Aaron Sorkin, Richard Thomas and cast discuss ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ in LA and Orange County

When writer Aaron Sorkin got word that Harper Lee had personally approved him to adapt her novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” for the Broadway stage, he said yes without a moment’s hesitation.

And then he began to panic.

“The reason I said yes – I thought it was a suicide mission – but I said yes because I wanted to be back in the theater,” says Sorkin,  whose resume includes writing both the theater and the film version of “A Few Good Men” and creating the TV series “The West Wing.”

“I wanted to write a play, and so it took me no time to say yes even as I was Googling, you know, ‘How to fake your own death,’” he says. “How is anyone going to accept a version of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ that wasn’t the novel and that wasn’t the movie?

“And sure enough, my first draft was terrible,” Sorkin says. “Because it’s like I had swaddled the book in Bubble Wrap and tried to gently transfer it to a stage without, you know, imposing my fingerprints on it at all.”

The best thing you could say about that draft was that it was harmless, he says. “Which was probably the worst thing you can say about ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ” he adds.

“I was in too deep now,” Sorkin says. “I just thought, OK, the Bubble Wrap’s got to come off. I can’t try to do a Harper Lee impersonation. And most importantly, I can’t pretend that I’m writing this in 1959. It has to be me writing it today.

“And it began to take shape.”

The play opened on Broadway at the end of 2018 with Jeff Daniels in the role of Atticus Finch, the small-town lawyer and single father to daughter Scout and son Jem, who passionately defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a White woman in 1930s Alabama.

The national Broadway touring production plays the Hollywood Pantages Theater in Los Angeles through Nov. 27 before moving to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa from Dec. 27 through Jan. 8.

This national touring production stars Richard Thomas as Atticus Finch, Melanie Moore as Scout, and Yaegel T. Welch as Tom Robinson. The production also stars Mary Badham, who played Scout opposite Gregory Peck as Atticus in the 1962 movie, as the Finch’s neighbor Mrs. Dubose.

All but Badham gathered recently at the Pantages to talk about the play and a story that’s touched millions of readers, viewers and theatergoers since the book’s publication in 1960.

Timeless and relevant

Welch, who was part of the Broadway ensemble before taking over as Tom Robinson for the current company, says the themes of the novel are as relevant today as when Lee wrote the book. Especially after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the protests against racism and injustice that followed.

“I think it’s always been there,” Welch says. “The injustice, particularly with Black people in America, that stems from racism. It has not ceased.

“It was interesting coming from doing this production before the pandemic, and seeing audiences witness the play,” he says. “Then there was more of a sort of nostalgia. Like, this is our old favorite novel, and they’re coming back to revisit some of the characters that they’ll see in this particular production.

“Then George Floyd and so many other cases happen,” Welch says. “And audiences are now erupting with this sense of passion to sort of conquer and acknowledge the injustice.”

The play quickly shed that sense of nostalgia, Sorkin adds.

“This isn’t a museum piece,” he says. “It feels like it’s happening today.”

To Thomas, it’s a particularly compassionate script in how it presents the stories not just of Atticus and Tom but also characters viewed as the bad guys of the piece such as Mayella Ewell, who accuses Tom of rape, and her father, the racist Bob Ewell.

“It’s a very empathetic play,” Thomas says. “We may not like Mayella, but we understand how much of the victim she is and how she is a pawn, and how all this stuff has been inculcated.

“So without excusing the behavior, Aaron has really given us an opportunity to understand why people are saying the things they’re saying in the play,” he says. “I like to say it’s a mix of empathy and outrage that we come away with.”

Moore says the similarities between the play and the real world are unmissable to most audiences.

“It’s impossible not to see the parallels,” she says. “It’s so painfully relevant. By changing such a minor, tiny detail they’re the exact same news stories that we’re looking at and investigating today.”

A shift in focus

The play that Sorkin ultimately wrote shifted not only the structure of the novel and film – the trial of Tom Robinson now opens the story – but also, and more controversially, the character of Atticus.

“That was going to be a scary part,” Sorkin says of his decision to make Atticus the protagonist of the play. “A protagonist gets put through something and as a result changes. Which doesn’t happen in the book. Atticus is the same person at the end of the book as he was in the beginning.”

In the book, he says, Scout is more the protagonist, changing from beginning to end as she loses some of her innocence.

“I wanted to keep the kids as protagonists, but I wanted the central protagonist to be Atticus, which meant he needed a flaw and he needed to change,” Sorkin says. “Giving Atticus Finch, America’s dad, a flaw was a scary proposition. Is he a bad father who becomes a good father? Is he a bad lawyer who becomes a good lawyer? Is he a racist who comes to believe in equality and justice? No.

“Then – and now I’m reading the book for the 20th time while working on it – I realized that he had a flaw,” he says. “It’s just that when I read the book, when it was taught to me, it was taught as a virtue. Which is that there’s goodness in everyone.

“That Bob Ewell, a Klan member, you’ve got to understand he just lost his job, and that makes a man feel small. Or Mrs. Dubose, the horrible next-door neighbor, we’ve got to understand she stopped taking her medication. That can mess you up.”

Atticus of the movie and novel believes that he knows his neighbors, Sorkin says. But Sorkin didn’t think that part still rang true. So he wrote Atticus as a man who comes to question that belief, a decision that prompted a lawsuit from the Lee estate, and a countersuit from the production before both were settled.

“What Aaron talks about, I don’t want to take issue with his comment about making Atticus the protagonist,” Thomas says. “I think it’s Scout’s story, telling the story of her childhood, and what she learned about her father and what she saw.

“That’s why he’s written Scout as an adult,” he says. “Remembering the story about her dad and the trial, all of that. So I think that Scout is still our psychopomp and way into the story, and our central character.”

But Thomas agreed that Atticus now has a protagonist’s journey to make and as a result new depths to the character.

“He has taken him off the pedestal,” Thomas says. “Fathers are, for kids, they’re close, but they’re also unknowable in some ways. And this is not an unknowable Atticus. This is a man all of whose unassailable virtues are being interrogated.

“His sense that just being decent is enough, and that people are all basically good at heart, and that you have to respect everybody, no matter what,” he says. “All of these things that made him so admirable in the book, and in the film, especially, I think with Greg Peck, are called into question.

“His ground is knocked out from under him. So we have a man who goes through a protagonist’s journey in that he’s essentially happy, he loves his family. Successful man, everything is good. And everything is deconstructed and brought down to nothing, and at the very end of the play, he has to start to rebuild everything from a new perspective.”