To Kill A Mockingbird: The Play

These notes about the play supplement my review of the Ferndale Rep production of To Kill A Mockingbird.

Harper Lee

Christopher Sergel, a professional story adapter and play publisher, wrote the stage version in 1970, mostly for schools. He kept revising it, and in 1990 his latest version had its first adult production in the U.S. One version or another has been produced widely and frequently ever since, including every year for a three week run in Monroeville, Alabama. Harper Lee is no longer castigated there for airing dirty laundry. The town has changed a great deal, and she is its claim to fame.

I gather from my reading that in Sergel's more recent version, the character of Scout (whose given name is Jean Louise) appears also an adult, to more or less narrate and comment in the voice of Harper Lee. The earlier version used a character in the book and movie, Maude Atkinson, a neighbor of the Finches, as narrator. That’s how the Ferndale production uses her, so their production may be from this version of the script, used most often by schools for its didactic emphasis. In any case, the character of Maude does much less in the play than either the book or movie, except talk to the audience and occasionally to the children.

While the book could give us the richness of the author’s voice and the extension of time, and the film produced a sense of spaces and solitary moments, the stage play necessarily revolves around three key dramatic moments: the lynch mob, the trial and the attack on Scout and Jem. Yet the play also tries to tell a lot of the story, and weave in the main messages and metaphors. It may be too much.

The Ferndale production excels in telling the stories, and the actors are convincing in the characters they create. But the drama in those key moments is a problem. I offered a couple of possible reasons in my column, to which I’d add that the physical limitations of this stage (as well as the local actor pool) probably played a part also in tamping down the courtroom scene, especially due to the absence of crowds and a jury (the device of seeming to make the audience the jury—which is in this version of the play script-- is really hokey and doesn’t work.) But given the various limitations on this production, I should make clear that they’ve done an admirable job. They bring the story alive and present local audiences with a full and engaging theatrical experience.

The play’s most conspicuous difference is shrinking the Boo Radley story—in this production to almost nothing. This may partly be a product of all the story the play tries to cram in, partly to the limitations of the stage in showing the town and the various actions by the children connected to the Radley house, and partly to the emphasis of this production.

However, the play restores the Mrs. Dubose subplot to reinforce the message regarding perspective and empathy, of walking in another’s shoes. It also makes the title reference crystal clear from the very beginning (something done with much greater subtlety in the film.)

The subject of killing or not killing mockingbirds comes up in connection with guns. In the book, it begins when Atticus gives Jem and Scout air rifles for Christmas. In the movie, it’s at a dinner discussion when Atticus says he was 12 or 13 before he got his first gun. In all three, the children are astonished to find that Atticus is the best shot in the county. But in the play, much is made of his distaste for guns, but we never learn why. It’s the dramatic equivalent of leaving a loaded gun on the table.

In the Ferndale production, Atticus is not quite so heroic as in the film. This may be in the play script, combined with how Brad Curtis chose to play him. But where Peck’s Atticus is silent, he is talkative here— befuddled by the attack on his children, and perhaps feeling guilty, and argumentative when the Sheriff wants to ignore Boo Radley’s involvement in the death of the attacker.

The play does more with the issue of class than the film. The class issues are much more ambiguous than race issues. Atticus is kind to those worse off in the Depression. But he links poverty with ignorance, and there’s ample evidence that they are linked, in the hostility of the “white trash” element living near the black families, such as the Robinsons. In their trumped-up rape charges, there is a sense of wanting to get rid of the black families near them, acting as better off whites might act about “property values.”

In this, they mimic in cruder form the more decorous racism of their class betters. This ties in with the moment that gets Tom Robinson convicted--when he says he "felt sorry" for the white girl. Today's audiences may not automatically understand what a violation this is. No matter how far down the class continuum a white person is, it was the iron law of the racist South that the poorest white was still better than any black person. For a black person to "feel sorry" for a white was to assert equality if not superiority, and that was unforgivable.

But class within the white world is more ambiguous: the abusive father and his daughter also both use class resentment against the aristocratic behavior of Atticus, to win the jury’s sympathy.

The ambiguity or doubleness of the class issue is presented in the minor character of Mr. Cunningham, who in the play is seen bringing Atticus a bag of foodstuff to pay him for legal services, but he is also in the lynch mob at the jail. (There is a fuller portrait in the book and film concerning his son and his relationship with Scout and Jem.) And it is in identifying Cunningham and talking to him as a person and a neighbor that Scout more or less innocently defuses the lynch mob situation.

As I mentioned in my column, it’s interesting to see live actors from our rural, small town communities in this play about a rural small town of another place and time. Racism has been part of this region’s history, though principally involving Native Americans and Chinese immigrants. Today we have many other ethnicities, as well as other differences in incomes, lifestyles, educations and occupations. The flashpoint of our divisions has recently been between those loosely described as timber versus environmental advocates. Many of these divisions are also power relationships, and have real consequences that can’t be glossed over with a soporific appeal to why can't we all get along. But this story, and its championing of justice and empathy, can be a useful addition to the dialogue.

To Kill A Mockingbird, the play, will be onstage at the Ferndale Repertory Theatre through June 17.