The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial

TAKING THE DEBATE ON TOUR

Eighty summers ago, in a sweltering courtroom in tiny Dayton, Tennessee, a substitute biology teacher named John Thomas Scopes was tried for the crime of teaching evolution in public school—a white-hot debate of faith versus science.

This fall, L.A. Theatre Works, radio pany, will embark on city national tour of The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial. Written by Peter Goodchild and directed by Gordon Hunt, the play is drawn from transcripts of the 1925 trial. It will be performed—and broadcast live on public-radio stations—by a rotating cast including Ed Asner, James Cromwell, Sharon Gless, Michael Learned, Marsha Mason, and Arye Gross.

As the play's narrator recounts, the trial "became national news when the giants of the liberal and fundamentalist causes"—Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, respectively— "answered the call to battle." For 12 days, the country was riveted by the first-ever live broadcast of a trial. From the beginning, as H. L. Mencken wrote, it seemed "the jury would be unanimously hot for Genesis." Momentum swung back and forth between the prosecution and the defense. Ultimately, Scopes was convicted, but the guilty verdict—and $ 100 fine—were later tossed out on a technicality, dashing Darrow's plans to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Five days after the trial, Bryan died.

DEE DEE MYERS