To Kill a Mockingbird.

A young, hardworking, negro family man has been accused of raping a 19-year-old white woman, and the trial judge has specially asked Atticus Finch, a highly principled, experienced, and capable lawyer, to defend the accused.  Through the trial and the weeks leading up to it, Atticus's young daughter, (nicknamed) Scout, comes to examine her own ideas and their implications with a degree of honesty and self-awareness that we hope will be infectious.

Harper Lee's iconic novel's focus on the ability of even a child to stand up for what is right has lost little of its power in adaptation to the stage.  In REP's production, the ideas and values that the novel's characters wrestle with, which include conformity with and refusal of convenient prejudices, and the emotive power of physical conflict are as present on stage as they are in the imagination of the reader, thanks largely to the dedication of actors who, with a combination of direction and vocal coaching, became American Southerners.  Several actors in fact acquired thick Southern accents with such fluency that at times no word of their speeches was discernible.  Even then, though, their tone and manner usually made their meaning clear enough.

The play was consistently fast-paced.  It could in fact afford a degree of relaxation in scenes of lesser intensity in order to allow the actors to better communicate and the audience to absorb their meaning, but the action generally conveyed a sense of immediacy and naturalness that was otherwise absorbing.  Lighting designed mostly to be unobtrusive and occasionally to represent a scene change worked very well, and the 1930s costuming (with accompanying makeup) stood out as seeming realistic for the depression-era southern United States.

REP's production highlights feeling and principle in characters we can appreciate.  With slight retardation of the fastest articulation, and even relaxation of some of the studied accents, it will become simply arresting.

John P. Harvey

Image: Jade Breen, Jamie Boyd, Jake Keen, Jaiti Khosla, and Michael Sparks, in To Kill a Mockingbird.  Photographer: Helen Drum.