[100 years
ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler
Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So
this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous
trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on
educators.]
How three
stage adaptations of the trial reflect the fraught relationship between art and
history.
1)
Inherit
the Wind (1955): Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s play, which has
been itself adapted
into multiple films for both screen and TV, is in many ways the most
well-known representation of the Scopes trial. Which is quite ironic, since in
their “Playwrights’
Note” before the text Lawrence and Lee explicitly argue that the play “is
not history,” that “it is not 1925,” and that “the stage directions set the
time as ‘Not long ago.’ It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.” To
my mind both the play and the 1960 film adaptation are profoundly focused on
contexts and questions from the
age of McCarthy, making Inherit very much a counterpart to The
Crucible (1953) and far more interesting as a 1950s text than a portrayal
of the 1920s.
2)
Inherit the Truth (1987):
As that article traces at length, Dayton
playwright’s Gale Johnson’s 1980s play was overtly and entirely intended as
a rebuttal to Inherit the Wind, but not so much in terms of historical inaccuracies
about the trial per se. Instead, Johnson believed that the prior play had badly
misrepresented both William Jennings Bryan and the town of Dayton, and sought to
correct those errors with a play that is hugely laudatory toward both the man
and the community (or at least its conservative Christians). I haven’t read
Johnson’s play so I can’t speak to its specifics, and in any case it’s important
to note that her goals are no more (or less) problematic than those of any
playwright. But I’d say her use of the word “Truth” in her title is deeply problematic,
and indeed extends Bryan’s embrace of mythic patriotism about which I wrote in
yesterday’s post.
3)
The Great
Tennessee Monkey Trial (1993): Whatever its flaws, though, Johnson’s
play seems to have had at least one important positive effect: it helped
encourage playwright Peter
Goodchild to write a play based far more explicitly on the trial’s
transcripts and histories than either of the Inherits had been. In
awarding Goodchild’s play its Earphones Award, Audiofile magazine noted that, “Because there
are no recordings of the actual trial, this production is certainly the next
best thing.” I hear that, and using transcripts is definitely a way to guarantee
a significant degree of historical accuracy. But at the same time, any actor
who performs Goodchild’s roles is an actor who’s performing, not (for example)
Bryan or Darrow themselves. So the relationship of art and history remains at
least a bit complicated here, if certainly distinct than with either of those
prior stage adaptations.
Last
Scopes context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
