Richard Thomas as Atticus Finch in the stage drama “To Kill a Mockingbird,” onstage at the Altria Theater Feb. 27-March 3 (Photo courtesy Broadway in Richmond)
Is there really good in everyone?
The 2018 stage drama “To Kill a Mockingbird,” adapted by Aaron Sorkin (creator of the TV drama “The West Wing”) from the 1960 Harper Lee novel, addresses this question, and others, in ways that are in neither the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel nor the Academy Award-winning 1962 film.
Broadway in Richmond brings the touring show to the Altria Theater Feb. 27-March 3, with a cast headed by Richard Thomas (pictured above) as lawyer Atticus Finch, who defends a Black man, Tom Robinson (Yaegel T. Welch), accused of rape by a white woman, Mayella Ewell (Mariah Lee). Mary Badham, who portrayed Scout in the film, is the pain-addled and difficult Finch neighbor, Mrs. Henry Dubose, in this production.
In Sorkin’s interpretation, Lee’s coming-of-age story about Atticus’ two children, Jem and Scout, takes Atticus off his pedestal with humor accompanied by revelations not only of his personal faults but of those of the society in which he lives. The structure of the adaptation differs from the film and the 1990 stage dramatization by Christopher Sergel, and there is original incidental music by composer Adam Guettel. The story’s two Black characters, Tom and the Finch family’s housekeeper, Calpurnia (Jacqueline Williams), are given larger roles.
Thomas came into fame as John-Boy Walton, the studious son of “The Waltons” television show set in the mountains of Depression-era Virginia. John-Boy served as a surrogate for the “Spencer’s Mountain” author and screenwriter Earl Hamner Jr., and attended “Boatwright University,” a stand-in for the University of Richmond.
Sorkin provides greater nuance to “Mockingbird,” but in 1966 little of that quality was demonstrated by Hanover County Public Schools. That body banned the novel from its libraries in a unanimous decision. They found the book to be “immoral” and “improper.” The action incited Lee to write a letter to the Richmond News Leader (the city’s evening paper at the time; it folded in 1992). She wrote in part, “Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is ‘immoral’ has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.”
Lee felt that the problem with her book pertained more to illiteracy, rather than Marxism, and enclosed a contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund with her letter, writing that she hoped it “will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.” The Beadle Bumble Fund was a News Leader collection named for a character in Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” and dedicated to the purpose of “redressing the stupidities of public officials.” The paper encouraged those who wanted a copy to write the editors and within a week gave away 81 copies of the book. The 1960 novel about 1930s Alabama, made into a film 62 years ago and a 1990 play revamped in 2018, remains relevant to this day.
Part of the 2023-24 Broadway in Richmond season, “To Kill a Mockingbird” is onstage Feb. 27-March 3 at the Altria Theater. Tickets start at $38.50.
