Broadway News How Aaron Sorkin’s ‘Different Take’ on To Kill a Mockingbird Will Reflect Modern America Some changes are in store for Atticus Finch in Oscar winner Aaron Sorkin's upcoming Broadway stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic.

By Adam Hetrick

September 13, 2017

When the curtain rises on the world premiere of Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird, audiences won’t encounter the morally sound Atticus Finch they know.

“He becomes Atticus Finch by the end of the play,” Sorkin told Vulture. “And while he’s going along, he has a kind of running argument with Calpurnia, the housekeeper, which is a much bigger role in the play I just wrote. He is in denial about his neighbors and his friends and the world around him, that it is as racist as it is, that a Maycomb County jury could possibly put Tom Robinson in jail when it’s so obvious what happened here. He becomes an apologist for these people.”

Atticus’ journey, Sorkin says, will have deeper resonance in the wake of the August attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a car plowed through a crowd of peaceful protesters who were demonstrating against an-alt right white nationalist rally. One woman was killed in the tragedy.

“All of a sudden, Donald Trump stood up at a news conference and said there are good people on both sides. I went, ‘Wow, bingo. We hit it right in the middle,’” Sorkin said.

Last year, Sorkin spoke with Playbill just after To Kill a Mockingbird was announced for Broadway. “I thought, ‘Well how hard can this be? Harper Lee has written such a great novel, it stands up pretty easily as a play, just take her scenes and dramatize them.’ That doesn’t work at all,” he said.