Study Guide to Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645423058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's Inherit the Wind, a political play that fictionalized the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial.

As a play of the 1950's, Inherit the Wind defended intellectual freedom. Moreover, the play intended to denounce the state of McCarthyism at the time. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Lawrence and Lee's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO LAWRENCE AND LEE

The most cherished freedom preserved for the American people in the original Bill of Rights is the freedom of speech. Yet at times throughout our country’s history, certain groups and individuals, through either covert methods or state and federal legislation, have sought to restrict our fundamental right to think and to communicate our thoughts to others. As the United States attempted to recover from the effects of World War II and entered the decade of the Korean and Cold Wars, two young playwrights, alarmed by the attempts of a Republican senator from Wisconsin to persecute and victimize individuals whose only “crime” was to exercise their right to think, wrote a play to protest the restrictions upon the right to freedom of speech.

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee turned their attentions and talents to an earlier era in American history when, once before, an individual’s right to think and to speak had been jeopardized: the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in July of 1925. A high school biology teacher by the name of John Scopes had challenged a recently passed state law that prohibited teachers from discussing the theory of evolution with their students. The Scopes Trial in the twenties and the McCarthy hearings in the fifties both focused the country’s attention on the conflict between the individual’s freedom of speech and governmental control.

John Thomas Scopes eventually went free, Senator Joseph McCarthy was later censured by his colleagues, and “the evolution law” was finally repealed, but Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee have created a drama that transcends each of these individual events. Translated into over thirty languages, Inherit the Wind has emerged as a modern theatrical classic that continues to defend, long after the repeal of a law or the death of a leader, the individual’s right to think and the freedom to express his thoughts.

ROBERT E. LEE AND JEROME LAWRENCE

Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee, playwright, director, and producer, was born on October 15, 1918, in the Ohio community of Elyria. When he was seventeen, he began Ohio Wesleyan University, attracted primarily by the Perkins Observatory telescope, which at that time was the fourth largest in the world. Lee worked extensively with the Perkins telescope, but also became interested in radio broadcasting. While at Ohio Wesleyan he worked as a radio announcer for two stations in Columbus and wrote for another in Cincinnati. As his infatuation for radio drama spread to include campus theatre, Lee’s grades and his dreams of becoming an astronomer began to feel the effects. “I was going through a discovery of the excitement of communication,” Lee has remarked about his experience at Ohio Wesleyan. “I decided that an astronomer was essentially an observer, a receptor; I wanted to be a source of emanations, a communicator.”

Two years later, at the age of nineteen, Lee moved north to Cleveland where he worked as a radio announcer and writer. In the following year, 1938, he settled in New York, where he worked for the radio advertising firm of Young and Rubicam as a director and producer. By January of 1940, Lee was shuttling back and forth between New York and Hollywood as an assistant producer for various radio shows.

Jerome Lawrence. Jerome Lawrence was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 14, 1915. At the age of eighteen, Jerome Lawrence enrolled in Ohio State University “to be a newspaperman;” he recalls, “but always a playwright, or somehow associated with the theatre,” and his experience there hastened Lawrence toward his goal. During the school year he performed in numerous campus theatrical productions. Each summer after he began attending Ohio State, he wrote and directed plays and musical comedies for summer theatres in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

A few months after his graduation, Lawrence returned to Ohio where he began work first as a reporter and telegraph editor for the Wilmington News-Journal and then as editor of the New Lexington Daily News. Lawrence moved to California in December of 1937 where he worked as continuity editor and writer-director-producer for a Beverly Hills radio station until 1939, when he was hired by Columbia Broadcasting Service as a senior staff writer. Although Lawrence worked for CBS radio for the next three years (1939-1941), he never abandoned his goal of becoming a “working playwright.”

Lawrence And Lee In Collaboration. Although Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee were born only three years apart in cities separated by less than thirty miles, attended neighboring universities the same year, were both aspiring playwrights, and had simultaneously worked in radio stations in Ohio and California, the two had never met. Each had heard of the other, but until early 1942 their paths had never crossed.

“Actors would say that we should meet,” Lawrence recollects, “and then in early 1942 we finally did meet: downstairs of CBS at Colbee’s restaurant on January 23, 1942.”

“I had come back [to New York] to work on the revived March of Time,” Lee recalls. “Jer was doing a CBS war series, They Live Forever. We both knew of each other’s work, were amazed that our lives had been so parallel, [and] decided to try doing some freelance writing together.”

That winter they collaborated on several radio shows, and in one week alone six of their collaborations were broadcast on the nation’s airwaves. Variety ran this headline: Lawrence And Lee Take Over Radio.

In 1946, four years after they had met and first collaborated, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee legally and formally organized the partnership since known as Lawrence and Lee. During the next four years the radio “Whiz Kids” were acclaimed popular and critical successes with such programs as Hallmark Playhouse, Halls of Ivy, Favorite Story, and The Railroad Hour.

On January 29, 1948; though, their musical Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’ opened at the Adelphi Theatre in New York City under the direction of George Abbott and Jerome Robbins and starring Nancy Walker. This marked the first meeting of the team of Lawrence and Lee with Broadway, and enabled the playwrights to gain valuable experience working with the professional people associated with a Broadway production. Lawrence describes it as a “fine first experience in the Broadway theatre” and “a moderate success; what we always called a ‘nervous hit.’”

The limited financial success of Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’ did not enable Lawrence and Lee to devote their talents full time to stage drama, but it supplied the necessary encouragement for them to continue writing plays as they supported themselves with hundreds of radio and television programs. It was to be six years, however, before they would return to Broadway with the next Lawrence and Lee production.

Inherit The Wind. Alarmed by the wave of McCarthyism that had begun to sweep the country, the team of Lawrence and Lee began work in the early 1950s on what was to become their most notable success, Inherit the Wind. Lawrence and Lee chose as the genesis of the play the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, wherein a young biology teacher had been tried and convicted of teaching the theory of evolution to his students. The spirit and message of the play transcends time, though, and its theme “the right to think” applied to the McCarthy era as well as to the turbulent sixties and seventies. Lawrence and Lee spent nearly a year researching, drafting, and rewriting the play, yet every major producer on Broadway turned it down. Only a chance meeting with a friend of Margo Jones, founder and director of the Dallas Theatre-in-the-Round, led to the eventual premiere of Inherit the Wind in Dallas in January of 1955.

After three successful weeks in Dallas before sell-out crowds, the Broadway director - producer Herman Shumlin took the play to New York where it opened with Paul Muni, Ed Begly, and Tony Randall at the National Theatre on April 21, 1955, and ran for an astounding 806 performances and received five Tony awards, the Donaldson award, the Variety Critics award, the Outer-Circle Critics award, and the British Drama Critics award. The play, now considered a modern classic and translated into thirty-one languages, established Lawrence and Lee within the ranks of prominent American playwrights and took from radio two of its brightest and most gifted writers.

After the wonderful success of Inherit the Wind, Lawrence and Lee collaborated on a host of plays, some more successful than others. These included Auntie Mame, which dramatizes Patrick Dennis’ sprawling novel of the same name, and The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. Just as Inherit the Wind uses the Scopes trial as a parable for the McCarthy era, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail depicts an actual event in Thoreau’s life as a parable for the protest against the Vietnamese War. In the play, Thoreau demonstrates his philosophy of peaceful civil disobedience when he is imprisoned for refusing to pay taxes which he felt were being used to support the Mexican War. Lawrence and Lee chose Ohio State University as the site for the world premiere of The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, proving that “theatre does not have to stem from New York.”

Lawrence and Lee live within miles of one another in California and still collaborate. They feel that Inherit the Wind and The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail are their two best works thus far; when asked to comment on their work and their position in American theatre they replied: “Critics try to cubby-hole us, as they do Neil Simon and Tennessee Williams. But we sometimes confuse people because we try to make our comedy serious and our serious plays funny…. To disagree - to dissent without violence - is to comment on the human condition.”

The final judgment on Lawrence and Lee and their work has not yet been made, but their manuscripts and memoranda are preserved in the New York Public Library to await later assessment. Few other playwrights of this troubled century have written so dramatically and prolifically about the issues of their own day, and it may require a passage of time before the total value of their literary work can be measured.

THE WORKS OF LAWRENCE AND LEE

Plays

Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’ (musical), Adelphi Theatre, New York City, January 29, 1948.

Inherit the Wind, National Theatre, New York City, April 21, 1955 (Random House, 1955).

Shangri-La (musical, with James Hilton), Winter Garden Theatre, New York City, June 13, 1956.

Auntie Mame (suggested by book Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis), Broadhurst Theatre, New York City, October 31, 1956 (Vanguard Press, 1957).

The Gang’s All Here, Ambassador Theatre, New York City, October 1, 1959 (World Publishing Company, 1960).

Only in America, Cort Theatre, New York City, November, 1959 (Samuel French, 1960).

A Call on Kurpin, Broadhurst Theatre, New York City, May 25, 1961 (Samuel French, 1961).

The Diamond Orchard, Henry Miller Theatre, New York City, February 10, 1965.

Live Spelled Backwards (Jerome Lawrence), Beverly Hills Playhouse, January 14, 1966 (Dramatists Play Service, 1970).

Mame (musical, with Jerry Herman), Winter Garden Theatre, New York City, May 24, 1966 (Random House, 1967).

Sparks Fly Upward, McFarlin Auditorium, Dallas, Texas, December 3, 1967 (Dramatists Play Service, 1969).

Dear World (musical, with Jerry Herman), Mark Hellinger Theatre, New York City, February 6, 1969.

The Incomparable Max, Barter Theatre, Virginia, June 24, 1969; Royale Theatre, New York City, October 19, 1971 (Hill and Wang, 1972).

The Crocodile Smile, State Theatre of North Carolina, Flatrock, August, 1970 (Dramatists Play Service, 1972).

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, Ohio State University, April 21, 1970 (Hill and Wang, 1970).

Jabberwock, Ohio State University, November 18, 1972 (Samuel French, 1974).

Ten Days That Shook the World (Robert E. Lee), Freud Playhouse, UCLA, May 31, 1973.

First Monday in October, Cleveland Play House, October, 1975...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to Lawrence and Lee
• 2) Inherit the Wind - The Title
• 3) Character Analysis
• 4) Critical Commentary
• 5) The Scopes Monkey Trial
• 6) Glossary
• 7) Questions for Review
• 8) Bibliography