Inherit the Wind at Arena Stage Is a Timely Revival That Crackles With Relevance

Arena Stage is currently presenting a production of Inherit the Wind that feels less like a revival of a 70-year-old play and more like a dispatch from today's headlines. Running through April 5 on the Fichandler Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater, this lean and engrossing production — presented in association with The Feast, a Seattle-based ensemble theatre company — makes a compelling case for why Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's 1955 drama remains one of the most important works in the American theatrical canon.

Inherit The Wind at Arena Stage in DC

The play takes its inspiration from the infamous 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Tennessee, in which a schoolteacher was prosecuted for violating a state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution. Lawrence and Lee, writing during the Red Scare of the 1950s, deliberately fictionalized the names and details to create what they called a "parable" — a story about something more enduring than any single historical moment: the fundamental tension between free thought and the pressure to conform. In 2026, with debates raging over what can be taught in classrooms, what history can be told, and what ideas can be freely expressed, the play's central conflict feels urgently, even startlingly, current.

The story centers on Bertram Cates (Noah Plomgren), a schoolteacher sitting in jail awaiting trial for teaching his students about Darwin's theory of evolution. His girlfriend, Rachel Brown (Rebecca Madeira), is the daughter of the town's fire-and-brimstone preacher, and she is torn between her love for Cates and the social and spiritual pressure to simply make the trouble go away. Into this small Southern town arrive two legal titans: Matthew Harrison Brady (Dakin Matthews), a bombastic, three-time presidential candidate and self-styled defender of the Bible, and Henry Drummond (Billy Eugene Jones), a sharp, idealistic Chicago attorney who has come to defend not just Cates but the very right to think. Rounding out the central players is E.K. Hornbeck (Alyssa Keegan), a cynical newspaper reporter who observes the spectacle with sharp-tongued wit.

One of the most distinctive choices of this production is its dramatically scaled-down cast. Where the original staging called for upwards of 50 actors, director Ryan Guzzo Purcell works with just ten, five of whom are ensemble members who fluidly inhabit multiple roles throughout the evening. With little more than a change of hat, a costume piece, or a shift in posture and voice, actors move between townspeople of different ages, genders, and stations in life. An-lin Dauber's costume design facilitates these rapid transformations with impressive flexibility. Holly Twyford is a particular standout among the ensemble, moving memorably between the warmly attentive Mrs. Brady and the weary court bailiff.

Tanya Orellana's set design rewards patience. At first glance — reddish, sandy earth, abstract wooden platforms, and tall towers strung with colorful pennants — the stage seems more evocative of a carnival or political rally than a small Southern town. But as Xavier Pierce's atmospheric lighting transforms the space scene by scene, and as drapes and other scenic elements are deployed to conjure a courtroom, a jail, and a town square, the design reveals itself to be purposefully non-literal, keeping the focus squarely on the ideas at stake rather than anchoring the story too firmly in any specific time or place.

The production's most electrifying sequence comes at the close of the first act, when a Fourth of July tent revival is staged with the full company in a moment that builds to a genuine dramatic crescendo. The Fichandler's in-the-round configuration is used to powerful effect throughout, with the audience on all four sides effectively becoming the community gathered to witness — and weigh in on — the events unfolding before them.

At the heart of the drama is the courtroom clash between Brady and Drummond, and the two actors make the most of every sparring exchange. Matthews cuts an imposing figure as Brady — grandiloquent, certain, and yet beneath the bluster, somehow diminished. Jones brings an easy charisma and quiet conviction to Drummond, making his defense of scientific inquiry and intellectual freedom feel less like legal argument and more like a moral calling. The two are well-matched adversaries, and the play's climactic scene — in which Drummond puts Brady on the witness stand and presses him on the literal interpretation of Scripture — remains one of the most electrifying confrontations in American drama. Madeira, as Rachel, lends the production its emotional anchor, creating a fully realized character navigating impossible choices between love, loyalty, and her own emerging sense of self.

The production runs approximately two hours and ten minutes with one fifteen-minute intermission. It contains theatrical haze and flashing lights.

Inherit the Wind plays through April 5, 2026, at Arena Stage's Fichandler Stage, Mead Center for American Theater, 1101 6th St. SW, Washington, DC. Tickets are available online at arenastage.org or by calling the box office at 202-488-3300. Performances are Sundays at 2 and 7:30 pm; Tuesdays at 7:30 pm; Wednesdays at 12 and 7:30 pm; Fridays at 8 pm; and Saturdays at 2 and 8 pm.