Atticus Finch

NOV. 25, 2018 “You’re Licked Before You Begin, But You Begin Anyway.” —Atticus Finch Bringing To Kill a Mockingbird to Broadway was nearly impossible. By Aaron Sorkin Photographs by Benjamin Lowy Aaron Sorkin. Photo: Benjamin Lowy “I have something very exciting to talk to you about.” That’s how Scott Rudin, the EGOT-winning producer, began a phone call to me three years ago. The last three times he’d called me to say, “I have something very exciting to talk to you about,” I ended up writing The Social Network, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs. So I was listening. “After several years of trying,” he said, “I’ve got the stage rights for To Kill a Mockingbird.” He wanted me to adapt the novel into a play. He was right — it was very exciting. It was also a suicide mission, and I understood that right away. This wasn’t just any Pulitzer Prize–winning novel; it’s one that holds a sacred place on America’s bookshelf. We all read it together in seventh or eighth grade. For some of us, it was the first time we read about injustice. It was the first time the hero wore glasses. It was the first time we were lulled into a bucolic world, seen through the eyes of a child, without knowing we were about to get kneecapped when we turned the page. It was the first time we liked reading a book more than watching television. It sells more than a million copies a year, and it continues to be taught in every school district where it hasn’t been banned for making Jim Crow laws look bad. And I’ve heard there’s a movie. Adding to the lore was the book’s author, Nelle Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird was her first novel and her last. (Go Set a Watchman, the rejected first draft of Mockingbird, was published in the final years of her life.) She never wrote again. She hid from the limelight — which can’t be easy to do when your best friend since childhood is Truman Capote — and in spite of the money that comes from a blockbuster book and movie, she lived the balance of her life very modestly in the town where she was born, Monroeville, Alabama, which served as the inspiration for fictional Maycomb County, where the story takes place. What could I do but make it all less than it was? Why invite the comparison between a legend and … not a legend? Why put on a nightly PowerPoint presentation on the difference between Harper Lee’s skills and my own? It would be like entering a head-to-head competition with Tom Brady in which points were awarded based on passing efficiency and handsomeness. It wouldn’t be a wise thing to do. Without hesitation, I said yes. I’m an accidental writer of movies and television shows. And while it’s been a very happy accident, what I love most is writing plays. Not just writing them, doing them. My last play was 11 years ago. This was a chance to be in a theater again, a chance to work with Bartlett Sher (whom Scott was dangling in front of me as director), a chance to be in a rehearsal room with a company of world-class actors, and a chance to work with this material. I wanted to be a part of it. Six months later, I turned in my first draft and it was terrible. Probably the best thing you could say about it was that it was harmless, which is probably the worst thing you could say about To Kill a Mockingbird. Basically, I’d just taken the most necessary scenes from the book and stood them up. It was a greatest-hits album performed by a cover band. I sent the first draft to Scott, and the next day he called and asked me to come to New York for a conversation. That’s regular working procedure for Scott and me. These work sessions usually last three or four days and I fly home with dozens — sometimes hundreds — of notes and write the next draft. The first Mockingbird work session lasted 45 minutes. Scott had two notes. The first was “We have to get to the trial sooner.” Yes. Agreed. How? I didn’t know yet. But the second note was the one that changed everything. Scott said, “Atticus can’t be Atticus for the whole play. He has to become Atticus by the end.” Well … duh. That’s Freshman Playwriting. First semester, first week. A protagonist has to change. A protagonist has to be put through something and be changed by it. And one more thing: A protagonist has to have a flaw. How did Harper Lee get away with creating a flawless protagonist who’s the same person at the end of the book as he is at the beginning? Simple. In the book, Atticus isn’t the protagonist — Scout is. Faced with the brutal realities of the Jim Crow South, Scout loses some of her innocence. Her flaw is that she’s young. But for the play, I didn’t want Scout (or Jem or Dill) to be the only protagonist. I wanted Atticus to be a protagonist too — in fact, the central one. I left Scott’s office knowing what I wanted to do, not knowing how to do it, and wishing I drank. A kind flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder a few times during the flight home to tell me I was talking to myself. Sorkin across from the Shubert Theatre moments before the first preview began. Photo: Benjamin Lowy I went to my office and wiped the dry-erase board clean, tore down all the index cards, and deleted the first draft from my computer. I didn’t want any part of that draft anymore. I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to swaddle the book in bubble wrap and transfer it gently to a stage. Theaters aren’t museums; they’re the places we go to have — as Lily Tomlin puts it — “the goose-bump experience.” The structural problem — getting to the trial sooner — was easily solvable. But how do you give Atticus Finch a flaw? Does he go from a bad guy to a good guy? A bad lawyer to a good lawyer? An abusive father to a loving one? A racist man to one who believes in equality and justice? No, no, definitely not, and no. I tried all the doors and they were locked, until I found one that swung open with the lightest touch. I didn’t have to give Atticus a flaw because, to my mind, he already had one; it’s just that we’d always considered it a virtue. Atticus believes that you can’t really know someone unless you “climb into someone’s skin and walk around in it.” He believes that Bob Ewell should be understood as a man who lost his job. He believes Mrs. Dubose should be understood as a woman who recently stopped taking her medication and lives in physical pain. He believes in the fundamental goodness in everyone, even homicidal white supremacists. He believes … that there are fine people on both sides? In the play, this set of beliefs would be challenged. There’s a story about James Carville on the night Bill Clinton won his first term, in 1992. Clinton walked out to a floodlit podium in front of the statehouse in Little Rock to address thousands of his supporters and millions more on television. A man turned to Carville and said, “My God, look at him. He’s so presidential. How did he change in just a few hours?” Carville said, “He didn’t change — we did.” There’s no event that occurs in the play that doesn’t occur in the novel, but the play takes a new look at some of those events because things have happened in the past 58 years. The book hasn’t changed; we have. That’s why it’s alarming when we abruptly discover how much we haven’t. There are only two significant African-American characters in the story: Calpurnia, the maid, and Tom Robinson, the accused. In a tale about racial injustice, neither of them has anything to say on the matter. Tom begs for his life, and Cal bakes crackling bread. It’s the kind of thing that would have gone unnoticed in 1960, but in 2018, using black characters only as atmosphere is as noticeable as it is wrong. Also, in this instance, a wasted opportunity. Does that mean all copies of the novel should be recalled and edited like a Wikipedia entry? Of course not. But neither could I pretend I was writing the play in 1960. To Kill a Mockingbird is about the nature of decency. What it means to be a person. In the novel, Atticus has the answers. In the play, he would struggle with the questions. There was speculation outside my circle of collaborators that I would incorporate Go Set a Watchman into the play. I’ve never read Go Set a Watchman, specifically so I could truthfully say I’ve never read Go Set a Watchman. I delivered the new draft in August 2017, a year after the previous one. Scott read it and immediately took out a two-page ad in the New York Times to announce that To Kill a Mockingbird, “a new play,” would open on Broadway in December 2018.

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