‘Mockingbird’ adaptation raises Black voices, character relationships

Those who seek to ban “To Kill a Mockingbird” from school bookshelves can’t kill the literary classic from playing out on stages. And Oscar- and Emmy-winning writer Aaron Sorkin and Tony-winning director Bartlett Sher have created an adaptation that plays to today’s audiences while preserving the intentions of writer Harper Lee, the lead actors told The Gazette in separate phone interviews from a recent tour stop in West Palm Beach, Fla.

On tour for more than two years, the memory play is coming to Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City for five performances Jan. 19 to 21 in an adaptation that gives more of a shared voice for Atticus Finch, played by Emmy-winning actor Richard Thomas, and his Black housekeeper, Calpurnia, portrayed by multiple award-winning actor Jacqueline Williams.

It embodies memories that can’t be erased, as a small-town lawyer in the 1930s South represents Tom Robinson, a Black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. While a tragic outcome may seem inevitable, widower Finch and his children, daughter Scout and son Jem, learn important lessons about prejudice, often from the point of view of their beloved housekeeper, a sister figure to Atticus and a surrogate mother helping him raise the children.

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“Aaron Sorkin has masterfully adapted Miss Harper Lee's story. And while fully honoring it — her voice, her story, the feel, the message — has also married it even more to now,” said Williams, who has a home in Chicago but works out of Chicago and New York City.

“And he has fleshed out the characters of Tom Robinson and Calpurnia. So in this live event, you really get a front-row seat into Calpurnia’s place in this family that she’s been a long, long time part of. And the relationship between Calpurnia and Atticus is really the central relationship in this piece.

“As Scout explains in her introduction to Calpurnia, (Atticus and Calpurnia) really are more like brother and sister — that’s how close their relationship is. They’re playful with each other, they go toe to toe with each other, they trust each other enough to disagree. There are many things that Calpurnia schools Atticus on — things that he can’t possibly know from the Black perspective. So she’s wise, she’s funny, she’s witty, she’s loving, she’s caring, she’s strong — and it’s really quite a plum to play.”

Teaching all history

Williams is stymied by the renewed efforts to ban Harper Lee’s book from schools.

“I do not understand it, because it’s part of our history,” she said. “And if you’re going to teach history, you have to teach all of the history — the good and the bad. And the ugly. This is part of our history, so I don’t understand it. You can’t really move forward, unless you know what you’re coming from.”

Thomas agrees.

“Obviously, I think it’s absurd,” he said of the book-banning efforts. “History doesn’t go away just because you turn away from it. In fact, if you turn away from it, it will bite you in the ass. You can’t turn your back on history.

“This idea that this story makes people feel bad about being Americans, it’s absurd,” he said. “If you feel good about yourself, because you haven’t paid attention to the whole story, how valuable is your good feeling?

“It’s still about a man who was trying to get us all to do the right thing. But one of the things about the play that I like people to come away from, besides first and foremost, being entertained, because that’s the job of theater. The job of art is not to check all the boxes. I’m not really interested in checking your boxes,” he said.

”But I want people to be entertained. It’s the rich emotional gifts of this play which I’m very happy about.

“And the other thing, I want people when they leave the theater, rather than congratulating themselves for not being racist, for being on the right side of the story, I’d like them to actually interrogate their own experience in terms of where they sit in the matrix of social justice — through their family history, or their own prejudices or what they have or haven’t done in their lives,” he said. “Because everybody’s a part of the story, and you shouldn’t walk out of the theater feeling self-congratulatory. You should walk out (asking) ‘OK, what have I done, what can I do?’

“It’s an extra thing,” he added. “It might be that I want people to have an empathic experience in the theater, which is really what theater, for me, is about.”

Thomas’ journey

Building empathy was his forte during his years playing John-Boy Walton on television’s “The Waltons” in the 1970s. His acting journey began much earlier.

Now 72, he was born in New York City to parents who were dancers with the New York City Ballet and owned the New York School of Ballet. Naturally, he studied dance in his youth. But he began acting at age 6, and while that has been the focus of his deep and varied career, he said his dance background has helped sustain the physicality.

“It's a wonderful activity for an actor to study dance, especially an actor who’s going to work on the stage. That was great, but I could never have entered a profession where I couldn’t talk.”

“Mockingbird” and “The Waltons” share a time and place, both stories beginning in 1933 in the rural South, noted Mike Olinger of Marion in replying to a Facebook request for questions to ask Thomas. Olinger, an actor on the Cedar Rapids scene, wanted to know if Thomas feels any carry-over between his roles in those shows, since both stories deal with poverty, societal and morality issues.

“It's actually a very good point,” Thomas said, “because Earl Hamner, in his writing of his novels ‘Spencer's Mountain’ (on which ‘The Waltons’ was based) and (its sequel) ‘The Homecoming,’ really does evoke the same kind of childhood experience beyond learning what the children go through. And when we did the series, we were always trying to bring a lot of social issues without ever being preachy, thank God.

“We were always anxious to bring a lot of social issues into the context of a regional story. That’s what’s so beautiful about ‘Mockingbird.’ And one of the things that was so beautiful about ‘The Waltons,’ was — like Eudora Welty and the great regional fiction writers — the stories were really specifically set at a time and place. And so you could extrapolate from the particular to the general in a beautiful way, right?

“I think that John-Boy and Atticus have a lot in common in that they’d both been raised probably in a similar kind of way, in the South during the same period of the Depression. They’re both obviously sympathetic characters, and people with good hearts and good intentions.

“But the difference is that Atticus is a man who is very at the beginning of the play, is very content in his community and his position his life. He’s got a law firm, he has a seat in the legislature, which of course, is not contested, because he doesn’t have any opponents.

“He likes his neighbors, his neighbors like him. He fits in, he’s very ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.’ He’s trying to raise these two kids as a widower. But he’s got the help of Calpurnia.

“John boy, on the other hand, is a young artist who has really got one foot in and one foot out of his life, his community. He loves his parents, he loves his friends, he loves where he lives and the people that he lives with, and has this deep affection. But he is also a writer. So there’s an objective aspect to the way he views his world. And he has an eye on the future, and he has an eye on other places, and other things.

“Atticus, has sort of created himself, and John-Boy is in the process of doing that, and he hasn’t fully done it yet. So they’re very different,” Thomas said.

“The beauty of Aaron’s version of ‘Mockingbird’ is that he takes this sense of well-being and satisfaction that Atticus has and completely smashes it. As he’s said in interviews before, in the novel, Atticus isn’t really the protagonist of the story. He’s a sort of a king figure, a father figure who is who is approachable, but also unattainable, in terms of his rectitude at all. And it’s a great character Gregory Peck embodied sublimely in the film.

“But Aaron was much more interested in a character who had a lot to learn. And he said, ‘I wanted Atticus to become the protagonist of the play.’ So between the two of them, Scout and Atticus shoulder the story, and Atticus’ loss of innocence mirrors the children’s. That’s much more satisfying for an actor to play.”

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Iowa connection

Greg Jackson, a 1990 University of Iowa graduate with a BFA in theater, is thrilled to be returning to Iowa City in the ensemble of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

He understudies several roles, and Hancher audiences will see him step into the shoes of Link Deas, who appears among the townspeople in the courtroom, but also has two major scenes at the beginning of Act 2, Jackson said.

The joys of being in the touring production are twofold.

“First of all, it’s a fabulous company of real pros,” said Jackson, who has been based in New York City since 1991. “Richard Thomas is excellent captain to the ship. It just feels like a really well-connected, supportive ensemble. We’ve got a lot of age range among the cast — it’s a big cast — and everybody’s playing for keeps and everybody’s really good. So it’s a real dream to be a part of a company like this.

“Then the other joy for me is bringing such a beautifully told and important story to communities all over the country at a time when I think the country is really hungry for and needs stories like this. That’s proving to be true everywhere — we see it and we feel it from audiences everywhere we go.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com