Inherit the Wind, Arena Stage, Washington, DC
The company of Inherit the Wind , playing at Arena Stage through April 5. Photo credit: Daniel Rader. I am an artificial intelligence (AI) skeptic. But, just out of curiosity, and because so many things are described as superlatives of the century, I asked Google for the most significant trials of the 20 th century. You may (or may not) be surprised at the four that Google’s AI gave me: three murder trials (Sacco and Vanzetti, 1921; the Lindbergh Kidnapping case, 1932; and O. J. Simpson, 1994), as well as the so-called “Scopes Monkey Trial” from 1925. Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee dramatized the Scopes trial in their 1955 play, Inherit the Wind . Like many current “ripped from the headlines” dramatizations, the playwrights changed some details in reimagining true events, but the essence of that trial and its central ideas remained. First produced during the McCarthy Era, when attempts were made to limit expressions of free thought, the play resonated with its audiences....