![]() Sorkin quickly cuts to the trial where Atticus’ values get put to the test. ![]() Roscoe), and Joey Collins (Bob Ewell) in ‘To Kill Mockingbird.’ Photos by Julieta Cervantes. Sorkin uses the device to introduce what will become his epic theme: Is consistency in one’s values always a virtue? What ought one do when exigencies call for an exception to rules-based principles? What if a higher ethical principle leads one to act contrary to conventions? Arianna Gayle Stucki (Mayella Ewell), Richard Thomas (Atticus Finch), Stephen Elrod (Bailiff), Richard Poe (Judge Taylor), Greg Wood (Mr. ![]() That right there is one of those in medias res literary devices meant to intrigue but that might be a head-scratcher. And as she tells us this, she cannot believe that her honest-to-a-fault father has espoused this pretty big lie - an ethical contradiction she cannot yet wrap her mind around. That expansion begins in the very first scene when Scout reads to us from a local newspaper report that Bob Ewell died by falling on his own knife - which she knows to be a cover story. ![]() Hearing the mini-chorus of all three kids’ distinct points of view onstage expands the play’s universe of ideas exponentially. Impressively performed by Melanie Moore (Scout), Justin Mark (Jem), and Steven Lee Johnson (Dill), they talk directly to us a lot and do so throughout the two acts. To unwrap the story and guide us through it, Sorkin has made Atticus’ daughter, Scout her older brother, Jem and their visiting friend Dill not only characters within it but also knowing narrators. Justin Mark (Jem Finch), Richard Thomas (Atticus Finch), Melanie Moore (Scout Finch), and Steven Lee Johnson (Dill Harris) in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Photo by Julieta Cervantes. My focus is the play’s depiction of interpersonal ethics in the person of Atticus Finch. My colleague Bob Ashby has parsed the public and political lessons in the play around race ( ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ at Kennedy Center opens us to our political onus today). This is what theater has always done best, and Sorkin’s version epitomizes how enactment on stage can hold values up to view so that we can see more clearly how to live. It is a metatheatrical resequencing and deconstruction of the story brilliantly conceived to tease out its ethical and political implications. What Sorkin has done with Harper Lee’s novel is beyond adaptation. The jury will be all white men, a conviction is predictable, but Atticus is convinced he has a solid case. The story is set in 1934 in a fictional small town in the racist South, where an upstanding white lawyer named Atticus Finch (played earnestly by the estimable Richard Thomas) agrees to represent a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Welch (Tom Robinson) and The Company of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Photos by Julieta Cervantes. And I suspect Sorkin wisely assumed that to be the case since to follow and fully appreciate his scintillating rethink would benefit from familiarity with the basic plot: Yaegel T. I suspect many theatergoers thronging to the thrilling Broadway stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s beloved classic - now on tour at the Kennedy Center in an extraordinary production directed by Bartlett Sher - will also recall elements of the film treatment as they take in Aaron Sorkin’s retelling. Just a few bars of Elmer Bernstein’s heartrending score* and I’m awash in emotion remembered from the film. I am someone who cannot hear the main music theme from the 1962 movie of To Kill a Mockingbird without melting inside and moistening in my eyes.
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