Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird Arrives on Broadway
Aaron Sorkin has never met a stirringly idealistic speech that he didn’t like. He made a name for himself before he was 30 with the 1989 Broadway production of his courtroom drama A Few Good Men (and the subsequent Hollywood adaptation). And he cemented his reputation as television’s most passionate, hyperarticulate voice of high-minded liberalism with The West Wing and The Newsroom. Now Sorkin is returning to the theater—and the courtroom—with his adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s classic novel about the clash between racism and decency in 1930s small-town Alabama. As Sorkin approached the task of bringing the book to the stage, he realized that it was a chance to examine both our country’s dark past and also, in an era of racially motivated voter suppression and the killing of unarmed African-American men by white police officers, the present. “To Kill a Mockingbird should be a museum piece—something we look at and think, Wow, can you believe how bad things were back then?” Sorkin says. “As a playwright—not as a person, obviously—I’m very excited by the idea that, as much as we think we’ve evolved, there’s really only been a costume change.”
Under the sterling direction of Bartlett Sher (currently represented on Broadway by his terrific revival of My Fair Lady), the production translates the gripping linear narrative of the novel into deliberately theatrical terms, including a fractured timeline and a modular set that swiftly moves from a bare stage to a front porch to a court of law. It also features a superb cast, led by Jeff Daniels, stepping into the stalwart shoes of Gregory Peck, star of the beloved 1962 film version of Lee’s novel, as Atticus Finch, a white lawyer whose faith in the law is severely tested when he defends a (clearly innocent) black man accused of raping a white woman. Daniels, whose specialty is revealing the moral complexities beneath his affable surface, comes to the part steeped in the rhythms of Sorkin’s language (he played Will McAvoy on The Newsroom) and fresh from an Emmy win for his sinister performance on Godless. The character of Atticus has become an emblem of courage and rectitude (though, in Sorkin’s adaptation, he’s a man with racial and moral blind spots of his own), and Daniels plans to play him at face value. “He’s a small-town lawyer who sometimes gets paid in vegetables, and he’s raising two kids by himself,” Daniels says. “He’s an optimist who believes in the court system and that truth will prevail. And then he walks into the buzz saw of this trial and the right hook of the jury’s racism, and he throws out his prepared statement and makes up his closing argument on the spot. The audience gets to watch this guy struggle to find what to say—and he finds it, and it’s pretty beautiful.”
One of the conceits of this production is that Atticus’s children, Scout and Jem (and their friend Dill), are played by adults, who narrate the action as a kind of Greek chorus. First among equals is Celia Keenan-Bolger as the tomboy Scout, the novel’s narrator, who learns at a young age about her fellow humans’ capacity for evil—and also, through her encounters with the mysterious Boo Radley, for unexpected goodness. Reuniting with Sher, who directed her in the pre-Broadway tryout of The Light in the Piazza, Keenan-Bolger is no stranger to playing little girls and childlike young women—as she has, for instance, in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Les Misérables, and The Glass Menagerie. But she feels a special obligation to get it right with “probably the greatest literary heroine of my time,” as she sees it. “Scout feels like this tiny moral compass in a sea of some very, very confusing questions about the world she lives in,” says Keenan-Bolger. “And I think that sort of clarity—paired with this scrappy, tough, funny little kid—is something that continues to not only delight us but teach us about the kind of women we can be.”
In this story:
Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
Hair: Thom Priano for R+Co; Makeup: Yumi Lee.
Grooming by Lynda Eichner for Trees and Flowers for Skin.
Prop Stylist: Brian Webb
