Thomas, playwright take Atticus Finch off pedestal
Arkansas audiences will get their first chance to see Oscar-winner Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winner “To Kill a Mockingbird” when the national touring company brings the production for its Arkansas premiere to Fayetteville’s Walton Arts Center this week.
At the center of the touring production cast is Richard Thomas as Atticus Finch, a lawyer in the fictional, tiny, Depression-era town of Maycomb, Ala., who takes on the grim task of defending a Black laborer against the charge that he raped the daughter of a white sharecropper.
Thomas says Sorkin’s script, which had its Broadway debut amidst some controversy in 2017, brings the characters to life in a new way.
“He’s done an amazing job of remaining utterly faithful to Harper Lee, to the spirit of the story,” Thomas says. “Liberties have been taken, but classics have a way of surviving — that’s why they’re classics.”
Among the other things Sorkin brings to the table in this adaptation is looking through the book’s thorny issues with a more modern eye.
“It offers a more present mode of discussion for things like social justice, history, racism, using the lens we look through now,” Thomas explains. “It’s wonderful — quite a magic trick.”
And it humanizes Atticus Finch in a way that Lee’s book, and the 1962 film in which Gregory Peck played Finch, did not, Thomas adds. And it makes him easier to play.
“It takes Atticus off a pedestal — that’s a great gift to any actor,” he says. “It puts Atticus’ story front and center, but with the same loss of innocence; I can play him as a [simpler] country lawyer who mostly handles wills and entailments.
“But it still gives him unassailable virtues. He gets a very close look in this adaptation; he tries to do the right thing against all odds.
“And for the actor, Sorkin gives him a wonderful sense of humor. I can approach this character with a lot of gravity, dark and light, but humor is a wonderful way to let the audience come closer to you and make the character more approachable.
“It’s very, very rare that an actor has a chance to play a pure character with this degree of challenge and richness. This show is just great to be in. I’m grateful to have the experience.”
Moreover, Thomas says, Sorkin enhances the presence of what have been previously secondary or at best subsidiary characters, including Calpurnia, the Finch household housekeeper (played in this production by Jacqueline Williams) and the defendant, Tom Robinson (played by Yaegel T. Welch).
“He’s enriched the story in some ways. He’s bringing Calpurnia forward, enriching the role far beyond the book or the movie,” he explains. “He gives Tom Robinson great breadth and dignity.” (For example, judging by the company photos, Robinson wears a suit to testify in court; in the movie, he’s wearing shabby overalls.)
One more character that Sorkin
brings forward: Mrs. Henry Dubose, the Finches’ elderly, unlovable neighbor, who only appears as a shrewish woman spitting insults from her front porch in the movie, but who in the new play gets a bigger presence. And in this touring production she’s played by Mary Badham, who played Scout Finch in the 1962 movie.
The tour started in March 2022 and closes at the end of June, just about the time Thomas will be celebrating his 73rd birthday. But he’s not worrying about potentially being out of work.
“I’m ready to move on. And something always pops up,” he says. (In fact, after our interview, Broadway World is reporting that Thomas will be playing Mr. Webb, editor of the Grover’s Corners newspaper, in the forthcoming Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”)
Thomas has been working more or less nonstop since he made his Broadway debut at age 7, a cast replacement playing John A. Roosevelt, one of the children of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, in “Sunrise at Campobello.”
“My [Actors] Equity card was 65 years old last October,” he notes.
Thomas spent quite a lot of time in 1976 and 1977 in Conway making the movie “September 30, 1955,” in which he played a small-town Arkansas college undergraduate, obsessed with actor James Dean, who just flips out upon learning of Dean’s death on that title date.
He made his biggest impression on audiences playing John Boy for the first five seasons of TV’s “The Waltons” in the early ’70s. (He was nominated for two Emmy Awards and won one.) Other noteworthy films in which he appeared as a young actor: “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “The Red Badge of Courage” and “Red Sky at Morning”; he also starred in the television miniseries “Roots: The Next Generations.” More recent memorable roles include Special Agent Frank Gaad on FX’s spy-thriller series “The Americans” and Nathan Davis in 10 episodes of “Ozark” on Netflix.