The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial

LA Theatre Works’ ends its 24-city national tour of The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial at The Skirball Center in LA in March. The play is drawn from actual transcripts of the infamous 1925 trial of John Thomas Scopes, a young science teacher and part-time football coach who challenged the State of Tennessee’s teaching of evolution in the classroom. The trial drew the attention of the legal community, the ACLU, and a reporter named H.L. Mencken. It became the first trial ever to be broadcast on radio, and sparked a national debate not unlike what’s happening today with the growing conversation on “intelligent design,” an approach to life’s beginning put forth by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.