Jerome Lawrence Quotes
I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy. You can only punish. I warn you that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches - its upholders as well as its defiers.
Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee. Inherit the Wind. Random House, 1955.
Sapho, a play, opened in New York taking sexual explicitness to a new level. The hero, leaves the stage carrying the famous actress, Olga Nethersole, upstairs to an unseen bedroom presumably for sex. There was no explicit sex but the “immorality” lay in the fact that a woman was portrayed as a sexual being at a time when most “expert thinking” held that women were devoid of sexual pleasure. The New York City vice squad, responding to the many complaints, closed the show, causing national controversy which exploded further when the courts ruled that sexual innuendo was insufficient to censor the show and it re-opened.
Jerome Lawrence was an American playwright and author. After graduating from Ohio State University in 1937 and the University of California, Los Angeles in 1939, Lawrence partnered with Robert Edwin Lee to help create Armed Forces Radio. The two built a partnership over their lifetimes, and continued to collaborate on screenplays and musicals until Lee's death in 1994.
