To Reawaken A Mockingbird

To Reawaken a Mockingbird In his adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel, Aaron Sorkin homes in on Atticus Finch’s blind spots.

- Sara Holdren

“I WANTED YOU TO SEE what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.”

You won’t hear Atticus Finch say those words to his son, Jem, in the To Kill a Mockingbird now alighting on Broadway. The banners outside the theater proclaim, in capital letters, harper lee’s to kill a mockingbird, but the smaller print tells the truth: “A new play by Aaron Sorkin.” The production is “not an homage or an exercise in nostalgia,” wrote Sorkin for this magazine. “I [didn’t] swaddle the book in bubble wrap and transfer it gently to the stage. Theaters aren’t museums.” Reverent readers turned theatergoers might clutch their pearls (as the Lee estate did), but it’s exciting to hear a writer speak clearly about intent and that intangible but incontrovertible sense of present consciousness that a piece of theater owes to its moment. Sorkin has written a new play, and it’s characteristically taut and nimble, fluid and funny, with plenty to meditate on and argue about. My own personal jury is still out on its major thematic turn of the dial—a condemnation of modern respectability politics through the developing character of Atticus—but as a piece of theater, it’s magnificent.