God vs. monkey

Inherit the Wind recreates the courtroom
showdown of the century with a slew of
great Montreal actors

EVOLUTION ON TRIAL:
Sean McCann as Henry Drummond

by NEIL BOYCE

Was it seven days or several billion years?

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s 1955 play Inherit the Wind freely adapts the true case of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes—the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.” In the small southern town of Hillsboro (“a buckle on the Bible belt”), a schoolteacher tells his pupils about Darwin’s theory of evolution and is promptly arrested.

Greg Kramer directs a packed stage at the Segal season opener, managing the play and its cast of 20 (plus assorted kids) like a shark in the ocean: he keeps it moving for its own survival.

The busy show, filled with great Montreal actors, is thick with June bug-buzzing atmosphere. Characters flood the stage from all corners, pushing baby prams, hawking hot dogs and shouting “amen!” and “hallelujah!”—a musical-theatre hybrid of hymns and gospel exaltations that erupt without warning.

David Francis (seen recently in Teesri Duniya’s Truth and Treason) is chilling as the Bible-thumping creationist “Colonel” Matthew Harrison Brady, brought in to buttress the case for God’s place in the school. Unrepentant, jailed teacher Bertram Cates (Karl Graboshas) insists, “Man wasn’t just put here ...like a geranium in a flowerpot.”

Wonderful Canadian stage and screen actor Sean McCann plays defence councillor Henry Drummond with maximum crustiness. He’s the smart Yankee agnostic whose arrival only intensifies North-South antipathies, worsened by Marcel Jeannin in the role of muckraking journalist E.K. Hornbeck, while Cates’s friend Rachel Brown (Tamara Brown), daughter of the town preacher, only wants it all to blow over.

Kramer places the main theme—a plea for tolerance in all ways and beliefs—into sharper relief by casting Cates and Brown as a secretive biracial couple, and in having an African-American Reverend (Tyrone Benskin) preach to a largely white congregation.

The sharp-edged production has many fine moments: the Reverend Jeremiah Brown (Benskin is magnificent) condemns Cates, whipping his congregation into a righteous fury—the kind vigilante mobs are made of—before turning on his own daughter.

The playwrights saw the pull between change and stability as an eternal concept. In the ’20s, it was Darwinism. In the ’50s, McCarthyism. And in the ’00s? As Drummond remarks, controversy over new ideas is like a child waiting to be born: “You think this sort of thing is over?” he says. “It’s going to happen again and again.”

Goings on elsewhere

A busy late October continues into November with a flurry of plays either still running or opening soon.

Continuing to Oct. 31 are Fallen Angel’s The Pillowman at Théâtre Ste-Catherine, Paul Van Dyck’s spook fest Haunted at St. James United Church and Cloud Nine, at John Abbott College Casgrain Theatre in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue. Duplicity Girls is on at the Freestanding Room (4324 St-Laurent) until Nov. 1.

Productions all over downtown kick off this week with Persephone’s Be My Baby opening today (Oct. 29) for a two-week run at Monument National; Death & the Maiden at Centaur (Nov. 3), and Black Theatre Workshop’s Swan Song of Maria (at MAI, Nov. 3). From Nov. 5, you can see Altera Vitae’s Bent (at Espace 4001) and the collected plays in George F. Walker’s Suburban Motel series mounted by Tableau d’Hote at MainLine.

INHERIT THE WIND TO NOV. 8 AT THE SEGAL
CENTRE (5170 CÔTE STE- CATHERINE), (514) 739-7944