To Kill a Mockingbird

On Broadway

I wrote about my experience watching To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway in my Two Weeks (March 20th) post, but my reflections are as follows:

I don’t remember reading TKAM in high school, but I know that I did and I know that I enjoyed it. I also didn’t remember how the story ended before watching the play, but I did know what would happen at trial.

Knowing made watching the play emotionally fatiguing. The cast was so compelling, I screamed internally for a different verdict for half the show. It reminded me of when I read The Old Man and the Sea summer of freshman year in college. I hadn’t read the book when I was assigned to in high school, but I had Sparknote’d it and remembered the ending.

After reading The Old Man and the Sea, I made one of only two unplanned calls to my long-distance complication that summer to tell him how devastated I was. Turning pages, willing that the printed words would rearrange themselves into what I wanted to happen, was so distinctly exhausting. Actually, in TKAM (and I know this because I Googled quotes after seeing the show) Atticus says, “[…] real courage is[…] when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.” I think this quote does a good job conveying the particular dread I experienced reading/watching the book/the play.

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to jot down here were my thoughts on Atticus, who was so very human in this production. In the back of my mind, I have this perception of Atticus being deified as a literary character. In this production, he was not. In fact, at times, I wanted to condemn him for not taking a stronger stand against racism, which was a very interesting feeling for me to have because I often say that I have no opinions about anything. It made me wonder if I would similarly judge myself if I had the power to watch myself from a truly objective third-party perspective.