Saturday, September 29, 2007
A+E, Theater, Reviews

Criminal negligence

‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ lacks emotional impact

Tom Key and Eric Moore in “To Kill a Mockingbird” CREDIT: Bill DeLoach

“TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD” Through Oct. 7. Theatrical Outfit at the Balzer Theatre at Herren’s $30 678-528-1500 www.theatricaloutfit.com

By Bert Osborne

Is nothing sacred? Don’t ask playwright Christopher Sergel—one reason being he died in 1993. But at the risk of speaking ill of the dead, another is that he barely had an original idea in his entire career, which seems to have been spent basically cashing in on the work of others, as opposed to leaving well enough alone. Look over a list of his credits and you’ll find stage adaptations of everything from “Lost Horizon,” “The Outsiders” and “Up the Down Staircase” to “Fame,” “Pillow Talk” and “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Ugh.

Harper Lee’s literary masterpiece “To Kill a Mockingbird” got a definitive dramatization in the classic film starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, the virtuous gentleman lawyer and single father to two young kids coming of age in segregated, Depression-era Alabama. It would be tantamount to blasphemy for anyone to ever suggest remaking the movie, and it isn’t much more excusable that Sergel rehashes the story as a play, as though there were something that needed enhancement or improving upon, when in actuality the stage production only pales in comparison.

In director Rosemary Newcott’s Theatrical Outfit production, famous character-defining moments from the novel and film unfold awkwardly. Obviously, for instance, you can’t have a rabid dog running around, so that whole scene develops anticlimactically, focused on an unseen menace off stage left. Given the finite space and the impressive dimensions of Kat Conley’s scenic design, a fateful walk through the woods (in which the Finch children, Jem and Scout, are attacked) initially plays out at the back of the stage, behind and occasionally obscured by other pieces of the set.

More problematic are pivotal emotional encounters that fall flat—Scout’s jailhouse confrontation with a bigot and her ultimate introduction to misunderstood neighbor Boo Radley—primarily because these scenes rest on child actors who, due to their ages, don’t have the theatrical expertise to pull them off completely. Constance Owl (Scout), Daniel Bignault (Jem) and Tendal Mann (as their friend Dill) know their lines, but they don’t always deliver them with real conviction or meaning.

During the play’s prolonged courtroom melodrama, they sit up in a balcony looking largely disinterested. When one of them is finally moved to cry or steps down to reiterate everything we’re supposed to think about the trial, it feels phony and unnatural. (For these scenes, we in the audience are addressed directly as members of the jury to souring effect—essentially lumping us in with a bunch of small-minded rednecks who’d convict a man of a crime he clearly didn’t commit simply because he’s black.)

Of course, at its best, there’s an intimacy and immediacy about live theater that even the greatest movie can’t touch. This is a lesson I learned long ago from actor Tom Key, and I’ve always had a special regard for him because of it. After a few years covering suburban community theater, I got my first assignment to review a big show at the Alliance Theatre, a 1991 staging of “Wenceslas Square.” Key’s touching performance brought tears to my eyes—something I’d never experienced in the theater before (and rarely since).

No doubt I’m a lot more jaded than I used to be. The fact that Key is now playing Atticus at the Outfit, where he serves as artistic director, might smack of a vanity project, except for his lack of vanity in the role. If anything, he’s too understated and nearly disappears into a story he’s intended to simultaneously carry and ground. Unlike watching different actors taking stabs at interpreting Hamlet, say, Atticus is such a iconic character, so perfectly embodied by Peck, that it’s a no-win situation for anyone else. SP