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You'd think that by now clear lines would be drawn (legally or otherwise) between seminal issues like the division of church and state, religion and science. But in newspaper headlines, school board meetings and watercooler chatter, the issues of what should be taught in public schools — evolution or evolution and intelligent design — are just as vital and tender as they were in 1925.

"The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial," which played to a full house at the Philharmonic Saturday night, returns to that groundbreaking source of it all, the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial, which made a popular Dayton, Tenn., teacher a willing scapegoat in the epic question of whether to teach evolution in schools. Ed Asner plays William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate turned Christian ideologue, and James Cromwell channels the iconic defense attorney Clarence Darrow.

There are solid performances all around, including the small ensemble and an elegant, spare setting for this battle of words. At times, though, this semi-staged play slides into being too much like a real trial: driven by what people say (and say and say) and not what they do.

Today, it's hard to imagine how hungry the country was for news of this trial, which didn't involve serial murders, sex, secret wiretaps or kidnapping. Journalists, including the acid-penned H.L. Mencken, flooded the little Southern town that summer and more than a thousand people crowded the courtroom that first sweltering day.

There was no mistaking the attitude of the locals: Banners in the courtroom proclaimed "Read your Bible." Bryan, Mencken says at one point, was regarded as a "Fundamentalist pope" simply conveying a "graceful statement of the obvious."

Sound familiar? Be warned: This is not "Inherit the Wind," the 1960 film where Spencer Tracy and Fredric March battle it out in a look-alike trial as fictionalized versions of Darrow and Bryan. There's all the normal Hollywood emotional bric-a-brac here with backstories of wives and friendships gone awry, a young man (Dick York, later of "Bewitched") sacrificed for the greater good and the town that might think differently if given a chance.

No, "The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial" is a radio play, really, one that tours nationally with a rotating cast of familiar faces and on this night, was recorded by L.A. Theatre Works for possible inclusion in a series that goes to schools. And as you'd guess, it has one minimal set. The text — which moves actors from the witness stand to lawyers' table to the judges desk and back again — is taken entirely from transcripts of the actual trial and recounts, through narrator Sharon Gless, Mencken and other characters, a more complete telling of the story.

Thankfully, Darrow and Bryan were literate men. Their dialogue and that of their law teams is often funny, always smart and sometimes downright maddening.

"You guess, you guess," grumbles Bryan as Darrow questions him on his interpretation of the Bible. "You evolutionists guess."

"But when we do, we have the sense to be right," Darrow says.

A Lou Grant pause by Asner. "Yes, but you don't do it often."

Trademark Asner and the kind of thing an audience expects from an emblematic actor. For most of the play, though, Asner has little to do here but frown, move papers around and occasionally object. One wonders if the part were scaled down: His gruff delivery and patented growl are very much in evidence, but when this 76-year-old actor moves, he does so with the rolling gait of a man in pain. He looks very much like a swollen old thumb in suspenders.

Which pairs him nicely with his dramatic doppleganger.

It's Cromwell's evening, though. A tall-drink-of-water who pounds his witnesses and just about everyone else with a showy kind of smarts, he sticks and moves with a lazy confidence, if none of Tracy's trademark bemused humor. Perhaps it's a more balanced depiction of famed attorney, who sometimes is as mean here as his opponents are faithful.

Strangely, though, the most riveting moment of the two acts occurs when character actor defense attorney Dudley Field Malone (character actor Harry Groener), makes an impassioned speech objecting to what he sees as Bryan's abandonment of his real beliefs and more importantly, of the truth.

"Here, here," responds one audience member.

By the time the second act began ("If I fall asleep, we're leaving," a man told his companion as they walked back to their seats), the play settled into a steady drone of words, making it too easy to fall into personal contemplation of Tracy's performance or what TiVo might be recording.

Still, there's something quite thrilling about hearing an audience talking, if not about loving the play, then about the issues and history many Americans have forgotten.