A scavenger hunt has been added to the festivities surrounding the 2015 Scopes Trial Festival, leading off two weekends of events in Dayton, Tenn.
For a second year, Cumberland County Playhouse and the Dayton Scopes Festival are partnering to produce “Front Page News,” a dramatic re-creation of the historic trial proceedings.
The play is presented in the actual courtroom at the Rhea County Courthouse where William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow clashed over whether Tennessee schools would teach evolution or biblical creation during Dayton’s 1925 “Monkey Trial.”
“We were delighted with the new production last year, and this year’s promises to be a step up from that,” says festival chairman Tom Davis. “There is a larger cast, and Jim Crabtree has tweaked the production to help re-create the feelings of that summer 90 years ago that put Dayton on the map.”
Last year, Crabtree, producing director at the Playhouse, and Grammy-nominated Nashville songwriter/actor Bobby Taylor teamed to write an adaptation with music of the original “Front Page News” by Deborah DeGeorge Harbin of Elizabethton, Tenn.