“You see, I haven’t really thought much. I was always afraid of what I might think, so it seemed safer to not think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside your body. It has to be born. If it dies inside you, part of you dies, too,” says Rachel Brown at the end of Inherit the Wind. Freedom of thought is at the core of Asolo Repertory’s production of the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, which is to be directed by Asolo Rep’s Producing Artistic Director Peter Rothstein. Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, in which schoolteacher John T. Scopes was indicted for breaking Tennessee state law by teaching Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in class. 

“I’m anxious to get in the room with all the actors,” said Rothstein in an interview prior to the start of rehearsals. “I have a fantastic, fantastic cast and design team. I’ve always loved this play since I first saw it in high school, but I’ve never been able to work on it. It’s actually a title that Michael Donald Edwards (his predecessor) tossed out last season when we were planning this season together, and I thought it was a brilliant idea.”

Although Inherit the Wind is by no means a historical reenactment of the Scopes trial, the scaffolding in which the story sits is largely the same. A young school teacher, Betram Cates in the play, is being tried for teaching the theory of evolution in the classroom, which violates a state law. The trial—which was deliberately staged in real life to attract public attention to Dayton, Tennessee—becomes a national spectacle as the media descends on the small southern town of Hillsboro. Two nationally renowned lawyers, fundamentalist Matthew Harrison Brady (based on the prosecution’s three-time presidential candidate and former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan) and Henry Drummond (based on the defense’s Clarence Darrow) spar with each other in a heated debate. The trial quickly becomes a theological argument about science, religion, freedom of thought and what schools should and should not be allowed to teach children. “The writers say that the setting of the play, ‘might’ve been yesterday’ or it could be tomorrow,” says Rothstein. “Our production will sit in 1925, but I think there’s a theatrical language that I hope feels very contemporary and very immediate and now. What makes an evening in the theater, no matter when the play is set, is that it feels like it has a foot in the now. You’re not looking at history as a documentary; there’s an immediacy to the telling or theatrical event.”

When Inherit the Wind debuted in 1955, it was meant as an allegory to the wave of McCarthyism that had swept the nation—a battle cry for the importance of freedom of thought and expression in a time where the playwrights felt that liberty was being constricted. More than 60 years later, the conversations around science and religion are just as relevant in today’s political climate. “What I love about this play is that it’s a nuanced conversation. It’s not a tweet or a Facebook post. It’s an in-depth conversation with real people who are filled with contradictions and nuance and change,” says Rothstein. “I love the nuance around the conversation of science versus religion. What are we allowed to teach inside our school systems, and what is the intersection of freedom of thought and responsibility, when we look at raising our young people? What is the role of the legal system inside academic discourse around academic freedom?”

In the end, while still being a call for intellectual freedom, Inherit the Wind concedes that there is room for both science and religion. As Drummond, who argued staunchly for the defendant’s right to teach evolution in the classrooms, leaves the courthouse, he takes with him the defendant’s copy of Darwin’s The Descent of Man and a Bible. “The writers say that it’s not about science versus religion; it’s about science and religion. That’s where I hope folks, no matter where they live on the sides of the political spectrum, will give the play its due,” says Rothstein. “What is indisputable inside the play is that we need to have freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and that’s at the core of this country. When that’s at risk is when the play becomes an allegory for a society unwilling to exercise a liberation of freedom of thought and freedom of expression.”