But she shares narrating duties here with Jem and Dill. Scout, sporting tomboyish dungarees and a hacked-off basin bob, remains at the heart of the story, grappling with the complexities of adult behavior and small-town mentalities. While Scout voices her skepticism about the official explanation that Ewell fell on his own knife, the doubts surrounding his fate provide a secondary thread of suspense resolved only in the tense final scenes. The other structural shift is the disclosure, early in the play, of the death of racist redneck Bob Ewell (Frederick Weller), father of alleged rape victim Mayella (Erin Wilhelmi). Nonetheless, you find yourself holding your breath as his fate is decided, your eyes stinging with tears. The majority of the audience knows how it will end for the defendant Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe), a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. He weaves the climactic trial throughout the story, calling the first witness just 10 minutes into the play. One of the works that put Sorkin on the map as a writer was A Few Good Men, so it should be no surprise that he’s adept at constructing a taut courtroom thriller with fiery speeches. The thematic emphasis on kindness and decency in the face of stark injustice is deeply moving. ![]() That potential disconnect dissolves within the first scene, instead yielding a beautiful duality that allows the play to unfold both as a story of children having their eyes opened to the cruelty of the world, and of those same figures as adults, reflecting back with sadness on the loss of innocence. This is not starchy masterpiece theater, it’s very much alive and emotionally impactful.Įven the riskiest choices pay off, such as having Atticus’ children, the book’s 6-year-old narrator Jean Louise “Scout” Finch (Celia Keenan-Bolger) and her older brother Jem (Will Pullen), as well as their visiting friend Dill Harris (Gideon Glick), played by adults. That nuanced revivification of familiar characters is matched by a haunting sense of time, place and community, and yet the bridge to our own era is implicit. Sorkin, Sher and their estimable cast work together to give every significant figure on the stage a distinct identity without a whiff of cliché. Perhaps the most notable achievement of this thoughtful adaptation, and Bartlett Sher’s meticulously calibrated Broadway production, is that it takes Harper Lee’s 1960 novel - a modern American classic that pretty much all of us know either from studying it in high school or watching the outstanding 1962 film version - and makes us hang on every word as if experiencing the story for the first time.
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