Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee were classic Broadway scribes who knew how to crank out serious plays for thinking Americans, back when more theater-goers wanted to think. And, boy, did this pair know how to craft parts over which generations of actors could salivate.
Their 1952 drama "Inherit the Wind" is a perpetually prescient courtroom battle over the legality of teaching evolution, fought by two titanic and perpetually popular characters inferred from the Scopes trial — fundamentalist preacher Matthew Brady and secularist lawyer Henry Drummond. If you have decent actors in those parts — say Tony Mockus and Scott Jaeck—you mostly have to get out of their way and let them, and the play, rumble.
It takes a while for Jessica Thebus' Northlight Theatre revival to arrive at that understanding. For the wobbly first half-hour, it feels as if we're trapped in some nightmarish collegiate production of "Our Town," what with poker-faced actors moving little model houses around the stage (for reasons that escaped me), characters taking seats atop gigantic step-ladders (I didn't get that either) and other fussy bits of concept.This play is hardly rocket science. It is a trial play. It requires a simple courtroom and truthful performances. Most everything else is clutter.
Once Mockus shows up, things find a much firmer footing. This veteran Chicago actor — long advantaged by a booming voice — is in glorious fettle. His Brady is precisely as those unapologetic liberals Lawrence and Lee intended — sincere, intelligent, passionate, tragic in magnitude and thoroughly wrong. Thankfully, Mockus is too smart to play into stereotype — even when the script pushes him that way. His Brady remains empathetic until the end. Actually, this play always works better when the Brady is stronger than the Drummond. It evens up the fight a bit.
Scott Jaeck may not be a tub-thumper but he's every bit as good as Mockus. Jaeck's version of the Chicago lawyer Drummond also eschews stereotype — he delivers the play's bon mots with the right aplomb but he also shades his performance. Jaeck's Drummond drips laconic Midwestern understatement — his character has a kind of haggard, prosaic grayness that reminds you of weary commuters getting off the 5:05 in Elmhurst, circa 1952. Clipped, smart and pained by everything, he's pitch-perfect.
There are a few decent supporting performances — notably the guileless Erica Elam as the accused schoolteacher's girlfriend — but there also are times when the overall production lurches from the overly familiar to the wildly progressive without ever quite finding that sweet spot between the two. Still, Thebus surely cast the right actors in the leads. They do not disappoint.
The play holds up quite well, of course, being as we're still arguing this case — all the way to the White House. The most telling line comes from Elam's big-hearted Rachel, trying to understand why people fear evolution. We live in a small town, she observes, simply, and, "when the sun goes down, it's dark."