REVIEW: Inherit the Wind (Arena Stage)

Ever heard of “competency porn”? It’s media in which the main draw is everyone being very good at their job and supporting each other. The West Wing is the earliest show I can think of with this sort of warm and fuzzy modus operandi, but the term has entered the zeitgeist recently thanks to The Pitt, the medical drama with a lovable cast of mentally damaged doctors and nurses who nevertheless persist. But it’s certainly not a “new” concept. In fact, Inherit the Wind, Arena’s latest production, was published in 1955, and features a distinct undercurrent of it. But despite the bubbly optimism of the piece, the production often fails to take its subjects that seriously.

Book

Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee take the clever steps of paralleling the Scopes “Monkey” Trial along the then-contemporary fever of McCarthyism. If you’re not familiar with the trial, it was a 1920s media circus involving the brief imprisonment of a Tennessee schoolteacher for violating a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. While the actual criminal proceedings were mostly a sham, it became a nationwide sensation on the prescient debate of faith vs. science. The angle of the Red Scare does feel like a solid one, but too frequently does the piece lecture the audience on the strength of its reason. At every turn, our noble defense attorney Henry Drummond is kaput by some sort of legal shenanigan that was algorithmically generated to box him in. Only later does he find a window to preach from, telling the liberals of 100 years in the future how important it is to side with the teachings of science and how they can coexist with religion. Is this a lesson that should be taught? Of course. Is it one that feels overwrought by this point in time, with this audience? Very much. The dialogue and smattering of other characters simply aren’t sharp enough to engage the mind further than merely reading an essay on the annals of fundamentalism in US politics, and not to mention its unfocused finale. 3/10

Acting

Such pantomime good-vs-evil is at least put on with grand charisma by the dueling attorneys of Drummond (Billy Eugene Jones) and Brady (Dakin Matthews). The former full of 2008-era Obama spirit, preaching heartwarming liberal idealism and a charming array of emotion. The latter, a less serious take, but an enjoyable one. This Colonel Sanders-like persona is mixed with a Trumpian demagoguery and Benoit Blanc humor. 8/10

Production

Ryan Purcell’s direction seemed humorous, but I’m not sure if that was the intention. In fact, much of the production has an air of an overlong SNL skit — but, not a bad one. There are incongruous elements that took me out of the action at several points, but when I too stopped taking it seriously, I was able to enjoy the effort more. The costumes were noteworthy, ranging between ridiculously plain, distractedly period-independent, and properly garish (non-derogatory; where can I get a quilted robe like that?). But for every positively eye-catching garb there were things like comedic quick-changes of ensemble members coming out of nowhere and impromptu drag-adjacent appearances. Though this is a fictionalized account of the trial, the real-life setting is in Tennessee; so why does this staging inexplicably take place in the post-apocalyptic Mad Max desert? Though I concede its fiction allows a varied setting, the environmental storytelling potential is almost completely squandered by placing it in such boring environs, especially underwhelming in the Fichandler’s in-the-round-setup. 3/10

Viz

The show seems to take place in a boxy desert, with lots of warm hues and wooden pallets. The only thing that indicates any sort of action to occur would be its pair of loudspeakers on poles in the northwest and southeast corners. The key art leans into these colors though, and I like the gavel casting a shadow of a cross; it’s a simple and effective way of using common symbology. 6/10

Verdict

Inherit the Wind didn’t do a lot for me, serving merely as a surface-level argument for the separation of church and state that is just as shallowly executed in one of DC’s most engaging spaces. 20/40