![]() There’s a sweetness and a sadness to his Atticus, a perfect match to the melancholy backwards glance of Sorkin’s text. I was fascinated by the prospect of Harris, who brings an edge to even his most warmhearted roles, playing one of the most heralded characters in the American literary canon, and he didn’t disappoint. The production, directed by Bartlett Sher, premiered last year with Jeff Daniels headlining a seasoned cast and has now turned over with Ed Harris in the lead role. The stage adaptation is nonetheless made with appreciation for Lee’s novel, and that mix of homage and update has translated into a family-friendly Broadway hit. The play beefs up the relatively anonymous parts given to black characters in Lee’s work, gives Atticus’s kids a more argumentative nature, and sheds harsher light on the book’s somewhat pat ending. That framing encourages the audience to ponder the limits of Atticus’s impulse to empathize even with vile racists such as Bob Ewell, a man who’s trying to pin his own assault of his daughter Mayella on Tom. ![]() Though the adaptation broadly follows the narrative arc of Lee’s novel, it uses Scout, her brother Jem, and her friend Dill (all played by adult actors) to cast a wary eye over some of the book’s more idealistic details. In Sorkin’s play, the other trial is of Atticus’s own nobility, and how it doesn’t always square with his grander vision of justice. Instead, it stages two trials: One is from the book, in which Scout’s attorney father, Atticus Finch, defends Tom Robinson, an African American man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama, and tries to combat the community’s entrenched racism. Sorkin’s dramatization of Harper Lee’s novel, which opened on Broadway last December, is an unexpectedly probing work that refuses to let an American classic go unchallenged. ![]() “Something didn’t make sense,” Scout Finch tells the audience of the tale that’s about to unfold. The first line of Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird is one of quiet confusion.
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