Sorkin drags ‘Mockingbird’ into present
Jeff Daniels stars in radical rendition of Harper Lee classic
NEW YORK — Ever since Gregory Peck, the Tom Hanks of his moment, starred in the film version of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 1962, the small-town lawyer Atticus Finch has been a symbol of American decency. Not unlike Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, he’s been an emblem of how ignorance can only be banished through empathy. If you wanted to dismantle the systemic racism of the American South, argued the avuncular Atticus with every fiber of his genial being, you should do so by doing your job, having patience, sticking to the facts, working doggedly within the system and, above all, by being willing to walk a step or two in each individual’s shoes.
Under his worldview — dominant in America of the early 1960s — even the most deplorable white supremacists among us have the potential to come around. If they are made to feel understood.
Doesn’t fly so well today, does it?
Yet until now, Christopher Sergel’s loyal dramatic adaptation of “Mockingbird” — which I’ve reviewed a lot over the years — is the only authorized stage version that ever has existed. As in the film, the dramatic climax of that script occurs when the beaten down AfricanAmerican citizenry of Lee’s semi-fictional Depressionera Maycomb, Ala., rise to their feet as Atticus walks by, thus denying agency to the very people most impacted by the horrors of the sham rape trial that results in the conviction of an innocent black man. By the end of the courtroom drama, Atticus’ daughter Scout, through whose eyes we view this story, has realized she is the daughter not just of a country lawyer, but of a dogged all-American hero.
Aaron Sorkin’s genuinely radical and thoroughly gripping new Broadway adaptation of this novel — which opened Thursday night at the Shubert Theatre with Jeff Daniels in the starring role — has no truck with the heroic image of Atticus, his wide-eyed daughter and the famous Finch briefcase, a stand-in for the slow march toward justice, all striding together into a new American dawn. No siree. Sorkin has written a “Mockingbird” that fits this riven American moment. And the director, Bartlett Sher, has felt little need to assuage with sentimentality.
Daniels interprets Atticus as carrying an unexplained sadness, a sense of personal dread that chills his relationships, even with his own children. Where Peck (and any number of other actors over the years) viewed Atticus’ value system as immutable and lived with confident rectitude, Daniels treats him as a weary, unknowable Homeric traveler, slowly realizing that he has no adequate tools to fully fight the Jim Crow hydra, capable of rearing up at any moment and taking down our fragile American democracy.
Even if the fundamental story, especially the courtroom dialog, remains much the same, Sorkin has turned “Mockingbird” into a deconstruction of Finch’s core philosophy — that minds must be changed through considerate understanding. And in so doing, of course, he’s homed in on the great divide among progressives — do you converse with and try to understand the “deplorables,” if only for practical purposes, or does moral rectitude require you to resist, lest they flood America with variations on the timeless theme of white supremacy?
To do that, Sher did not need to turn the character Bob Ewell into so broad a villain (as his daughter Mayella, the superb Erin Wilhelmi is far more credible). But Sorkin did have to add agency to the AfricanAmerican characters whom Lee gave little voice. Most notably, Calpurnia (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) now takes down Atticus in his own kitchen, acquiring much of his moral centrality, schooling him in what are, for her, the painful personal consequences of his own gentility. And the long-silent Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe) now speaks — and not of Atticus as his savior.
How you feel about all this will depend really on whether you’re a Constitutional originalist like Antonin Scalia — a work from 1960 should be interpreted on stage to reflect and respect authorial intent! — or whether you see worth in a living, breathing “Mockingbird,” a play that surely respects this beloved American novel, but also overhauls, or at least updates, its point of view. I embrace the latter, especially given the evidence that Lee always intended Finch to be more complicated and troubled than the one immortalized by Peck. But it’s a fair debate.
Either way, this new version pulses with relevancy. Now that Sorkin’s adaptation is on the table, it will make its predecessor seem dated at best, redundant at worst. It has the capacity to change how America sees this story for good.
Designed by Miriam Buether on a set intended to offer little comfort to anyone, “Mockingbird” now has three narrators switching between childhood memory and their adult selves — Celia Keenan-Bolger’s Scout, as is traditional, Scout’s brother Jem (Will Pullen), and their gay friend Dill (Gideon Glick), who wants nothing more than to be part of Atticus’ orbit, a need that the distracted Finch fails to quickly see. The change is consistent with all of the above, but I missed the father-daughter centrality, excellent work by Keenan-Bolger notwithstanding. There was room for more kindness to these curious children than Daniels yet allows. Some of his coolness to the touch feels unexplained.
But Sorkin sees more hope in the fevered Link Deas (the excellent Neal Huff ), one of the only Alabama white citizens with a personal understanding of the pain of racism, and, of course, in Boo Radley (Danny Wolohan) who here teaches Scout a lesson that Atticus cannot conceive — coming to terms with what you fear most about yourself (and your kind) is the only way toward freedom for all.