“‘Inherit the Wind’ is remarkably relevant to the social, political and interpersonal relations conflicts that have come to impact daily life for everyone throughout the world,” said Wolfe. Peter Wolfe, Imagination Theater’s artistic director, takes the helm of this production and enlists the help of seasoned and first-time actors to bring this still-relevant piece to the stage. Further film adaptations were released in 1965, 19. “So we went back in history to another case where people were being told what to learn, what to think and it did have a great effect on the country.”Īfter a successful 806-performance run on Broadway, the play went on to be adapted for the screen in 1960 starring Spencer Tracy and Frederic March and was nominated for four Academy Awards.

“We were indignant, appalled at thought control in the mid-’50s,” said Lawrence in a 1994 New York Times interview. Both playwrights saw freedom of thought being challenged by McCarthyism and wanted to have their say. Lawrence and Lee have both gone on record to say that the play was a direct indictment of the then-contemporary Second Red Scare and the McCarthy witch hunts of the late 1940s and 1950s. Although the real John Scopes was unsure whether he actually taught evolution, he deliberately incriminated himself. The Tennessee law prohibited teachers from denying the biblical account of the origin of man.

27, is a fictionalized account of the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 wherein schoolteacher John Scopes was put on trial and convicted of violating the Butler Act. The 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Originally set to open in September, the Mosquito Fire had different plans for Imagination Theater’s production of “Inherit the Wind.” With the fairgrounds encumbered with the first responders’ fire camp, the production was postponed.

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