Last year, the American Library Association documented more than 4,200 titles being targeted for removal from schools and libraries. Meanwhile, there’s been a surge in legislation designed to ease the book banning process. In adjacent news, teaching everything from “The Diary of Anne Frank” to songs about rainbows to African-American studies has gotten educators fired.
All of which makes watching the Goodman Theatre’s “Inherit the Wind” something of a surreal experience. The drama by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee was inspired by the 1925 “monkey trial,” when a small-town Tennessee high school science teacher was prosecuted for violating a state law that made teaching evolution — specifically Darwin’s seminal groundbreaking book “The Origin of Species” — a crime. The play is set nearly a century ago, but the distance of years vanishes within the drama’s opening moments.
Under director Henry Godinez, the two-hour production slams history into now with jarring impact.
The celebrity lawyers of the 1925 trial are now icons enshrined in history books: Williams Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential nominee known for his blazing oratory and decades-long political power, prosecuted the science teacher. The defense was Clarence Darrow, the civil libertarian from Chicago famed for his work for unions and his “hate the sin/love the sinner” defense of University of Chicago thrill killers Leopold and Loeb.
With “Inherit the Wind” the defense falls to the fictional Henry Drummond. Like Darrow, Drummond is a nationally known champion for civil rights. At the Goodman, he’s played by Black actor Harry Lennix. The choice means that when locals paint Drummond as “a creature of the devil” and a “force of darkness,” their words come with a historical context embedded in violent, vicious racism.
The white prosecutor is Matthew Harrison Brady (Alexander Gemignani). Like Jennings, he’s a three-time nominee for U.S. president who believes the Bible is the highest law of the land. He’s welcomed not with screaming children but with an all-town picnic and an honorary “military” honor.
The program notes the setting merely as “a small town, not too long ago” but jaded, deadpan hilarious reporter E.K. Hornbeck (Mi Kang) gets more specific: She tells us we’re in the “buckle of the Bible Belt.” (“Show me a shouter,” Hornbeck notes dryly after one of Brady’s speeches, “and I’ll show you an also-ran.”)
The argument at the heart of the drama is laid out in the opening moments, as 13-year-old Howard (Thomas Murphy Molony opening night, Chase Clevenger at some performances) and his friend Melinda (Presley Rose Jones) argue over a bucket of fish bait. As Howard, fascinated, describes life crawling from the primordial ooze, Melinda shuts him down, proclaiming, “That’s sinful talk!”
Lennix (from TV’s “The Blacklist”) brings all of his formidable grace and firepower to Drummond. When he speaks of feeling watched as he walks down the street, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that he’s surely working in a Sundown Town, the deadly intent of Jim Crow silently screaming through the subtext. During the trial, Drummond launches a monumental argument by turning directly to the audience to announce, “Progress isn’t a bargain.” Lennix gives the words an import that feels as pointed — and contemporary — as a laser.
Gemignani is a blustering force, praising the town for its commitment to Christian values and righteousness, vilifying the sinners who would replace Genesis with Darwin. His arc in “Inherit” — which ranges from lion in winter to worm on the railroad tracks — is epic, and Gemignani’s journey through it is fascinating.
At the eye of the legal hurricane sits science teacher Bertram Cates (an affecting Christopher Llewyn Ramirez), both determined to fight his dismissal and terrified to find himself in the crosshairs of a national debate.
Also looming larger in the town: The Rev. Jeremiah Brown (Ryan Kitely, delivering a sermon worthy of Piper Laurie in the final act of “Carrie”), a fire-and-brimstone spouting evangelical whose deeply sheltered, traumatized daughter Rachel (Tyler Meredith) offers a sympathetic portrait of someone forced to question the very foundation of their moral compass. And as a sympathetic local warden, Robert Schleifer weaves sign language into his scenes with so much emotional clarity, spoken words become unnecessary.
Collette Pollard’s set puts the town buildings in a dome arcing over the stage, emphasizing the play’s insular world and leaving the stage free to accommodate a crowded courtroom filled with outsized personalities.
A final note, about the “Read Your Bible” banner raised by the townsfolk as they gleefully prepare to welcome Brady. The verb tense isn’t specified. If you put it in the past tense, and it’s not a command but an opening for discussion.