Directed Paul Ebert (1 results)

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. Six-page octavo softcover 1959 amateur playhouse theater program from Oak Ridge, Tennessee (in a nice state of preservation), which acknowledges the generosity of the officials of the town of Dayton, Tenn. for their loan of "the original Scopes trial witness chair." While it might be overstating it a bit to call it "daring" to have staged this successful dramatization of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Tennessee only 34 years after the actual event, the production was impressive and we remember it being well received in a town best known for its federal nuclear production facility. (The play debuted in Dallas in early 1955 after being rejected by eight Broadway producers, though it subsequently did move to Broadway, where it starred Paul Muni and Ed Begley.) H. Clyde Claiborn here played defense attorney Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy's role in the 1960 film), while Fred Johnsson here played Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March's role in the film.) Playwright Lawrence later defended the play's historic inaccuracies -- schoolteacher Scopes was never actually arrested for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution, though he was convicted -- by asserting it was written as a "parable" to indict the contemporary efforts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy to expose Communists in the U.S. State Department, the playwright stating "It's not about science versus religion. It's about the right to think." "Very good" original theater program with a few very small brown spots. Reduced from $37.