Actors - Inherit the Wind

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	Actors - Inherit the Wind

Inherit the Wind is a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. It is frequently cited as being a fictionalized account of the Scopes Trial. The play first appeared on Broadway in January 1955.

The real-life opposing attorneys William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow are roughly portrayed as Matthew Harrison Brady and Henry Drummond respectively, while John Scopes is remade in the character Bertram Cates and journalist H.L. Mencken becomes E.K. Hornbeck. But despite the similarities, the play is not intended to be a historical documentary-drama, but a fictional social commentary on McCarthyism based loosely on an historical event. Although the play reflects on what has been claimed as one of the darkest events in American history, it has been hailed one of the great American plays of the 20th Century, with themes about religious tolerance, belief and freedom of thought that have considerable resonance to this day.

The play's title comes from Proverbs 11:29, which in the King James Bible reads:

::He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind:

::and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart

Inherit the Wind and history

Inherit the Wind, in both the movies and the play, takes much poetic license, meaning that the writers do not try to present things as they actually happened, but instead use key events to craft a story, embellishing them according to the needs of drama. It is, like Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, a social drama, which is a literary device wherein historical events are retold as an exploration of events and ideas of the times.

The play was intended as a critical representation of the anti-communist congressional investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy, with the Brady character representing McCarthy and his assistant Roy Cohn. In this case, authors used the historical Scopes trial as the background for a drama that comments on and explores the threats to intellectual freedom presented by the anti-communist hysteria. In particular, Brady's final fit of ranting and raving in the courtroom has no counterpart in the 1925 trial, but corresponds closely to McCarthy's behavior on June 17, 1954, when the Army-McCarthy Hearings were brought to an abrupt end. The script of the play uses multiple excerpts taken directly from the actual court transcripts.

The play includes a note from the playwrights reminding the reader that "Inherit the Wind is not history." They state that the characters have different names from the historical figures on whom they are based, and that the play "does not pretend to be journalism." Rather, they argue that "the issues of conflict have acquired new dimension and meaning" in the thirty years since the actual courtroom clash. They do not set the play in 1925 but instead say that "It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow." This timelessness of the setting could be seen as a warning about repeating the wrongs of the past, which, without vigilance, always have the possibility of recurring. During the play's original Broadway run it was widely understood in the McCarthyism context, but subsequent interpretations have focused more on the literal plot, given the resurgent relevance of the creation-evolution controversy after the end of McCarthyism.

Despite the comments of the authors, much of the marketing of the play today portrays it as a basically true account of the Scopes Trial, and many still unknowingly interpret the work as a documentary-drama. The Scopes trial did not appear in the Encyclopædia Britannica until 1957 when the inclusion was spurred by the successful run of Inherit the Wind on Broadway, which was mentioned in the citation. It was not until the 1960s that the Scopes trial began to be mentioned in the history textbooks of American high schools and colleges, usually as an example of the conflict between fundamentalists and modernists, and often in sections that also talked about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the South. Most entries followed the play's lead and focused on Darrow reducing Bryan to a figure of ridicule and several substituted the substance of the drama for the reality of the actual trial.

Inherit the Wind in film

The play has been made into three made-for-television movies and a 1960 screen film. The movie stars Spencer Tracy
(Drummond), Fredric March
(Brady), Gene Kelly
(Hornbeck), Dick York
(Cates), Harry Morgan
(Judge), Donna Anderson (Rachel Brown), Claude Akins
(Rev. Brown), Noah Beery Jr. (Stebbins), Florence Eldridge
(Mrs. Brady) and Jimmy Boyd
. It was adapted by Nedrick Young
(originally as Nathan E. Douglas) and Harold Jacob Smith (Howard) and directed by Stanley Kramer.
[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Inherit the Wind ]

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This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Inherit the Wind; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

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