![]() ![]() The play’s ambivalent approach to Atticus is satisfying but also sometimes glib: It’s as though after Anne Frank said, “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart,” someone chimed in to add, “Well, except the Nazis.” And despite Sorkin’s best efforts-as is often the case with sensitive material-every righteous decision engenders new potential critiques. When Atticus says, “I believe in being respectful,” Calpurnia is ready with a rejoinder: “No matter who you’re disrespecting by doin’ it.” Meanwhile, Atticus’s attitudes are challenged in explicit terms by his truculent young son, Jem (Will Pullen), and by his staunch African-American maid, Calpurnia (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), whose role has been beefed up substantially from the novel. Sorkin has made the villains-especially the odious Bob Ewell (Frederick Weller), the accuser’s abusive father-more villainous than ever factors that might mitigate our revulsion toward the meaner characters, such as illness or extreme poverty, are downplayed. “They’re still our friends and neighbors.” But the storytelling doesn’t back him up. “They’re still good people,” Sorkin’s Atticus says of the racists in his town. (In a departure from normal procedure, the production did not provide critics with a copy of the script.) The play does not think that there are fine people on both sides, and it wants to plant a flag on the right one. Having survived a legal challenge from Lee’s estate, which believed that it departed too much from the novel, the play has its guard up. That isn’t quite fair to the Atticus of Lee’s book, who dismisses any white man who cheats a black man as “trash.” But it’s a question about which Sorkin’s play seems acutely alert and, well, defensive. Atticus’s humanism can sound, at times, like an evasion of moral distinction. It is not just the black skins that he urges his children to walk around in it is also the skins of the white farmers who try to lynch Tom Robinson before his trial. Even more problematic, to some modern ears, is the scope of Atticus’s magnanimity. At its center is a story about a young woman-Tom’s accuser, Mayella (Erin Wilhelmi)-whose allegations of sexual assault must not be believed. As seen through the eyes of his preteen tomboy daughter, Scout (Celia Keenan-Bolger), Atticus is very much a white-daddy savior, albeit one who can’t perform miracles, in a narrative that has little room for the perspectives of black people beyond the respect and gratitude they show him. Slow to anger and reluctant to judge-“You never really understand a person,” he says, “until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”-Atticus is a paragon of that most fabled of American values: decency.īut while To Kill a Mockingbird has a special place in the literature of American civil rights, the book is also now a minefield. The hero of the story is Atticus Finch (Jeff Daniels), a lawyer in rural Alabama in the early 1930s, who bravely defends a disabled black man, Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe), against a false accusation of rape. That the play exists at all is an act of boldness: Turning Harper Lee’s 1960 novel into a play in 2018 is far from easy. ![]() Greg Kinnear, Baize Buzan, Portia, Hunter Parrish, Michael Braugher, Noah Robbins, Neal Huff, Gordon Clapp, Zachary Booth, Mariah Lee, Christopher Innvar, Russell Harvard, Patricia Conolly, Amelia McClain, Ted Koch, William Youmans, Scout Backus, Ian Bedford, Rosalyn Coleman, Anne-Marie Cusson, Michael Bryan French, Steven Lee Johnson, Tyler Lea, Geoffrey Allen Murphy, Luke Smith, Yaegel T.The defense never rests in Aaron Sorkin’s cagey adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. To purchase 10 or more tickets, visit Broadway Inbound. To Kill a Mockingbird Special Information Don’t miss “one of the greatest plays in history” ( NPR), now on Broadway. The character of Scout, based on Lee herself, has come to define youthful innocence - and its inevitable loss - for generation after generation of readers around the world. ![]() Inspired by Lee’s own childhood in Alabama, To Kill a Mockingbird features one of literature’s towering symbols of integrity and righteousness in the character of Atticus, based on Lee’s own father. In the meantime, view all Broadway Shows and Off Broadway Shows and Events.Īcademy Award ® nominee Greg Kinnear stars as Atticus Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway, adapted by Aaron Sorkin. This show played its last performance at the Shubert Theatre on January 16. ![]()
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