Actor Richard Thomas, Richmond magazine Senior Writer Harry Kollatz Jr. and Richmond magazine Editorial Intern Kendall Taylor (Photo by Dyani Wright)
Richmond magazine was recently invited to meet with three actors in the current traveling production of “To Kill a Mockingbird” including Steven Lee Johnson, who portrays Dill Harris, the excitable and oversharing friend of the youngsters Scout and Jem Finch — a character novelist Harper Lee based on her childhood friend Truman “In Cold Blood” Capote. Yaegel T. Welch, who embodies Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of a crime he didn’t commit. Richard Thomas, who wears the linen suit of a humanized Atticus Finch. The stage production of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in which these thespians appear continues through March 3 at the Altria Theater.
In a sense, Aaron Sorkin’s reworking of the story is a memory play. Scout (played on alternative nights by Maeve Moynihan and Rae Gray), Jem (Justin Mark) and Dill are both inside and outside of the show — narrators also in the narrative, as Dill says, explaining his own confusion. They are recalling events from a distance of time and place.
This adaptation of “Mockingbird” is both tragic and exultant, complicated and nuanced, and I, Harry Kollatz Jr. and Richmond magazine intern Kendall Taylor, were able to sit down with the performers to chat about facets of this production.
Actor Steven Lee Johnson, who portrays Dill Harris onstage in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” sits down with Richmond magazine Senior Writer Harry Kollatz Jr. (Photo by Kendall Taylor)
Prior to “Mockingbird,” Johnson, from Rockford, Illinois, and a Yale University School of Drama graduate, performed in regional and off-Broadway productions, but this is his first big touring show. He was 28 when he started, and 33 now, but in person radiates a boyishness that serves him well as his stage character Dill.
“I was one of those rare people,” he says, who hadn’t read the source material prior to his audition. “It somehow totally eluded me in middle and high school, so when I got the audition, I binged that book in one night. And I loved it!”
When tuning in to Dill’s character, and his youthfulness, he relies on his personal experience. “I was kind of like Dill growing up,” he says. “I was a precocious kid, I couldn’t wait to be older and had a huge imagination. I was this big ball of sensitivity; it was difficult for this little container of my body to hold this huge, raw nerve. Sometimes this is a dark world, so this show is sometimes a time machine for me.”
Trouping with a show through the nation makes one understand its immensity but also recognize that different audiences will react differently to the onstage situations in this renowned and beloved (and remade) story.
“There’s a line about the level of brutality in a race-based murder in the show, and when we did it in Minneapolis, in a post-George Floyd place, we heard this audible reaction in the audience. The energy changed in the room,” Johnson says. “It was upsetting and distressing but also powerful, and it was really like this incredible shared experience of collective grief and fear that transcended actor and audience.”
Actor Yaegel T. Welch, Richmond magazine Senior Writer Harry Kollatz Jr. and Richmond magazine Editorial Intern Kendall Taylor (Photo by Dyani Wright)
Welch certainly understands that sense. He joined the production in 2019 and during the intervening four years has gone through the production’s travels through physical space but also a tumultuous time. Welch, a graduate of Morehouse College, Brandeis University and The George Washington University academy for classical acting, has amassed multiple stage credits, and his television performances include “The Blacklist” and “Madam Secretary.”
I brought up to him how Black actor Charles Sidney Gilpin, from a large Catholic family in Jackson Ward, originated the titular role of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones.” Gilpin almost overnight became a marquee name, but he confronted the play’s racial epithets with some difficulty — coming close to blows with O’Neill about saying them or having them said about him. Both the Black and white press of the time criticized the play for differing reasons. When the show went to London, O’Neill hired a young Columbia Law School student to take on the part named Paul Robeson. Yet O’Neill later recalled Gilpin as one of the foremost interpreters of his work.
There were discussions about language in the Sorkin-penned production.
“When you take things like that out, you whitewash the material,” Welch muses. “You have to be willing to tell the story. When [the N-word] is done purposefully, that’s one thing, but when it’s used in flippant ways just for entertainment, that’s another thing, and this particular story, it’s very intentional. It’s portraying a very real world. To tell the story without any edits, I think what you’re doing is being faithful to those who suffered. This is how this happened to us. I don’t believe you can clean up what was ugly because it’s uncomfortable.”
Welch looks at Tom Robinson through the lens of the character’s personal history: He is 25 years old; he lost the use of an arm through a farming machine accident; his formal education probably ended at the fourth grade; all his life he has worked from sunup to sundown; yet he is a church-going man and married with children. His innocent decision, motivated by empathy, to help a young white woman who appeared to need help, rather than walk by, puts him in jail and a courtroom facing death.
“He’s being a good person,” Welch says, “and obviously not every white person out there was like Mayella [who accuses Robinson of rape], but he just happened to come across someone who is herself in some adverse circumstances — and she’s a victim, too. And so there’s a conflict in all of that. The history is all there, and it’s important to witness how horrific it all was.”
The experience of Robinson isn’t that far away from today, or from Welch’s experience. With some humor he says, “I’ve been Black all my life. There are ways I have to code switch and in ways that I am pairing a myriad of different struggles. You take a moment in a simple conversation, and when you heighten that and put life or death on it, well,” he says, nodding. “I’ve had instances with police officers where I’ve been terrified. And certainly had instances where I’ve been in spaces where I felt unsafe. And what I have to take into account was reading about Jim Crow and the way they lived, the treatment they endured; the horror that happened wasn’t only occasionally.”
The responsibility of portraying these characters, and in the context of a time that seems both removed and also all too familiar in the present day, is important to Welch, and to Richard Thomas. An earlier generation remembers Thomas as John-Boy Walton in the long-running family drama “The Waltons,” but more recent television viewers came to know him playing FBI Special Agent Frank Gaad in “The Americans” and as Nathan Davis, the estranged father of Wendy Byrde in “Ozark.” In addition, he retains his connection to live performance.
I mentioned to him about the Hanover County School Board in 1966 seeking to pull “Mockingbird” from its libraries.
The action inspired Richmond News Leader (the city’s evening paper at the time; it folded in 1992) editor James J. Kilpatrick to use the newspaper’s Beadle Bumble Fund (dedicated to the purpose of “redressing the stupidities of public officials”) to purchase copies of the book and give them to students who wrote in to say why they wanted to read it. More than 80 copies were handed out in a week. Kilpatrick was at the time also a vigorous defender of segregation. Harper Lee wrote to the paper in defense of her book and added a small contribution to Kilpatrick’s fund, “to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.”
Which I thought of as a thoroughly Scout-like remark for Lee to say.
Thomas laughs in agreement. This true-life story, I offered, is similar to the nuances Sorkin reveals in this version.
“I don’t think [Atticus’] particular split consciousness is reflected in the play itself,” Thomas replies. “That is, playing on the good team while being an ardent segregationist, although if you interrogated Atticus in a different context, there might’ve been a certain degree of typical paternalism from that period.”
He grants that it’s a natural tendency to judge past periods from our present standpoint, which can be valuable, but there’s also merit in looking at the past and how people lived through challenging times. “Sure, it’s complex,” Thomas says. “Were there people fighting for the right things who were also paternalistic on some level? Well, yeah, because everybody isn’t always good all the time for the sake of everybody else. People can have very wrong ideas about one thing and then have very good ideas about another thing. I mean,” he says and pauses, gazing through the Altria’s mezzanine windows, “we are extremely complicated animals.”
He pursues the question, though, about the attempts through the years to ban “Mockingbird,” and criticized the perspective that the book might harm someone as “absurd on the face of it.”
“Kids, especially now, reading [this] book in that time of life, in middle school, are beginning to develop their sense of social justice and their own sense of what community means, which is so much a part of this story.” He prefers Sorkin’s view that if there needs to be discussion about “Mockingbird,” then the best place for that is in a classroom.
One political view might characterize Finch in a derisive way as a “white savior.” Thomas shrugs. “I don’t see him as a ‘white savior,’ because he loses the case — every single night! He’s just a man trying to do the right thing against impossible odds, and there’s something quixotic about that, for sure.”
Another argument is that the book may make young people feel bad about Jim Crow-era whites participating in the oppression of Blacks.
“Yes, they should!” Thomas exclaims. “They shouldn’t only feel bad, but outraged — but that doesn’t mean they should feel guilty or blame themselves, but feeling outrage, at a certain point it comes down to you asking where you stand on the question and how that fits into the matrix of the bigger picture.”
One of the aspects of the production that Thomas enjoys, and audiences don’t necessarily expect, is the humor in the play. Part of that comes from Sorkin imbuing Atticus Finch with quite real characteristics. He’s a small-town lawyer, a widower with children and a dry wit who gets along with everybody; he’s got a good little practice involving some family law and real estate.
“[Sorkin]’s interrogated all of Atticus’ unassailable virtues, he’s made his idealism ultimately seem like naivete. He’s made him teachable, he’s given him vulnerabilities which are exploited against him — and he’s given us Calpurnia.” Sorkin’s Calpurnia, performed here by Jacqueline Williams, has more to say in his version than in the book or the film. “This is the aspirational relationship at the center of the play,” Thomas says. “They reach across this divide, they bicker, and they laugh while they’re trying to raise these kids together. To me it’s a gorgeous part of Aaron’s iteration of this story.”
The pointed and serious example of bigotry isn’t, for Thomas, something to be veered away from. “No family — and when I say family I mean nations, because family systems are like national systems — no person and no country have ever gotten any better by not uncovering the truth. You can’t move forward in a constructive manner in any other way.”
Part of the 2023-24 Broadway in Richmond season, “To Kill a Mockingbird” is onstage through March 3 at the Altria Theater. Tickets start at $38.50.
