‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ lives up to the hype

Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of the classic novel is as powerful as it is timely

Everyone has some of those big pieces of canon they haven’t read or seen yet. I’m not sure how but through all the English classes I took throughout high school and college, Harper Lee’s to Kill a Mockingbird had never landed in my lap. I corrected this last year sometime and certainly enjoyed the book — although I can think of quite a few other American novels that stand above it.

Then along comes Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, A Few Good Men, etc. etc.), a playwright with one of the best ears around for action and dialogue, who took the story and turned it into a stage play that manages to seriously over-deliver in terms of adapted material. The touring Broadway version now at the Denver Center’s Buell Theatre features Richard Thomas in the role of Atticus Finch — a small-town lawyer in 1930s Alabama who doesn’t share the racial animus most of the other townsfolk do toward their Black neighbors.

As I waited for the curtain to rise on opening night in Denver, I wondered to myself how Sorkin would start things off, how he’d take the many disparate pieces of family life that comprise the bulk of the novel and fit them together with the rape trial set piece at the heart of the story. His answer was to take all the many scenes of To Kill a Mockingbird and arrange them like a jigsaw puzzle. Some things were left out, some pieces were made larger or smaller, but somehow Sorkin put it all together in ingenious fashion — aided in large part by not worrying too much about chronology to focus instead on how to turn a somewhat quiet novel into a theatrical barn burner.

One of the rare touring Broadway shows to show up at the Buell that’s not a musical, To Kill a Mockingbird has shown that at least some drama can make it big: opening on Broadway in 2018 with Jeff Daniels in the Atticus Finch role, the production went on to earn millions while also running into a number of legal disputes.

While the novel positions Atticus’s daughter Scout (Melanie Moore) as the protagonist, the play focuses more on the father while still keeping Scout as a narrator. Along with her brother Jem (Justin Mark) and a visiting kid named Dill (Steven Lee Johnson), the three run around the vast stage causing mischief while also breaking the fourth wall to comment on the goings on. Indeed, the opening scene jumps right into the trial, with Scout walking around unseen between the other characters filling us in on the action.

The injustice at the heart of the story centers on a Black man falsely accused of raping a White woman. And while Atticus is mostly a civil attorney, he’s persuaded by the judge (a delightful David Manis) to take on the case for fear the court-appointed attorney would do poorly. It’s 1934 in Maycomb, Alabama, and Atticus knows full well that even neighbors he’s helped over the years may well turn on him for defending a Black man.

As he makes his way through these tricky waters, he’s also trying to explain the world to his children (and Dill, who’s become a de-factor family member). They have a lot of tough questions, and the patriarchal omniscience he effects at the outset of the story suffers some cracks along the way as some of what he believes about his neighbors is continually contradicted by their actions. The family’s maid and nanny Calpurnia (Jacqueline Williams) has no qualms about challenging Atticus, and she really makes him question his belief that all people deserve respect when pointing to the despicable actions of Bob Ewell (Joey Collins).

Ewell is the father of the alleged rape victim, Mayella (Arianna Gayle Stucki), and a nastier character is hard to imagine. Collins is fantastic in the role, snarling every line in his whiny drawl and showing every step of the way how deep racism can eat away at someone’s soul. His confrontations with Atticus are some of the most intense scenes in the play, with the staid lawyer using every bit of his cool not to lose it.

Thomas handles the lead role with aplomb, looking and acting very much as I’d imagined the character in the novel. Although played by adult actors, the three kids are also a lot of fun to watch, and Moore as Scout is particularly convincing despite the fact that she’s a good 20 years older than the character. But she did struggle quite a bit hanging onto the Southern accent, which was distracting as it careened from sounding sorta Southern to so far away from Alabama that at one point I thought she was doing some kind of Eastern European accent.

Also tremendous is Johnson as Dill, an intelligent boy who plays dumb due to his shitty home life but who nonetheless reveals himself to Atticus in a touching scene where he learns Dill’s never even met his father.

As directed by Bartlett Sher, To Kill a Mockingbird moves quickly, with ingenious use of fly- and roll-in set pieces that transform the stage from courtroom to the Finch home in seconds. Fans of Sorkin’s other works will no doubt recognize the fast-paced dialogue, with characters talking over each other and deploying enough zingers and laugh lines to keep the heavy story from collapsing under its own weight.

As we continue to confront the kind of ugly racism depicted in the play here in 2023, much of what we see from nearly 100 years ago sounds almost the same. To Kill a Mockingbird is a sober reminder that racism lives where we let it grow, and that Atticus’s battle to see and treat people equally independent of race is a struggle that has no end.