![]() ![]() Celia Keenan-Bolger, Gideon Glick, Will Pullen Julieta Cervantesįollowing the brief memory-play preamble on that barren warehouse-looking set, young Jean Louise, Jeremy (Will Pullen) and Charles Baker Harris (Gideon Glick) - Scout, Jem and Dill - are quickly surrounded by the makings of a courtroom (Miriam Buether’s set design is a marvel of efficiency, as a jury box, witness stand, judge’s bench, attorney stations and spectator seats sweep quickly into place). He demands no less of his characters, keeping us in good company from start to finish. What Sorkin does require, though, is an open mind, a willingness to question the things we so admired about Lee’s tale and its characters, to hold their lessons up for scrutiny in an age when so little of what we once took for granted can withstand the heat. Sorkin’s shrewd Mockingbird doesn’t demand our exclusive loyalty - my love for the movie, and for Gregory Peck and Mary Badham and Horton Foote and Kim Stanley’s uncredited narration is undiminished, my lesser affinity for the novel neither strengthened nor weakened. (The play barely, if at all, references Robert Mulligan’s triumphant 1962 film, though TV commercials for the production take full sentimental use of that music). With a fine, natural performance from Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch – the most honest man in Maycomb, Alabama, as his daughter Scout remembers him – Broadway’s To Kill a Mockingbird, opening tonight, sets a route for itself that is bound to lose some of those who can’t set aside their loyalties to a cherished book or a movie that can still send shivers with the first few notes of its Elmer Bernstein score. ![]() Our “national novel,” as the New York Times has called it, is the very subject of the new play that bears its name. Scout and Sorkin and Sher are demanding we reconsider that fiction itself. I’d suggest years. Fifty-eight, to be exact, and what we’re being asked to recall and re-evaluate is not merely an event dreamed up by Harper Lee to cap her landmark 1960 fiction of race, justice, bigotry and faith. When, exactly, are the young Finches and their beloved childhood friend reuniting for this exorcism? How long has Scout been pondering that grim evening, when she and her brother were viciously attacked, when their attacker died, when one neighborhood mystery emerged from the shadows and another took its place among the secrets? Weeks? Months? The set-up is a Sorkin masterstroke, perfectly executed by director Bartlett Sher, a dreamy gambit that justifies every liberty this simultaneously revisionist and faithful Mockingbird will take over the next two hours-plus. Aaron Sorkin Talks 'To Kill A Mockingbird': Atticus, Trump And The New Voice That Stirred A Lawsuit - Deadline Q&A
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