January 29, 2009 Issue
Primates, Publicity and the Pulitzer Prize
ASU Presents The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial February 11
The L.A. Theatre Works will perform The Great Tennessee Monkey Trials at Farthing Auditorium in Boone on Wednesday, February 11, at 8:00 p.m. The show is part of ASU’s Performing Arts Series. Photo by Annie Appel
“Like so many archetypal American events, the trial itself began as a publicity stunt,” said historian Edwin J. Larson, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, chronicled the decidedly bizarre and controversial event known as the Great Tennessee Monkey Trial.
On Wednesday, February 11, leading radio theater company the L.A. Theatre Works will present The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial at Farthing Auditorium at 8:00 p.m. as part of ASU Performing Arts Series. Tickets are $18 for adults, $16 for seniors and ASU faculty and staff, and $10 for students.
Starring a cast drawn from the ranks of L.A. Theatre Works Radio Theater, a cast that includes Ed Asner and Jerry Hardin, the characters at the center of one of the great debates of American society come to life in this magnificent, semi-staged production. Based on the original transcripts of the 1925 Scopes Trial that championed the right to teach evolution in public schools, the radio play features unlikely heroes Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, H.L. Mencken and John Scopes, who set the stage for an ongoing national debate over the separation of church and state in a democratic society. Although this conflict of social and intellectual values played out in a rural Tennessee courthouse nearly 80 years ago, the issues at the core of this thought-provoking show remain unresolved even today.
Said The Berkshire Eagle of the show, “The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial permits the voices of history to speak with clarity, distinction and, as the closing narrative notes, chilling timeliness.”
According to Wikipedia.com, the case dominated the front pages of newspapers like the New York Times were dominated by the case for days. More than 200 newspaper reporters from all parts of the country and two from London were in Dayton, Tenn., where the trial took place. Twenty-two telegraphers sent out 165,000 words per day on the trial over thousands of miles of telegraph wires hung for the purpose; more words were transmitted to Britain about the Scopes trial than for any previous American event.
To add even further to the spectacle, trained chimpanzees performed on the courthouse lawn. Chicago’s WGN radio station broadcast the trial with announcer Quin Ryan via clear-channel broadcasts for the first on-the-scene coverage of a criminal trial. Two movie cameramen had their film flown out daily in a small plane from a specially prepared airstrip.
Broadcast in America on NPR and internationally on BBC, CBC, and Voice of America, L.A. Theatre Works has been the leading radio theater company in the United States, and has single-handedly brought the finest recorded dramatic literature into the homes of millions for the past two decades. With the largest library of its kind in the world, L.A. Theatre Works’ Audio Theatre Collection has earned awards from the Audio Publishers Association, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Writer’s Guild of America as well as Grammy Awards and many others.
The Philadelphia Inquirer said of the company, “L.A. Theatre Works is a national theatrical treasure.”
To purchase tickets for The Great Tennessee Monkey Trials, call the Farthing Auditorium box office at 828-262-4046 or click to www.pas.appstate.edu.
Want To Go?
Date: Wednesday, February 11
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Location: Farthing Auditorium, ASU
Cost: $18 for adults/$16 for seniors and ASU faculty and staff/$10 for students
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