‘Clarence Darrow’ Has Lessons For Today: One-man Play At Chatham Congregational Church Saturday

The actor who will portray Clarence Darrow in the one-man play “Clarence Darrow” enjoyed the challenge of assembling the outfit he wears in the production set in the late 1920s.

 “I found the suit in a Goodwill store,” Richard Figge, a professor emeritus at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, said in an email interview last week. “It was once expensive.”

  And there’s more: “I was searching for old-fashioned men’s comfort shoes — what I would call duffer shoes. I found them when I was in Vienna, Austria, and I learned that they are actually waiter’s shoes.”

 Add suspenders holding his trousers up, a necktie over a crisp shirt, and neatly trimmed gray hair, and Figge cuts a credible figure as Darrow at the age of about 70.

The one-man, 90-minute play by David W. Rintels will be presented on Saturday, Sept. 28 at the First Congregational Church of Chatham. The play is a joint fundraiser for the church and the Eldredge Public Library. 

Figge has known the Rev. Joseph Marchio, the church’s pastor and director of music, since he was Marchio’s undergraduate German professor. Last year Figge appeared at the church in a production of “Give ’em Hell, Harry!” portraying Harry Truman.

 Ohio native Darrow (1857-1938) was a prominent labor attorney in the 1890s and instrumental in the adoption of the eight-hour working day. Today he is perhaps best remembered for his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial in the summer of 1925. Darrow defended John Scopes, a high school biology teacher in Tennessee who was charged with violating a state law that made it illegal to teach Darwin’s theory of evolution in a state-financed school. Representing the prosecution was William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate, who argued that Darwin’s ideas were mainly a “hypothesis” that violated the moral standards of the Bible. This brings us to Darrow’s relevance today.

Darrow “was a champion of independent thought in an age of pressure to conform,” Figge says. “As a freethinker, he thought doubt was more important than imposed faith. ‘Doubt,’ he said, ‘leads to investigation, and that is the beginning of wisdom.’”

Darrow also opposed the death penalty, Figge says. “I once performed for a bar association in Cincinnati, and after the play, a judge came up to me and said I had shaken his thoughts about capital punishment and that he was going to have to reconsider his ideas about the death penalty.

“The man’s example of human decency and his defense of the underdog, it seems to me, are messages in themselves. When he believed in the moral and ethical question at stake, he never charged a fee if a client couldn’t afford to pay,” Figge says. “He was in many ways a deeply pessimistic man, but he redeemed this with a wonderful sense of humor that kept him going in difficult times.”

Figge first learned about Darrow when he was in high school and saw the famous play “Inherit the Wind” about the Scopes Monkey Trial. Years later when he found Rintels’s script, “all the old excitement came back, and I knew this was the play I wanted to do.” “Clarence Darrow” opened on Broadway in 1974 starring Henry Fonda in the title role.

To prepare for portraying Darrow, Figge read several biographies, beginning with Irving Stone’s “Clarence Darrow for the Defense,” which Rintels based his play on. 

“I also studied Darrow’s own writings, speeches, and court summations,” he says. He even studied photographs and listened to recordings of Darrow.

“For the physical movements, I watched closely and learned to copy the movements of older men, starting with my next-door neighbor, a retired farmer, as he used to heave his great frame from his armchair. I sometimes walked behind older men at the zoo or in a park, studying the way they moved. Now, my wife can actually tell, from the way I move, when I am thinking of Clarence Darrow.”

He has met people who knew Darrow, including granddaughter Blanche Darrow Chase. “My education continues as new books and studies come out,” he notes.

Figge’s father was a lawyer “during the latter days of Darrow’s career,” he says. “He would often tell me about being a lawyer during the Depression.” 

Has any character that he has portrayed changed Figge? Yes, Darrow. 

“I have been moved by his kindness, his compassion and fundamental decency, his amused skepticism, and his zest for living in spite of so many daunting challenges. I like to think that I am a slightly better person for having spent so much time in his company.”

Figge has performed “Clarence Darrow” across the country and in Europe. He also hosts a weekly podcast called “For Reading Out Loud” in which he reads classic short stories.