrison Brady, the writers’ version of the buffoonish orator and frequent presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, is in the capable hands of Brian Dennehy. The bumptious Brady, the play’s version of a hugely popular public figure of the time, described in the text as “the buckle on the bible belt,” is treated vastly more seriously and less cartoonishly than is usually the case by Hughes and Dennehy in the current production.
Among the results of the excellent Dennehy’s approach to the role is that his soberly intense Brady, far from being a fool or a clown, provides Plummer with a first-rate whetstone against which to sharpen his redoubtable Drummond.
This time, E. K. Hornbeck, an ascerbic reporter from Baltimore, a character based on the controversial journalist, H. L. Mencken, is being done with wit, grace and insight by the sly and unfailing Denis O’Hare.
The intelligence and integrity of director Hughes’ approach to the material combine with Plummer’s magisterial performance as Drummond and Dennehy’s solid, somewhat serious approach to Brady to make the seldom produced “Inherit the Wind” seem a more admirable work than had perhaps heretofore appeared to be the case.
In these days of a widespread and pervasive resurgence of fundamentalist Christianity, “Inherit the Wind” can be said to have taken on a fresh relevance. No one in the play is converted to liberalism or becomes a freethinker. Henry Drummond, whom most of the townspeople regard as a sort of Satan, hasn’t made any new friends in Tennessee, and leaves the community as reviled as he was when he arrived. The embattled teacher, John Scopes, renamed Bert Cates by the writers, and well-played by Benjamin Walker, leaves town on the same train that carries Drummond north. Cates is accompanied by Rachel Brown, the girl he loves, gracefully and warmly portrayed by Maggie Lacey.
Rachel just happens to be the daughter of the hellfire and brimstone town preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Brown, powerfully played by Byron Jennings, an outstanding veteran actor.
Hughes has placed a number of the play’s spectators on bleachers above the playing area, and, when the actors are not actively involved in a scene, they sit in a row behind that portion of the audience. For much of the running time of the play, the stage seems almost bare, yet all the items provided by set and costume designer Santo Loquasto, ranging from banners, hats and shawls to ice cream trolleys and a spectacular gorilla suit, are apt evocative and memorable.
The lighting by Brian MacDevitt and the original music and sound design
by David Van Tieghem contribute meaningfully to the overall excellence of director Hughes’ remarkable reevaluation of “Inherit the Wind.”
It’s deeply regrettable that Doug Hughes’s recently deceased father, the wonderful Barnard Hughes, couldn’t have lived long enough to have seen the splendid job his son has done with this classic play.