TULLAHOMA, Tenn. — It was a landmark Tennessee legal battle playing out in a rural small town that pitted religious fundamentalist against science that feels a little on the nose for today’s political climate. On September 17-20 the South Jackson Community Playhouse will bring perform Inherit the Wind, the 1955 classic, Tennessee, courtroom drama, which examines the Scopes Monkey Trial. It will be performed at the Main Stage at South Jackson Performing Arts Center. Shows will take place on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 7 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.

The trial that inspired it all took place in July 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, about 100 miles northeast of Lynchburg. High school teacher John T. Scopes was charged with violating the Butler Act, a state law that made it illegal to teach human evolution in Tennessee’s public schools. The case was staged from the start — town leaders and the American Civil Liberties Union both wanted the publicity, and Scopes agreed to be charged as a test case. What followed was a media circus: two of the most famous lawyers in America, three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow for Scopes, squared off in a Dayton courtroom while the trial was broadcast live on radio to the rest of the country. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, a verdict later thrown out on a technicality. The Butler Act itself stayed on the books until 1967.

Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee didn’t set out to write a history of that trial. They wrote Inherit the Wind in the early 1950s as a response to McCarthyism — the era in which Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee hauled Americans in front of Congress over suspected Communist ties, ending careers and blacklisting writers and actors over their beliefs. Lawrence and Lee borrowed the shape of the Scopes trial — a small Southern town, a teacher on trial for what he taught, two towering lawyers fighting over the right to think freely — to say something about their own moment without naming it directly. The play never specifies a year; its stage directions simply call for “Not long ago.” The fictional attorneys, Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady, are stand-ins for Darrow and Bryan, and some of their courtroom exchanges are lifted almost verbatim from the real trial transcript.

In 1960, producers adapted the play for an acclaimed film starring Spencer Tracy and later reinvented it as a made-for-TV drama in 1965, 1988, and 1999.

That refusal to be pinned to a single decade is part of why the play keeps getting revived. It isn’t really about evolution, and it isn’t really about communism — it’s about what happens when a community decides some ideas are too dangerous to be taught, said, or even quietly believed. Seventy years after it premiered, audiences can plug in whatever fight over curriculum, censorship, or “acceptable” belief happens to be dominating headlines that week, and the play still fits.

Several locals are including in the cast and crew. MCHS alumni Iris Brown will play the role of Rachel Brown, the 22-year-old daughter of Reverend Jeremiah Brown. Fellow alumni Neleh Dickey will also appear in the case at Howard on Friday and Sunday, and Bannister and Cooper on Thursday and Saturday. Spencer Odette, the son of Company Distilling’s Amber Odette, will help out behind the curtain as an assistant stage manager.

The SJPAC has deep roots in Southern Middle Tennessee. It began in 1977 as a grassroots preservation effort — “Save South Jackson” — to stop the demolition of the old South Jackson School building, and it opened as a performing arts venue in January 1979. Today it’s run by the nonprofit South Jackson Civic Association and includes a 400-seat auditorium with a full proscenium stage, along with the Mitchell Museum of local history housed in the same building. It’s served Coffee, Moore, Franklin, Bedford, and Warren counties for decades as a presenting and community-theater venue.

Tickets for Inherit the Wind are now on sale at the SJPAC website. •

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