Sorkin hits B’way with iconic courtroom drama
Aaron Sorkin is a huge fan of courtroom dramas, both as a reader and as a watcher. His first Broadway play was the swashbuckling military justice story, “A Few Good Men,” and he’s returned with another legal thriller this winter. But this time he had to shake off a real courtroom drama.
A lawsuit earlier this year threatened to delay or even derail Sorkin’s adaptation of the beloved Harper Lee 1960 novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” before the Oscar- and Emmy-winning writer made a few minor changes to his script to keep the show on track.
“There was a very scary few weeks,” Sorkin acknowledges during an interview in the Shubert Theatre, where his adaptation is a big draw. “We were afraid we were going to lose this theater and therefore not be able to be in any theater.”
The legal maneuvering began when Lee’s estate complained that the play’s script wrongly altered Atticus Finch, the noble attorney at the heart of the novel, and other book characters. That lawsuit was met by a countersuit and eventually mediated discussions broke the deadlock. Sorkin expected no lingering bitterness, with many of Lee’s heirs that were expected to be at opening night, Thursday, Dec. 13.
“When they come see the play, I really do hope that they’ll see that it was written and directed and performed by people who have enormous respect for the source material,” Sorkin said. “But we didn’t want to do a museum piece. This isn’t a class field trip. It’s not an exercise in nostalgia or an homage.”
Sorkin’s adaptation crackles with energy and his trademark soaring language that made hits of “The Newsroom” and “The West Wing.” He has bril- liantly cut the undergrowth of minor characters and enhanced others, particularly two prominent African-American characters: the maid Calpurnia and Tom Robinson, a client falsely accused of rape, both of whom are mostly silent in the coming-of-age novel about racism and injustice.
“I understand that, in 1960, using African-American characters only as atmosphere would probably go unnoticed. But I couldn’t pretend that I was writing the play in 1960. I’m writing it now and it is noticeable and it’s wrong. It’s also a wasted opportunity,” he said.
LaTanya Richardson Jackson, who plays Calpurnia opposite Jeff Daniels’ Atticus, said Sorkin examined the subtext and innuendo of her character and built Calpurnia an existence she never had before.
“I don’t know of anyone else who could have done what Aaron has done. He truly has lifted the essence of everything that was inside that Harper Lee book,” she said. “She might have written it in 1960 but the translation is totally 2018.”
The script also has Atticus’ children, Scout and Jem, and their best friend, Dill, played by adult actors who narrate, argue over memories and, in a selfreferential way, comment on what they’re doing. (“This is where I come in,” one says when he appears.) Sorkin used the technique once before in his last Broadway outing, “The Farnsworth Invention.”
Perhaps his most ambitious change was with Atticus, a widowed father and open-minded progressive in the Depression-era South, played to perfection by Gregory Peck in the film version. “He’s a godlike figure in the book and in the movie who can do no wrong. He’s kind of carved out of marble,” said Sorkin.
Atticus is so morally grounded that he tolerates intolerance, believing that there’s good in everybody. As Sorkin wrestled with humanizing this smalltown lawyer, events in the real world seeped in. White supremacists marched down a Virginia city’s streets and the U.S. president did not denounce them. “Suddenly it started to sound to me in 2018 like there were ‘fine people on both sides,’ ” Sorkin said. Atticus would have to come off his high horse. “In the play, I wanted him to struggle with the questions.”