To Kill A Mockingbird: An American Classic at Ferndale Rep

In the town of Monroeville, Alabama, a rich man’s son was caught joyriding in a stolen car. His father persuaded the sheriff not to arrest the boy, but to leave the punishment up to him. He imposed three years of house arrest, but it turned into a life sentence when the young man found he could no longer face leaving the confines of his house, except at night. He became an object of mystery and fear in the neighborhood.

 Or so the local story goes. This was Nelle Harper Lee’s hometown in the 1930s. In her novel, To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee transformed memories of her childhood (her father was the inspiration for Atticus Finch, Truman Capote became Dill, and that ghostly young man was the probable prototype for Boo Radley) and wedded them to a courtroom drama based partly on a case of her father’s, and partly on the infamous Scottsboro Boys—young black men falsely convicted of raping a white woman.

 Published as the Civil Rights Movement came to fruition in the early 1960s, the book struck a chord—it became an immediate best-seller and an enduring American classic. So did the equally classic 1962 movie version, starring Gregory Peck in his Academy Award performance as Atticus Finch, the widowed father of the tomboy Scout (Harper Lee’s self-portrait) and Jem (Scout’s older brother).

 Atticus is a lawyer appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Christopher Sergel, a professional story adapter and play publisher, wrote a 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.

 Now it’s on stage at the Ferndale Repertory Theatre, through June 17. A play with such a pedigree poses special problems. For instance, who can follow the indelible performances of Gregory Peck as Atticus, Robert Duvall as Boo Radley and Mary Badham as Scout? Well, nobody. But stage actors can present believable characters within any play, and in this play at Ferndale they do.

 It begins with the young actors who drive the first act. Derby McLaughlin as Scout, Denim Ohmit as Jem and Louis Sterback as Dill are all experienced (in Ferndale’s youth companies, among others) and comfortable on stage. They handle the dialogue and accent admirably, move the show forward and win the audience’s confidence.

 Brad Curtis has the central role of Atticus. After his flamboyant character in NCRT’s Chicago, Curtis is equally dominant in a quieter role. Gerri Cose’s energy and diction as Maude (a neighbor who also serves a narrator in this version) is crucial in a play crammed with information and incident. Other roles—especially Michelle Renee Kagan as Calpurnia, Gary Franklin as Bob Ewell, Wanda Stapp as Mayella, and Joseph Waters as Tom Robinson—must communicate a lot with comparatively little stage time, and they do.

 Audiences that feel the power of this play in its subject and content are well-served by this clear narrative and these sharp characterizations, propelled forward by Renee Grinnell’s brisk and efficient direction. Sergel’s script emphasizes the central message of empathy--of seeing the world from the other’s point of view—in part by restoring another storyline edited out of the movie version.

 But a stage play can’t do everything. There are much-beloved aspects of the book and film that suffer, such as the evocation of small town childhood and more specifically the full story of Boo Radley. 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.

 But while the narrative was clear and fast-moving, and the lighting and staging of the attack were effective, on opening night the emphasis of drama was generally lacking. This may partly be a product of the inventive but crowded set, with rough-hewn houses bunched together to represent the town, which projected a claustrophobic feeling while possibly limiting flexibility in staging individual scenes. Or it could be rhythms and moments that will be discovered as the run continues.

 While this play is produced often, it is also often banned, probably because of the fairly frequent use of the “n” word. But then, linking the American history of racism with fears and other attitudes about those who are different in any number of ways is central to this story and its impact. It’s interesting to see actors from our rural and small town area playing characters from the rural small town South of the 1930s. It’s otherwise easy to see all this as remote in time and place. But see it on stage here and now, and at least on some levels, the perspective may change.

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.