![]() It’s that Atticus believes that goodness can be found in everyone. While I wanted to explore Scout, I absolutely wanted Atticus to be a traditional protagonist, so he needed to change and have a flaw … It turned out that Harper Lee had given him one it’s just that when we all learned the book, it was taught as a virtue. ![]() How did Harper Lee get away with having a protagonist who doesn’t change? Because Atticus isn’t the protagonist in the book or the movie Scout is-her flaw is that she’s young, and the change is that she loses some of her innocence. And if he’s gonna be the protagonist, he has to have a flaw. I realized that Atticus, as the protagonist story, has to change. It felt like a greatest-hits album done by a cover band-just somebody trying to imitate Harper Lee and standing up the most famous scenes from the book. My first draft was terrible because I tried to gently swaddle the book in bubble wrap and transfer it to the stage. Sorkin: When I started out, I thought it was a suicide mission, but I said yes right away ’cause I wanted to do a play so badly. And what the three characters-Scout, Jem, and Dill-are questioning is something from the book. The curtain goes up and it’s not what you were expecting to see. Sims: The industrial warehouse look of the set-it’s like a space that’s been there for a long time but has been standing empty. ![]() Scout spends the play trying to solve, but broadly what we’re doing is having a new conversation about the book, the story we all learned in seventh grade and thought we knew. From the moment the curtain goes up, we try to knock you off your pins a little bit. I knew the book, and I had seen the film multiple times, so I was not expecting to be surprised.Īaron Sorkin: I’m glad to hear that. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.ĭavid Sims: The show surprised me. I talked with Harris and Sorkin together about their approach to the revival, Atticus’s status as a hero, and recasting the classics for a modern audience. There’s a sweetness and a sadness to his Atticus, a perfect match to the melancholy backwards glance of Sorkin’s text. I was fascinated by the prospect of Harris, who brings an edge to even his most warmhearted roles, playing one of the most heralded characters in the American literary canon, and he didn’t disappoint. ![]() The production, directed by Bartlett Sher, premiered last year with Jeff Daniels headlining a seasoned cast and has now turned over with Ed Harris in the lead role. The stage adaptation is nonetheless made with appreciation for Lee’s novel, and that mix of homage and update has translated into a family-friendly Broadway hit. The play beefs up the relatively anonymous parts given to black characters in Lee’s work, gives Atticus’s kids a more argumentative nature, and sheds harsher light on the book’s somewhat pat ending. That framing encourages the audience to ponder the limits of Atticus’s impulse to empathize even with vile racists such as Bob Ewell, a man who’s trying to pin his own assault of his daughter Mayella on Tom. Though the adaptation broadly follows the narrative arc of Lee’s novel, it uses Scout, her brother Jem, and her friend Dill (all played by adult actors) to cast a wary eye over some of the book’s more idealistic details. In Sorkin’s play, the other trial is of Atticus’s own nobility, and how it doesn’t always square with his grander vision of justice. Instead, it stages two trials: One is from the book, in which Scout’s attorney father, Atticus Finch, defends Tom Robinson, an African American man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama, and tries to combat the community’s entrenched racism. Sorkin’s dramatization of Harper Lee’s novel, which opened on Broadway last December, is an unexpectedly probing work that refuses to let an American classic go unchallenged. “Something didn’t make sense,” Scout Finch tells the audience of the tale that’s about to unfold. The first line of Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird is one of quiet confusion.
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