Aaron Sorkin may be one of Hollywood’s most celebrated screenwriters, with five Emmys to his name for “The West Wing” and an Oscar on his shelf for writing the seminal “The Social Network.” But the prospect of adapting Harper Lee’s landmark novel “To Kill A Mockingbird” for the stage felt like “a suicide mission” in which he would become the villain, he told the Globe in a 2022 Globe interview. He said he feared wrecking people’s adoring memories of a beloved American literary classic and the enduring 1962 film starring Gregory Peck. But he didn’t want the play to be an “exercise in nostalgia” or “a trip to the museum.” It needed to stand on its own, resonate for contemporary audiences, and be told with verve and immediacy. “You have to fall out of love with the source material and get rid of the bubble wrap,” he said at the time.
The resulting stage version, starring Jeff Daniels, opened on Broadway to critical acclaim in 2018 and became a huge box office hit. The national tour came to Boston in 2022. Now, the Huntington and artistic director Loretta Greco are mounting the first regional production of Sorkin’s “Mockingbird” at the Huntington Theatre, Oct. 8–Nov. 8. Here’s what to look out for in this adaptation of the novel, about a young girl in a small Alabama town watching her father, an attorney, grapple with racism, bigotry, and injustice as he defends a Black man accused of rape in the Jim Crow South in the 1930s.
Scout tells the story, but Atticus is the protagonist
In the novel, Scout (Karen Killeen) is the protagonist and serves as Atticus’s moral compass. But she loses some of her innocence and has her eyes opened over the course of the story. For the stage adaptation, Scout, her older brother Jem, and their friend Dill are the storytellers, but Sorkin made Atticus (Karl Kenzler) the protagonist, which meant he couldn’t be a sanctified hero only seen through the eyes of his daughter, as in the novel.
Atticus is a more morally complex figure
Sorkin wanted Atticus to go on a journey, to have an awakening, and to change. In the novel, he’s viewed as a hero and paragon of moral virtue who stands up for justice. But Sorkin realized that Atticus is a flawed man, prone to forgiving unforgivable sins from some of the most virulently racist people in the town in the name of finding goodness in everyone.
“[Sorkin] has taken Atticus off of his white savior platform. He created a story where the protagonist has this very long trajectory of getting his dignity, his confidence, his absolute beliefs and bedrock foundations dented, dinged, and questioned,” says Greco, who’s directing the Huntington production, in a recent interview. “You see a little of Atticus’s hubris too. He feels much more like a man and not a saint.”
Calpurnia and Tom Robinson have deeper roles
That brings us to the only two significant Black characters in the story — Calpurnia (Patrice Jean-Baptiste), the Finch family’s maid and nanny, who has helped to raise the kids since the death of their mother, and Tom Robinson (Rafael Jordan), who’s been unjustly charged with rape in the trial that drives the book’s plot.
Sorkin’s adaptation gives both of those characters strong voices, new dimensions, and real moments of agency. The deepening of those characters serves as a great opportunity for conflict, since it allowed Sorkin to dramatize the friction between Atticus and Calpurnia, whose relationship Scout likens to that of a brother and sister.
A frustrated Calpurnia criticizes Atticus for tolerating the intolerant and for turning a blind eye to the ugly truths about the town. She sardonically repeats his own words back to him: “‘You gotta give Maycomb time, Cal. This is the deep South, you gotta give ’em time,’” she says. “How much time would Maycomb like? [Tom’s wife] Helen Robinson was askin.’”
“I love that both Tom and Cal, in their very different ways, call Atticus on his [expletive] and live their own truths,” Greco says.
Characters speak fluent Sorkinese
Sorkin’s patented rapid-fire conversational exchanges and hyper-verbal sparring is on display at times, including in some of the debates between characters and in the courtroom scenes. And his penchant for propulsive storytelling speeds up the leisurely pace of the novel. “His language is absolutely delicious. It is like music,” Greco says. “We are toggling from kids to adults, from the courtroom back to the kids, from in the present moment to into the past. There are very few people that can do that as lyrically and as muscularly as Sorkin.”
The courtroom drama takes center stage
As the writer of “A Few Good Men,” “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” and even “The Social Network,” Sorkin is a master of crafting tense courtroom and legal dramas, and those skills come to the forefront in his adaptation. While Tom Robinson’s trial doesn’t occur until the midway point of the novel, Sorkin threads the courtroom scenes throughout the story to build high-wire tension from the beginning.
The staging at the Huntington, Greco says, will immerse the audience inside Maycomb and the courtroom, so the audience will feel the conflicts on a visceral level. The production design eschews naturalism in favor of a simple set, with some tables, chairs, and a few set pieces that move on and off. “The fourth wall between the artists and the audience will be super porous,” Greco says. “So there are steps that lead from the audience into this liminal space outside of the box, and then the playing space is a white box.”
Adult actors play the children
In this stage adaptation, 8-year-old Scout, her older brother Jem (age 12), and their loquacious friend Dill (age 11) are all portrayed by adult actors — Killeen, Benjamin Izaak, and Andrew Stevens Purdy. The story unfolds in the form of a memory play told from the point-of-view of the children, but narrated by them as grown-ups speaking directly to the audience. And that’s due in part to all that Sorkinese dialogue: “Children would not be able to handle this much language in a play,” the writer told the Globe in 2022. The adult actors who have worked on his version modulate their posture and voices to help differentiate between their moments as adults looking back, and their scenes as the kids.
Along the way, the children lose some of their innocence, and the scales fall from their eyes. “When we’re kids, everything is supposed to be fair. We think the world is black and white,” Greco says. “And growing up is realizing that the world and humanity is nuanced. It is mostly in the gray zone. But if we don’t believe in justice, if we don’t aspire to the higher goodness in us all, we’ll be nowhere. Scout comes to see that justice is fragile and not as clear cut as Atticus made it out to be.”