A shortened version of this interview appeared in Lakewood’s magazine, Spotlight Volume 66, Issue 3, which included the program for Inherit the Wind.

Lakewood Theatre Company: Let’s start with the basics ‒ who are you and what do you do? 

Lucy Lee: I’m a professor at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, in our department of business communication — I teach primarily classes in writing and strategic communication. The students are incredibly smart, hard working and ambitious – they keep me on my toes.

Speaking of strategic, I’ve had a decidedly non-strategic career path. I graduated from Occidental College with a degree in Speech and Drama, experience as an actress performing in more than 50 plays on campus and in the College’s marvelous summer drama festival — and absolutely no clue about how to realistically travel along any sort of clear professional path. I moved to New York right after graduation and worked a series of odd jobs while performing in off-off-Broadway productions, eventually getting my Equity card. I even co-authored – with NINE other actors – a play called The Man Who Shot the Man Who Shot Jesse James, which was produced at a small theatre in New York, and got excellent reviews. Frank Rich saw it and liked it (this was well before he became the lead critic for the New York Times). My dad always joked that I was the only one in the family to get a good review from Frank Rich.

I got into writing when I lived in New York, and came home to L.A. to pursue a master’s in journalism. I worked for several years in network radio news before jumping the fence into PR and media relations. When I was working for a small college, somebody got the idea that I should teach a class in journalism. I was hooked. I fell in love with teaching. Shortly after completing a Ph.D. at University of California, Los Angeles, I joined the faculty at USC. It’s so strange, but I feel like everything in my checkerboard career leading up to my USC appointment helped prepare me to teach.

Part of my instinct for teaching is no doubt genetic: both of my grandmothers were teachers. My dad loved teaching as well, and often said: “Good theatre should teach, and good teaching should be theatrical.” I try to bring a little bit of that theatrical flair to my classroom.

LTC: As the daughter of voice actress Janet Waldo and playwright Robert E. Lee, how did your parents’ careers influence your own career path? 

LL: My parents loved their work and were deeply passionate about it. I saw that passion every day. They CARED about what they did – it was never just a “job.” They were also both fierce optimists, to the core. That optimism and joy in their work never dimmed, even when they faced painful setbacks or disappointments. 

My mom had a remarkable career as an actress – she was classically trained and was discovered by Bing Crosby when she was in her first year of college in Seattle, winning a contract at Paramount Studios. She was brought to Hollywood, with her mother, when she was barely 18. She was never at ease in front of the camera, though, and found her footing in radio. She and my father worked together on many, many radio comedies and dramatic series in the 1940s and 1950s. She went on to do on-camera work in television, then lots of voice-over commercials, and landed in animation – a world where she could truly be whoever she could sound like. She was astonishingly versatile.

My students definitely fall out of their chairs when I tell them, at the start of each semester, that I’m the daughter of “Daughter Judy” on The Jetsons. I also almost always have students in class who have read, in high school, either Inherit the Wind or The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. That always thrills me. I tell them that thanks to my parents, I have genetic qualifications for teaching communication and writing.

LTC: Is there anything you can tell us about your father’s experience in the era that bore Inherit the Wind, and how and why he and Jerome Lawrence decided to hone in on the Scopes trial for dramatization?

LL: [Jerome] Lawrence and [Robert E.] Lee wrote Inherit the Wind to defy the McCarthy-era “witch hunts,” using the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925 as a parallel, a jumping-off place to help them express, in dramatic form, their passion about the right to think freely, and to express those thoughts without constraint. They wrote Inherit out of outrage and despair, in an effort to remind us of the precious freedoms that define us as Americans. They saw the impact of McCarthyism on many colleagues and friends whose careers were ruined.

I think in the decades since the play premiered in 1955, Lawrence and Lee were surprised and frustrated by critics who periodically attack Inherit the Wind as somehow irreligious, a sinister distortion of historic events. Neither my dad nor Jerry Lawrence was an atheist, or agnostic – on the contrary, my dad was a great student of the Bible. He even wrote a play about the apostle Paul in the 1970s.

But Inherit definitely sparks debate, as good theatre should. Their agent, Harold Freeman, had tried all through 1953 and most of 1954 to interest a Broadway producer in the play, but no one would touch it. Eight Broadway producers turned Inherit down, cold. Lawrence and Lee were advised, “Burn this play… it will never be produced.” It was a truly serendipitous chance meeting that resulted in the play getting to Margo Jones, the so-called “Texas Tornado” who made bold choices in producing early plays by Tennessee Williams and William Inge, in addition to Lawrence and Lee. Her production in Dallas was a smash, and opened the door to Inherit’s debut on Broadway.

LTC: Why do you think Inherit the Wind has had such a lasting impact on our cultural landscape? What can we learn from it today?

LL: Inherit the Wind has retained its popularity for more than 63 years because it does what my father called “roughing up the consciousness.” It challenges us to examine our beliefs and biases, and to truly listen to each other. We certainly need to be able to do that better in today’s world. The play is about a clash of ideas, to be sure, but even more importantly, it is about finding ways to reconcile those competing ideas, allowing them to coexist. 

Lawrence and Lee moved freely in their 52-year collaboration from drama to comedy to musical theatre. What is remarkable about their work is that as diverse as it is, both stylistically and in its subject matter, their plays and musicals are linked by a common theme: the right of an individual to personal expression – and the right to nonviolently defy authority. Auntie Mame does it comically, and schoolteacher Bert Cates, in Inherit the Wind does it dramatically (with the help of his defense attorney, Henry Drummond).

LTC: Do you have any other stories about your father that you’d like to share? 

LL: Well, only about a million. It was so wonderful to have a father who worked at home – and as a writer, he was always looking for excuses not to write. So that meant he was often available to take a break from working to help me with homework, play, or just talk. That’s what I miss the most about him – the conversation. He was so widely read and we could talk, deeply, about anything.

Whenever I was blue or upset about something silly when I was in my turbulent teens – or my turbulent 20s, 30s, and beyond – he would type up one of his favorite poems for me. And then he would give me the piece of paper and say, with ferocious conviction: “Luce! Something WONDERFUL is going to happen to you!” He was right about that. I am the luckiest daughter on the planet, and my dad continues to inspire me every day.