Sunday, July 7, 2019

On Seeing To Kill A Mockingbird On Broadway

Yesterday an old college friend who I hadn't seen in a decade was in NYC, and he managed to score us tickets for To Kill A Mockingbird, which has been an award-winning sensation. Seeing the play, it was easy to see why. The actors were uniformly amazing. Celia Keenan-Bolger won a well-earned Tony this year for her portrayal of Scout. Jeff Daniels truly inhabited the role of Atticus Finch, LaTanya Richardson Jackson stole the show as Calpurnia, and Gideon Glick's portrayal of Dill was a delight. Gbenga Akinngabe made Tom Robinson into a fully-fleshed out person and not just a victim or symbol. Dakin Matthews wrung belly laughs as the judge.

I was not aware of how the play had altered the source novel, because one of my most embarrassing literary sins is that I have never read it. It was not assigned in my schools growing up, and afterward I never read it because I thought of it as the kind of book that gets assigned in schools. That had the benefit of making the play's plot far more dramatic to me.

My main skepticism about the play was that it was adapted by Aaron Sorkin, a writer I consider the equivalent of a hotshot prog rock guitarist. He is technically gifted and capable of flourishes as impressive as the solos on a Yes album, but rarely does his work actually move me. I can appreciate an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer record, but a one chord John Lee Hooker song does much more to hit my heart. I will say that the play moved me more than say The West Wing (which I don't care for) or The Social Network (which I think is excellent.) That's probably down to the source material and the tragedy of the story.

I came away profoundly sad, and not just because an innocent man was murdered by the judicial system. I felt like the play highlighted why the opponents of the current regime keep failing. Atticus insists that his children try to understand others and be able to walk in their skin, even noxious racists like Bob Ewell. Later in the play Calpurnia takes him to task for this, telling him that by trying to respect certain people he is deeply disrespecting those harmed by the Ewells of the world.

I wondered whether Sorkin was telling an allegory, if Atticus was supposed to represent educated liberals who want to fight with reason and logic and who think that the MAGA hordes are just good people deep down who can somehow be reached. After all, he believes in the righteousness of the justice system, but that system still convicts Tom Robinson despite overwhelming exculpatory evidence. It helps advance the allegory that Ewell and the jurors are low class white people, to be contrasted with Atticus and the judge, who are more educated and enlightened. According to certain narratives, it is working class white people who are the main drive behind Trumpism, since he speaks to their fears and frustrations. Never mind that it's wealthy white people who are more likely to vote Republican, and who give their money in abundance to that party and its leader. The educated people sitting in the audience want to flatter themselves that they are in the shoes of Atticus.

Parts of the play reinforce the "understand, don't judge" narrative, while others take Atticus to task for it. Calpurnia calls the jurors murderers in what I thought was the most powerful moment of the play. Perhaps Sorkin is not endorsing either civility or a more radical stance, but simply commenting on the clash between those approaches in the present day.

At the end of the play, however, Tom Robinson is dead and Atticus has been voted out of office. The death of Ewell in the climax is cold comfort, because the oppressive system underlying the 1930s Deep South society we are dropped into hasn't changed a whit. There's a monologue by Scout that says that it was doing the right thing that mattered, even if the goal wasn't reached. That of course ignores the murder of Tom Robinson and is an expression of the whiteness of the Finch family, who can make the whole thing an abstraction.

So while the performance of the play and its stagecraft were superlative, I was left a little cold at the end. I feel like this play reinforces some of the bad habits of mind of its audience, who are mostly educated liberals. They think of the current crisis as a moral one, not as a matter of life or death for millions of their fellow Americans. They are willing to do some things to resist, to be sure, but are incapable of taking the more radical action the current times demand. After all, the Atticuses of the world will be able to go on living comfortably, while the Tom Robinsons are sent to the grave. Until the Atticuses wed their moral duty to a greater sense of urgency, nothing is going to change.

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