Lee’s story remains relevant
Aaron Sorkin brings harsh light of reality to stellar ‘Mockingbird’
Amob of klansmen aim to lynch Tom Robinson before he can get a fair trial. A Black man accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town in the 1930s, Robinson may only have his lawyer, Atticus Finch, between him a noose. The viciousness is there, the violence a moment away, when Atticus’s kids — Jem and Scout — rush into the scene to protect their father.
The innocence of childhood has crashed into Aaron Sorkin’s reimagining of “To Kill a Mockingbird” — as it does repeatedly in the play, now through April 17 at the Citizens Bank Opera House. Scout defuses the mob’s rage by recognizing the voice of a single hooded klansman as the father of a schoolmate. She subdues the man’s bloodlust with her simple request that he say hello to his son for her. And suddenly Atticus’s wisdom is revealed.
“Mob’s a place where people go to take a break from their conscience,” he had told his daughter Scout. “A mob acts out of emotion, absent facts, absent contemplation, mostly absent responsibility. What they get in return is anonymity. Conscience can be exhausting.”
The play has a prescient sadness to it. It addresses what we face now: a desire to find easy answers through blunt and bloody force, a justice system shot through with inequities. It offers flashes of wisdom but, more often than not, falls back on confusion, bewilderment.
The marketing materials for the touring Broadway show advertise it as Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” But devotees of Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel will find less innocence and certainty here. Fans of the 1962 Academy Award-winning movie will discover this Atticus lacking Gregory Peck’s Lincolnesque quality. This is by design.
In the touring production, Atticus is played perfectly by veteran actor Richard Thomas. He’s a gentleman full of scholarly acumen that’s often utterly worthless in the real world. His optimism empty of impact, his naivete epic in scope. Many of this play’s best moments have Atticus being pulled back to reality by his Black housekeeper, Calpernia (Jacqueline Williams, in another perfect performance), someone forced to face reality without rest.
“I believe in being respectful,” Atticus says to Calpurnia. She replies, “No matter who you’re disrespecting by doing it.”
Where the play does recall the novel is in its ability to cram endless hardships in a single story — even if Sorkin’s version finds a different balance on what hardships to focus on. Like the novel, this new play uses the perspective of children — here Scout (Melanie Moore), Jem (Justin Mark) and neighbor Dill (Steven Lee Johnson) — to piece together tragedies beyond their intellectual grasp but well within their emotional understanding. Heaped on Tom Robinson’s doomed-from-thestart trial, the play digs into systemic racism’s insidious tentacles, child abuse, incest, alienation, the roots and legacy of poverty, and death from a myriad of vantage points.
Cluttered with pain, history and humor, Sorkin’s play can be awkward at times — on Wednesday audience members giggled at gallows humor that made others tear up. But that seems to be the goal. Sorkin wants it to be messy, wants us to confront cruel ironies, cynicism and miscarriages of justice by laughing, crying and hanging our heads in shame or resignation or horror.
One thing Atticus gets right is, as he says after he’s been crushed by reality, “We can’t go on like this.” Sorkin is smart enough not to try and solve problems that have nearly broken this country over and over again. Instead, he reminds us that we do go on like this. A hundred fifty years after the Civil War, 60+ years after the novel’s publication, half a decade after the white supremacist mob in Charlottesville, Va., we keep going on like this.