To Kill a Mockingbird Takes Stage

Jeff Daniels, Gregory Peck play Atticus Finch

How does a small, simple novel about growing up in dusty Southern town in the 1930s become an overblown Broadway production full of fire and drama and screaming courtroom slanging matches? First, the writer emphasizes the father rather than the children—who were the focus of the book—tweaks his character by adding great insight and passion, updates the racial relationships in Alabama of the late 1930s—and puts words in the mouths of children that they never said in the novel.

The novel was simple, poignant, and in the hands of its young author, Harper Lee, captured its designated time and place through the introduction of believable, relatable characters—three bright, scruffy children and a kind father who took his work as a small-town lawyer in the segregated South seriously. To Kill a Mockingbird was made into a black-and-white movie in 1962, a movie that held a mirror up to life in the American South depicting the complex racial relations in the adults’ world of the day. To Kill a Mockingbird was embraced for celebrating the best we human beings can be—and wonder of wonders, the South itself was not being vilified for its longstanding racial attitudes. Southerners came to love the book and to feel good about themselves because of it. It had villainous villains—but they were the racists—poor, ignorant folks who lived in squalor next to the city dump—so the reader could see them clearly, reject them, and, through the transcendent hero Atticus Finch, we could identify with goodness and stop hating ourselves.

The film was scripted by Horton Foote, an old hand a screenwriting, and a bona fide son of the region. He captured Harper Lee’s mood; her cadence; her train of thought. It’s a fine little film and in its day it was a bit revolutionary; it changed a lot of hearts in a deep way. The children in the film were touching in their authenticity. They were ordinary, sincere, and captivating. And towering over them all was the figure of Gregory Peck, a movie star from the old school, playing the father with a sonorous voice and a dashingly handsome presence along with an admirable mastery of the craft of screen acting. Peck himself loved the role, and wrote memos to studio executives expressing how he wanted the movie to be more about the character he played, Atticus Finch, than it was about the children. His opinion prevailed, and probably rightly so—however, his interpretation changed Harper Lee’s original Atticus from a simple small-town lawyer to a magnificent example of the best of American jurisprudence. In any later iteration of To Kill a Mockingbird, Gregory Peck would be a tough act to follow.

In this theatrical version, Jeff Daniels brings vigor and personality to his portrayal of Atticus. Totally different from Gregory Peck in both appearance and impact, he embodies all-American integrity and a certain ordinariness that Peck, a matinee idol, bypassed simply by being Gregory Peck, who portrayed the man as a font of wisdom and sympathy.  I suspect Miss Lee’s model for the character, her father Amasa C. Lee, was more like Daniels than Peck (she had originally wanted Spencer Tracy for the role), but that’s neither here nor there since Peck will always be Atticus Finch in the minds of most people familiar with the movie. His performance was so strong that people believe he WAS Atticus Finch. His imprint on the role has a few generations believing they read the book—when in fact they only saw the movie.

As presented at the Schubert Theatre on Broadway, this new To Kill a Mockingbird is overlong and incorporates some reinterpretation that I did not feel illuminated the story. It opens on a backdrop that looks like the side of a barn, and two people come out of a door, a woman positioning herself at an antique organ, downstage left, and a man with a guitar crossing and sitting down right, and they play a few somber notes before the barn wall is removed and actors move to set up a courtroom set. The musicians contribute nothing to the play and I cannot understand what they are doing there.

I do not feel that To Kill a Mockingbird is a sacred text and should not be tampered with. It was a pleasant book, to my mind, but it fell short of being a masterpiece. It was, however, a better movie—in its way is a classic American film, an intimate, authentic story of the South before the upheaval of Civil Rights. As both a novel and as a film, it is a very successful work, and may have potential for reworking, but I have yet to be convinced that a theatrical version can capture what the novel did. 

Playwright Aaron Sorkin has deconstructed the sequence of events, using flashbacks and beginning with the courtroom scene, requiring narration to help an audience orient to the time changes. Sorkin’s script shifts the focus somewhat, and adds some implausible elements like Atticus’ so-called “brotherly” relationship with the black woman who cleans his house and tends his children. This is not in the book nor in the movie, and does not strike me as true to life. Sorkin has also found it somehow necessary to expand the length of the play from a manageable two hours to almost three, which is difficult for most theatregoers to accept.

It would have been nearly impossible to put these leading roles in the hands of a six-year-old girl and a couple of nine-year-old boys, so in this production the roles were cast with actors in their 30s. The children narrate the story. The device is uncomfortable, as the narration reads a bit preachy. Jem, a grownup, is far more overt in criticizing his father than any child would be. Suspending disbelief is more difficult—no matter how good the actors are—when adults are cast as children.

I did like Jeff Daniels as Atticus, and, once I got into the swing of the idea of the casting of the children, I also liked Celia Keenan-Bolger as Scout. Keenan-Bolger has the gifts of a young Julie Harris, and it’s not easy to knock that, although I didn’t think it was quite right for the precociously independent, tough little girl called Scout.  Will Pullen worked well as Jem, looking like a teenager (actually in his 30s) and handling the arrogance and wrong-headedness of adolescent boys pretty well. Gideon Glick, however, was totally miscast as Dill. Seeing such a big and brawny guy play the slightly built and jittery neighbor boy was jarring at best. Not that Glick doesn’t know how to get a laugh, but his appearance here and stage presence gave the impression he had just walked in from the stage of a nearby Broadway musical by mistake. The character he was playing was based on the child Truman Capote, who was a close friend to Harper Lee and just incidentally with her brother. This play put the boys together as pals and Scout doing what little girls supposedly do—tagging along—but this was not the character Harper Lee wrote. Scout was the center of her own life, and the center of the book--and she was pretty fierce when called on to be.

Frederick Weller was too confident, too confrontational, for the ignorant Bob Ewell character. His outbursts in the courtroom were alarming (and of course would not have been allowed in a real courtroom), and his articulation of racist attitudes of the day were more eloquent than such a man would have been capable of. Erin Wilhelmi as Mayella is a brilliant actress, playing a low-mentality poverty-stricken victim of abuse, but the idea of her confronting Finch as she does in this production simply doesn’t seem believable. 

It’s expecting too much to think someone not from Southern culture could capture such nuances as one child saying to others, “Your father was…” when a Southern kid always says “Your daddy was.” It may sound a bit quaint or forced to contemporary urban ears, however, I grew up in Alabama in the 1940s and this was certainly the case. Moreover, the accents in this production were uneven and for the most part a bit off. Jeff Daniels did well, but the only cast member who had me fooled into thinking he must BE Southern was Dakin Matthews, whose performance as Judge Taylor was convincing in every way.

I squirmed through the play, wanting so much to like it, but I couldn’t sit through all two hours and fifty minutes. There was an intermission at the two-hour mark and I debated with myself, but decided I had seen all I could bear to. I knew some good stuff was coming—the scene with Atticus telling Scout it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird (and I’m sure Daniels was marvelous in that), Atticus’ final speech in the courtroom; and the line, “Stand up, Miss Jean Louise, your father is passing…” and the children realizing that Arthur Radley, the dark unknown man living in the haunted house, is their friend; and Scout saying, “Hey Boo” when she sees Arthur hiding behind the door inside her house. I know these scenes and I know they’re beautiful. They are just as beautiful in the book as in the movie, and to justify walking out without having seen their place in the play, I had to tell myself that this production could not have made them more so. I’m told that Sorkin worked hard to make Atticus more relatable, more contemporary, which I would think would be more theatrical, surely; however, the Atticus in the book was a country lawyer and not a crusader on any level. The need to heighten events and enlarge characters for the stage does not particularly serve the material.

There is another dramatization of To Kill a Mockingbird, credited to a writer called Christopher Sergel, who, as far as I can tell, did little more than transcribe the text from Horton Foote’s screenplay. It is often given amateur productions, and it is a bit flat as a play. However, because of its simplicity, it is more likely than this one to be produced in Little Theatres indefinitely. My question is, why make a play out of this book at all? There is an answer.

The answer is, because a new, Broadway-level production offers an opportunity for great American actors to play this juicy role. To my mind this is not enough of a reason. Future productions, if there are any, will always pit the leading actor against Gregory Peck, and future actors most likely will fall short. But I expect the line of actors wanting to take over when Jeff Daniels leaves is already forming.

A Film Worthy of the Bard

Nothing Is Truer Than Truth is a documentary film, telling in a very convincing way its own truth—that the writer of the works of Shakespeare was not the man we thought at all but Edward De Vere, who lived in the Elizabethan era, traveled to Italy

Edward De Vere

for a year and a half, and returned to bring the Renaissance to England almost single-handedly.

The film, brilliantly written, produced and directed by Cheryl Eagan-Donovan, relies heavily on  the book Shakespeare by Another Name, a biography of De Vere by Mark Anderson. It focuses on the years of De Vere’s life when he lived in Italy, drawing parallels between the works attributed to the man from Stratford and the real life studies and adventures of the English nobleman. Recent thought has brought much attention to the lack of evidence that the man Will Shaksper (sic) of Stratford had the scope of knowledge it would have taken to write what is considered to be the greatest literature in the English language. Eagan-Donovan says little about the man from Stratford, whose life has confounded scholars for centuries, and wisely reveals instead the very colorful and well-documented travels of Edward De Vere.

With footage of the architecture and festivals of Venice, Nothing Is Truer Than the Truth is a visual feast, calling to mind how Italy must have been in the 16^th century. There are film clips from Shakespearean productions featuring crucial scenes from A Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors--all illustrating Shakespeare’s intimate knowledge of Italy in his time. There is commentary by Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, both players who are knowledgeable about the details of Shakespeare’s work and his times. Jacobi openly espouses the idea, and here defends his position strongly, that whoever wrote the plays would have to have been to the locales and known some of the characters he wrote about—and that Edward De Vere fits that requirement remarkably.

Scholars, too, appear in the film and discuss their findings about the Shakespeare authorship question. Roger A. Stritmatter, who has done primary research on the Geneva bible owned by Edward De Vere (and annotated in such a way as to confirm its connections to Shakespeare’s writing), Alexander Waugh (grandson of Evelyn), Richard Whalen, (author of Who Wrote Shakespeare?), John Shahan, Diane Paulus, Tina Packer, and many others, talk about Edward De Vere and the works of Shakespeare.

Nothing Is Truer Than Truth is exhaustively researched and a joy to watch, leaving the viewer with a sense that there is more to this story than we yet know.

My Mother, My Friend

Maudetta Graham was the baby of the family born to Maude Melia Matthews Graham and John Richard Graham, born in 1914. The family lived in the town of Crichton, hard by (and now a part of) Mobile, and she grew up in poverty with a brilliant underachiever of a father and a doting mother. She learned to love from her mother Maude and her devoted aunt Etta, both of whom she was named for. She was to contract the double name into a shortened version which had an old-fashioned, genuine ring to it, much like herself. She worshiped her older brother, Theodore, known as "Doe," an entertainer and professional golfer. Her brother Claiborne, a year older than she and thought of as the smart one of the three children, died of spinal meningitis at the age of 15, a trauma she never really overcame.

She loved little children and dolls. For her 16th birthday, she received her last doll. Two years later she was married.

There was something innocent and childlike about Maudetta Timbes all her life. She was an expert at denial: Every child she loved was "the smartest" and everybody she knew was nice. A gifted and natural writer, she dabbled in poetry and short fiction. When we moved near the bay she began combing the beaches and collecting driftwood which she fashioned into furniture and lamps. She loved her gardens, always claiming that she didn't like the work but she loved the result. She had a wonderful sense of humor and an almost accidental wit. Her three children had a way of gathering and trading wisecracks and jokes in order to keep her laughing. Even at the nursing home, debilitated by a stroke and enormous discomfort, she was able to laugh if we were able to come up with the right thing to say.

She has never handled harsh reality well. When bad things happened she was overwhelmed. After my father died, desperately needing projects to fill her time, she threw herself into researching and creating a long and complex family history. Aided by a local family history club, she learned the techniques of looking into records--long before there was the ease of the Internet. She spent several years compiling what will always be a family treasure, a 200-page volume of stories, charts and anecdotes of as many family members as she could find, on both sides of our family. She peppered her writing with tales about people and events--rather than creating a family tree, as most do when presenting family history. The family research sites like Ancestry were not there, so she did the looking into old census records on her own. She visited major libraries and browsed ancient cemeteries and church records for her information. Her book is charming, insightful, but full of mythology--just as she herself was.

Her three children adored her but she was in many ways more like an older sibling than a mother. When I returned to Alabama, to live near her as she entered her 80s, I was a different person than the girl who had left at 18. We were able to thrash out some of the details of both our lives, together, and I came to know her on a new level. We never quite reached the natural role reversal of child becoming parent but I helped care for her as she lost a step, then another--and wonder of wonders--she died in 2008--she is still with me every day. She had done the best she could to make her life good, and memories of her make all of us who knew her, better.