Sugary coat
Nigel Shawn Williams does his best to update story with limited success
To Kill a Mockingbird digs for a deeper Atticus Finch at Stratford Festival
Nigel Shawn Williams is going in with a bang.
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee’s beloved 1960 novel about racism, from the perspective of pre-teen tomboy Scout Finch in 1935 Alabama, has been in the headlines again since 2015, when a first draft of another book titled “Go Set a Watchman” was published less than year before Lee’s death. Watchman famously revealed an older Atticus Finch, Scout’s virtuous lawyer father in Mockingbird, with unbecoming prejudices.
Since then, there has been a move to revise the steadfast, upright, bull’s-eye shot that is the novel’s most enduring character into a more complex, flawed figure. Aaron Sorkin recently won a fight with Lee’s estate over an upcoming Broadway production of Mockingbird starring Jeff Daniels that, as Deadline reported, would turn Atticus into “an apologist for the racial status quo rather than the everwise, benevolent lawyer depicted in the book.”
But Christopher Sergel’s 1990 theatrical version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” estate-approved, came well before the current vogue. And when Nigel Shawn Williams was approached to direct the play by the Stratford Festival, he followed a similar impulse to Sorkin, but his own attempts to update the story were blocked by the estate. Nevertheless, Williams does his best to erode the play’s sugary coat on an ugly matter, resulting in a sometimes vital, sometimes confusing production.
The play’s narrator, an adult Scout (Irene Poole), gets two words out before a gunshot rings loudly through the Festival Theatre, followed by a newsreel of archival footage of Martin Luther King Jr., segregation protests, offensive signs, lynchings and more.
According to the program, the death of MLK Jr. sends Scout back in time to the summer of 1935 in Maycombe, Ala., when her father was assigned to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, accused of raping a white woman (which doesn’t explain her modern clothes, but never mind).
It’s an aggressive start, which Williams follows with several moments throughout the following two acts to shock the audience, who are apt to be lulled into passivity by the familiar story and the slow, southern drawls of the characters. At the first mention of the N-word, the Finch family maid Calpurnia (a strong Sophia Walker) pulls down a drying bedsheet to reveal a hardened, angry expression. Atticus (Jonathan Goad) protects Tom (Matthew G. Brown), locked inside a cell, from a lynch mob in KKK uniforms. After one last injustice, Williams has his black actors unleash the primal scream that their characters are constantly suppressing.
It makes you wish that Williams had not been shackled by the estate, and instead seen his vision for the play all the way through. As it is, the play swings wildly in tone between Williams’ bolder choices, and Sergel’s sepia-toned script (highlighted by Denyse Karn’s costume design, which places everyone in beige and browns, except for both younger and older versions of Scout, our point of view, who wear blue jeans and green tops). And in a move that feels like thematic overkill to make up for this tonal difference, Williams has Poole distractingly echo key lines from the dialogue as they’re spoken by other characters.
What these choices can’t do is stop the script from lionizing Atticus Finch as “no ordinary man,” even though by today’s standards, his actions could be considered base-level decent. That’s also helped by a moving performance from Goad, who breaks Atticus’s perfect façade with a few flares of temper, but manages to make him even more likable because of it.
What’s more, he’s surrounded by a truly adorable cast of kids — Hunter Smalley as Dill, Jacob Skiba as Jem, and an endlessly charming Clara Poppy Kushnir as Scout. The nostalgic appeal of the story, buttoned with the heartwarming heroism of Boo Radley (Rylan Wilkie), shines through the moral muddiness that Williams adds to it.
There’s a darker, more complex story to tell here, and Williams is right to dig for it, but this production doesn’t quite make his point.
And I’m not holding my breath for Aaron Sorkin to give the final word at the Shubert Theatre this winter, either. But one day, we’ll get the Atticus Finch 2018 deserves.