[NEohioPAL] Review of CPH's "Inherit the Wind"

[Bob Abelman]

Inherit the Wind hits Play House stage with gale force

 

Bob Abelman

News-Herald, Chagrin Valley Times, Solon Times, Geauga Times Courier

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

This review appeared in the News-Herald 11/6/09

 

 

It is unlikely a theater's production schedule is influenced by divine intervention. Still, it's no coincidence that Inherit the Wind happens to be playing at the Cleveland Play House during the very month Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published 150 years ago.  Perhaps intelligent design or natural selection is at work.  

 

Inherit the Wind is Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's dramatization of the 1925 Scopes Trial, in which a small-town schoolteacher is accused of introducing evolution to his class in violation of Tennessee state law.  He is prosecuted by the fervently religious biblical literalist Matthew Harrison Brady and defended by the agnostic civil libertarian Henry Drummond.



This play offers an eloquently worded debate over creationism and evolution.



It provides social commentary on the inalienable rights of free thought and free speech, written as it was in the midst of 1950's McCarthyism.

 

But, mostly, it delivers a brilliant piece of theater-a dramatic collision between two outspoken, dynamic, feuding attorneys on opposite sides of the fence.  As they vie for position in the pressure cooker of a sweltering southern courthouse, we are witness to a survival of the fittest that makes the Galapagos tortoises seem like pet turtles.



When this Tony Award-winning play premiered on Broadway in 1955, it featured the legendary Paul Muni and Ed Begley as the attorneys.  The play was adapted for the screen in 1960 with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March in the lead roles.  It was revived on Broadway in 1996 starring Charles Durning and George C. Scott and brought back again in 2007 with Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy.  



The CPH production features veteran New York stage actors Ed Dixon (August: Osage County, Night of the Iguana) and Scott Jaeck (Sunday in the Park with George, The Best Man) as Brady and Drummond, respectively.

 

Dixon and Jaeck live up to the legacy of past performers, creating rich and textured portrayals.  Each man is a commanding presence on the stage, yet they take great pains to balance each other out, so as not to tip the scale toward one side of the debate over the other and ruin the drama.

 

Both men understand and appreciate the power in the words they are given, and deliver them with flair and nuance.  

 

The lead players are surrounded by a core of experienced local professionals as well as an ensemble of talented and disciplined third-year students in the CWRU/Cleveland Play House MFA Acting Program.  A few second-year students should have joined them, for actors double-up as various town-folk, which makes the town look sparse.

 

Scott Plate is wonderful as the articulate and acid-tongued journalist E.K. Hombeck.  He has some of the most poetic lines in the play, and speaks them with a big-city sarcasm that comes across as particularly thick and sticky in the southern humidity.  Mark Alan Gordon does a nice turn as Reverend Jeremiah Brown, the fire-and-brimstone protector of small-town souls. 

 

Most performers, including Dudley Swetland as the Judge, Tom White as the accused Bertram Cates, and Mark Monday as local law-enforcer Mr. Meekers, do a marvelous job of neutralizing the occasional preachiness and flair-ups of overt sentimentality that are inherent in Inherit the Wind.  The show's quick pace and fluid staging, courtesy of director Seth Gordon, facilitate this.  Other actors, such as Sarah Nedwek as the preacher's daughter, deliver fine performances but are less successful at brushing the dust off their classic characters.  

 

The Drury Theatre stage is filled with a superb set by Michael Raiford that captures the rural quaintness of Hillsboro while providing an arena-like atmosphere suitable for the spectacle of its trial.  Set changes are seamless, and dramatic lighting by Trad Burns and understated period costuming by Charlene Alexis Gross add layers to the production's atmosphere.

 

In a time when signs promoting John 3:16 ("For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only son") pop up at every entertainment venue, it is refreshing to find Proverbs 11:23 ("He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind") the focus of attention.

 

It is also refreshing to see such a familiar, time-honored play delivered with such power, passion and pacing.  

 

Inherit the Wind continues through November 15 in The Cleveland Play House's Drury Theatre.  For tickets, which range from $44 to $64, call (216) 795-7000 or visit www.clevelandplayhouse.com.
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