I liked nearly everything about “The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial” except sitting through it. There was so much high-powered acting talent on stage, and the subject was so compelling and utterly relevant to, as T. S. Eliot said, “where we have, in a manner of speaking, got to,” that I fully expected to be spellbound and swallowed until the final curtain. Alas, I was a somewhat less than enchanted viewer.

The Scopes trial of 1925 is absolutely relevant to the present argument between evolution and “intelligent design” (a.k.a. “Creationism), between science and faith. In fact, that was part of the problem. Fundamentalist Christian ignoramuses weren’t any more rational or articulate in 1925 than they are now, so about half the dialogue-presumably drawn from transcripts and newspaper accounts, particularly those of H. L. Mencken-wanted to make me scream. Ed Asner seemed to refuse the out provided by the radio-play form. He wasn’t about to coast, reading from a hand-held script and keeping the physical gestures to a minimum. Asner was going to give everybody what they came to see-a full-blooded resurrection of William Jennings Bryan, shouting and sweating, preening and blustering, collapsing into magnificent ruin, rising in wrong-headed glory.

It was truly grand; truly frightening, too. And it threw the whole thing off-kilter. John De Lancie made a very effective Clarence Darrow, and he has a strong stage presence, but the stage was always Asner’s for the taking-all he had to do was lift his head or twitch his fan. The great speech that ends the first half is not even Darrow’s, but another member of the defense team. By the time Darrow gets his steam up, the audience has lost most of its.

Thanks to Stanley Kramer’s great film of “Inherit the Wind,” we tend to carry around the misconception that Scopes won his trial. In fact, he was found guilty. Bryan’s side, that is, were the victors. But the evolutionists had the better writers working for them, and Clarence Darrow is the hero of the tale, the knight errant, the idealist.

But though the scientific vision of nature triumphed for decades in public education, to the point where we thought it safe to laugh at religious bigots as if they were stock figures of fun. We are now learning, to our cost, that we had merely scotched the snake, not killed it.