‘Mockingbird’ on Broadway sued

The estate of “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee has filed suit over an upcoming Broadway adaptation of the novel, arguing that screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s script wrongly alters Atticus Finch and other characters from the book.

The suit, which includes a copy of a contract signed by Lee and dated about eight months before her death in February 2016, contends Sorkin’s script violates the agreement by portraying Finch, the noble attorney who represents a black man wrongly accused of rape in “Mockingbird,” as someone else in the play.

Filed against the theater company of New York producer Scott Rudin, the complaint cites an interview with the online publication Vulture in which Sorkin was quoted as saying the small-town lawyer would evolve from a racist apologist at the start of the show to become “Atticus Finch by the end of the play.”

Such a change during a play could fit with the character evolution shown between the Pulitzer Prizewinning “Mockingbird” and Lee’s first draft of the novel, finally released in 2015 as “Go Set a Watchman.”

But the lawsuit contends the script would violate the contact by changing Finch and other characters and adding still more people who aren’t in the novel. It asks a judge to enforce a section of the agreement that states the play won’t “depart in any manner from the spirit of the Novel nor alter its characters.”

A firm that represents Rudin’s company, Rudinplay Inc., said Sorkin’s script “is a faithful adaptation of a singular novel which has been crafted well within the constraints of the signed agreement” between the producers and Lee.

The statement also took a jab at the “history of litigious behavior” of Lee’s estate, overseen by attorney Tonja Carter of Lee’s south Alabama hometown of Monroeville.

“This is, unfortunately, simply another such lawsuit, the latest of many, and we believe that it is without merit,” said the statement. “While we hope this gets resolved, if it does not, the suit will be vigorously defended.”

The play is scheduled to open in New York in December.