To Kill a Mockingbird at the Shubert Theatre.
Director Bartlett
Sher’s production of this whip-smart play made headlines this year when the estate
of Harper Lee, who wrote the 1960 novel on which the film and the play are
based, dragged Scott Rudin and his associate producers into court over alleged
departures from Lee’s intent. But they
needn’t have worried. The greatest
achievement of the new Mockingbird,
despite its very occasional stolidity and flourishes of directorial
obviousness, is its balancing of Lee’s moral uplift and well-rounded characters
with Sorkin’s language and themes. Nothing
in the story of Finch, the heroic lawyer Lee based on her father, or the
wounded humanity Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe), his defendant, is
betrayed. But the jokes are all classic
Sorkinese. Note where prosecutor Horace
Gilmer (Stark Sands), who’s trying Tom for rape, asks if Tom’s testimony can be
considered sworn if the hand he rests on the Bible is crippled. Quoth the presiding officer of the court,
Judge Taylor (Dakin Matthews), “The court is speechless.” And Sorkin’s lifelong interest in the
courtroom – his first Broadway play was 1989’s A Few Good Men – lends itself to the newly trial-focused structure with
which the play approaches the story.
That
structure is up-front here, perhaps more so than the well-trodden story
itself. The play functions as a
reconstruction of the events leading to the death of the virulent racist Bob
Ewell (Frederick Weller), whose daughter (Erin Wilhelmi) is Tom’s accuser. Those doing the reconstruction are Atticus’s
children, Jem (Will Pullen) and Scout (Celia Keenan-Bolger), our Lee
substitute, and their friend Dill (Gideon Glick). Choosing adults for the roles of the story’s
famously innocent juvenile roles is an unexpected but excellent choice by Sher
and Sorkin. It refuses to allow the
story to become cute, but in their half-present roles as narrators, the children
individuate from their peers on-stage, becoming conduits for the audience. Keenan-Bolger is especially good.
The major
change is the expanded role of Calpurnia (a strong LaTanya Richardson Jackson),
the Finches’ maid, who here functions as a challenge to Atticus’s insistence
that even the most unapologetic bigots of his hometown are still his “friends
and neighbors.” The pacifistic Atticus
ends the play promising Jem that “I’ll do the fighting from now on.” It’s a smart change, an update from the days
when tolerance meant acceptance even of the intolerant, without disrespecting
Atticus’s inherent goodness, which is never undermined as it was in Lee’s
prequel novel, 2015’s Go Set a Watchman. The downside is that the portions of the play
after the end of the trial can feel even more tacked-on than usual. Danny Wolohan, as Boo Radley, doesn’t
register the way Robert Duvall did, in the film. As compared with the power of the trial
scenes – Akinnagbe’s wounded pride, Keenan-Bolger’s fierceness, Daniels’
wisecracking, earthy humanity – anything thereafter is less a subplot than an
addendum.
But that’s
merely a testament to the play’s genuine power, its throbbing undercurrent – an
appeal to truth in the face of unthinking hatred. Sorkin’s genius here is his recognition that
those optimists who believe in the truth have always had to undergo an
emotional journey when it comes to their relations with their fellow men –
First, we believe its victory is assured, then, we recognizes it will take a
struggle, then, we begin that struggle.
The play ends with an old favorite psalm of Sorkin’s (he quotes it in a
2002 episode of The West Wing) – “Joy
Cometh in the Morning.” As Calpurnia
rightly notes, it’s a long time coming, but the first thing is to believe it
eventually comes.
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