Jeff Daniels and Celia Keenan-Bolger, wearing overalls.
(Photos by Julieta Cervantes)
The author, a regular contributor to Deadline Detroit, is a former reporter for the Detroit Free Press and New York Times.
By Joe Lapointe
NEW YORK -- “To Kill a Mockingbird” opened Thursday night on Broadway and the star of the Aaron Sorkin play is not the Michigander who gets top billing for this revered American parable about race hate.
To be sure, Jeff Daniels – who grew up in Chelsea, near Ann Arbor -- offers a dutiful version of Atticus Finch, the noble lawyer who defends a black man falsely convicted of raping a young white woman in 1934 in a small town in Alabama.
But the highlight of this new theatrical interpretation is the performance of Celia Keenan-Bolger, a Detroit native from the east side neighborhood of Jefferson-Chalmers and the University of Michigan ('07). She plays Scout, the daughter of Atticus.
Although she is 40 and cast as a tomboy, the petite, blonde Keenan-Bolger fills the historic Shubert Theatre with kinetic energy as an effervescent counterpoint to the stolid and subdued Daniels.
Beyond their often-pointed dialogue, she dances around Daniels – and other cast members – as an adolescent coming of age amid rough justice, vigilante injustice, sexual assault, adult hypocrisy and racism.
The story is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel by Harper Lee that became a black-and-white film in 1962 about the gulf between black and white people. Actor Gregory Peck won an Oscar as Finch.
In both formats, the story was perfectly pitched to the Civil Rights movement of the time. While keeping Lee’s original spirit, Sorkin has vigorously updated a story as important to 20th-century race consciousness as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was to the 19th.
Butterfly on the wall
In this 21st-century version, Daniels moves deliberately across the stage in a vested tan suit – sometimes with his hands clenched behind his back, sometimes stuffed in his pockets.
In contrast, Keenan-Bolger runs, jumps and bounces from scene to scene, wearing overalls and a face of intelligent curiosity. More than a mere fly on the wall, she is a butterfly that flutters about the courtroom and the family porch, usually in plain sight of her father.
But Scout also hides under the porch to eavesdrop on the grownups. While silent in these scenes, Keenan-Bolger dominates the stage. And when Atticus stalks across the floor with heavy, measured strides, Scout both stomps on it with childish pique and skips across it with elfin lightness.
Scout also serves as the primary narrator. The other two are her brother, Jem (Will Pullen) and their visiting summer friend, Dill (Gideon Glick).
An actor who steals scenes is Frederick Weller as Robert E. Lee Ewell, the incestuous father of the alleged rape victim, Mayella Ewell, played by Erin Wilhelmi. Sorkin’s script gives the elder Ewell some of the best lines and Weller maximizes their viciousness.
“Don’t take for granted the rage that runs just beneath the surface of regular people,” Ewell says. “ . . . Situation like this is about who runs the show . . . Is the survival of your race worth fightin’ for? . . . I’m a fair man. Niggers are niggers. It’s the race traitors I can’t abide . . . . One tree, two ropes.”
Another beneficiary of Sorkin’s expansive dialogue is LaTanya Richardson Jackson as Calpurnia, the African-American cook and servant in the Finch home. Of course, Calpurnia appears in both the novel and the film but, in them, she is a quieter presence.
Black lives mattered then, too
In Sorkin’s script, Calpurnia has a contemporary voice. She challenges the white chauvinism of Atticus, who expects to be thanked for defending a “Negro.” She expresses bitterness when the convicted man, Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe) is shot to death in prison with five bullets because, the authorities claim, he tried to “escape.”
Celia Keenan-Bolger, an alumna of Mosaic Youth Theatre and the Detroit School of Arts High School.
“Five times!” she cries. The echo you hear here is that of Black Lives Matter. And Ewell’s bitter hatred of the wealthier, educated Atticus suggests the class resentment of some citizens toward today’s liberal, coastal “elites.”
Fans of Lee’s original story may be disappointed that one of the memorable and symbolic scenes in the book and the film – Atticus shooting the mad dog – did not make the transition to the stage.
That’s understandable in a theatrical format. But the play also avoids the novel’s account of Scout and her brother visiting Calpurnia’s church, a jarring scene that could have worked on stage.
In addition, conservatives (and supporters of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh) who are skeptical of the #MeToo movement could ask: “If this `Mockingbird’ story is about truth and justice and is still relevant today, why didn’t they make a bigger deal about a false accusation of rape?”
This “Mockingbird” has a few flaws. In previews, the play ran up to two hours and 50 minutes. Sorkin’s script has been trimmed by 15 minutes, which might not be quite enough. And the southern accents of the actors (including Daniels and Keenan-Bolger) are not always convincing.
Moreover, there are moments when the body language of Daniels seems too self-conscious, as if he is burdened by the specter of Peck’s performance. Perhaps he will loosen up in what could be a long run.
But these are minor faults in a major success. Keenan-Bolger, as Scout, could get her fourth Tony nomination. She should have won one in 2013-14 as Laura Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie.”
As main narrator in “Mockingbird,” Scout both opens and closes the show. At the finish, her words are ambiguous.
They could pertain to a judge entering a courtroom in the 1930s. Or they might apply to a 21st-century culture still settling its Civil War and deciding who might stand up to fight for what is right.
“All rise!” she says.
