Inherit the Wind

                While his one-time wife Tammy Grimes wowed the crowd at the Metropolitan Room last night, Christopher Plummer wowed the courtroom and the estimable audience at the Lyceum Theater’s opening of the 1955 drama “Inherit the Wind.” Mike Wallace, Jill Clayburgh, Joan Rivers, Fran Drescher, Blair Brown, and Annabella Sciorria saw Plummer in a performance so good it is sure to earn him the Best Actor Tony—again (he won for “Cyrano” in 1974 and “Barrymore” in 1997). As lawyer Henry Drummond he paced and pondered, strutted and whooped defending a Hillsboro(read Smalltown) schoolteacher’s use of  Darwin’s Origin of the Species in the classroom. His worthy opponent in court is the streamlined Brian Dennehy (the actor’s lost 60 pounds), playing Matthew Harrison Brady, a Bible thumping defender of the faith. What’s at stake of course is freedom of thought. Young Conor Donovan, an actor to watch, plays a fresh faced student whose mind may be corrupted by such teaching. While the play written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee must have resonated during the McCarthy period, it now at first seems didactic and dated. But as Plummer’s Drummond, snapping his suspenders, moves through his oratory, blowing Dennehy’s Brady away, a whiff of current events lingers. During intermission, the theater’s lobby became an informal court debating the ethics surrounding Don Imus’ recent verbal transgressions. The lessons of “Inherit the Wind” hold sway.

                                                                                                                  Regina Weinreich

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