Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, at the Kavinoky Theatre in Buffalo. Adapted by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Kyle LoConti. Has the usual uniformly strong cast assembled by Kavinoky. Saw the performance Friday night, November 29, 2019. Worth seeing. Good play, good production.
Sometime around 7th or 8th grade, around 50 years ago, I read Harper Lee's novel and liked it. About that same time, I remember seeing the movie with Gregory Peck playing a sage and saintly Atticus Finch. The play is a decent takeoff on the story, compressing the narrative into 2 3/4 hours (which of course has consequences). A lot of Americans who grew up in the 60s and 70s know the story. You can't help but seethe over Tom Robinson's fate as the black man falsely accused and convicted of raping a white woman in a sleepy Alabama town in the 1930s (Tom is played by Xavier Harris in a modulated, controlled performance). Unfortunately, the play says almost nothing about Boo Radley, the mysterious neighbor who comes to the children's rescue, until the very end, thus making the ending difficult to understand if you don't know the book.
The play emphasizes Atticus Finch (well played by Chris Avery) as a moral crusader. Tom wants to plead guilty to the charge of raping a white woman, and is willing to accept a 15 year prison sentence. Tom knows the score, and knows a jury of twelve white farmers will surely convict him, and execute him. But Atticus convinces Tom to plead innocent. So we have a trial. The play seems to show Atticus as being in a conflicted, ambiguous moral position. He gets flack for it from his black maid Calpurnia, and while the Judge Taylor and Sheriff Tate seem to support Atticus, the townspeople condemn him for being a "nigger-lover".
The play takes some theatrical liberties that bothered me. The loathsome Bob Ewell (menacingly played by Patrick Moltane), is given long lines that too neatly describe his racism. Ewell sounded "scripted" on the stand, as if the playwright blared at the audience that Ewell represents racism in general. And I found Calpurnia's mocking of Atticus for his own possibly racist assumptions hard to understand. She does it with a sort of 2019 irony that I don't see in the 1936 story line. It sticks out as jarring and false.
We know how it goes. Tom is shot five times trying to escape a prison he should never have been in to begin with (we get the allusion to the police shootings of black men of the last few years). And Boo Radley pops out of nowhere to save the children. Good play. Good production.
