It’s a play. Breathe.
That could well be your inner monologue as “To Kill a Mockingbird” sears across the stage at Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Center for the Performing Arts.
The play is a new take on Harper Lee’s 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which became an acclaimed 1962 movie starring Gregory Peck in a cultural touchstone performance that won him an Academy Award.
But six decades have not diminished the political punch and countercultural currency of this story about racial injustice
The voice in your head, as you watch in rapt attention like the rest of the South Florida audience, might next observe: This has lost none of its — oh, what is the word? — threat, even after all these years.
The reverberations coming from the pretend world onstage are compounded by deep divides on this side of the footlights in the real world, and made particularly visceral here in Florida with the brewing storm of book banning and erasing Black history. Lee’s masterwork is still a lightning rod.
“We have to heal this wound or we will never stop bleeding from it,” goes a line.
In a prescient piece of playwriting, Aaron Sorkin has tapped into all of that and more. His signature snappy dialogue — “The West Wing,” “A Few Good Men,” “The Social Network,” “Moneyball,” “Being the Ricardos” — serves him well here. This is a smart script.
Surprisingly, it is also a funny script. Oh, not funny in that Broadway-ish way with a set-up and a punchline delivered with hammy panache, but rather naturally funny. Absurdities rise up organically. Wit is probably too dusty a word, for a play that opened on The Great White Way in December 2018 (and almost immediately set about breaking box-office records despite the run’s interruption by the pandemic), but witty it is.
The thought crosses your mind: Thank God for the laughs or else three hours including a 15-minute intermission would be interminable.
That humor is unexpected because the story is a bit of a passion play with the trial, suffering and … well, you know … of Tom Robinson (Yaegel T. Welch), a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town in 1934, during the height of Jim Crow. A white attorney, Atticus Finch (Richard Thomas), signs on to defend Robinson.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is a memory play where three children, played by adult actors, narrate the story which ping-pongs back and forth in time in a nonlinear way that not only keeps the pace moving briskly but hones in on Lee’s other theme: Her magnum opus is also, in equal measure, about parenting.
In the book and the movie, Finch’s daughter Scout (Melanie Moore), her brother, Jem (played on media night by Daniel Neale), and their friend, Dill (Steven Lee Johnson), carry much of the story. The Black characters, Robinson and the Finch’s housekeeper, Calpurnia, are heard from sparingly (in the 1960 book and the 1962 movie, we don’t actually hear from Robinson until roughly halfway through the story). This page-to-the-stage iteration remedies that. Sorkin has added scenes that spotlight those two characters, filling in their profiles and rounding out the story.
The cast delivers in a way that’s hard to wrap your brain around. This tour has been on the road since March 27, 2022, delivering up to eight shows a week in city after city after city. But you’d never know it because there isn’t a hint of weariness, not an iota of complacency. No one is phoning it in. No one. Not even the ensemble players relegated to the courtroom spectator gallery. Clearly, this is a mission for the actors.
And they take it as far as they can. Yes, the ending slacks a bit, and the story loses a little of its tautness and pull, but there is so much truth in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The truth seeps up from somewhere unfathomed between Lee and Sorkin and hardens, making a sturdy platform for this play to unfold.
As you leave the Broward Center, you’re likely to think: That shouldn’t have felt as fresh as it did.
If you go
WHAT: “To Kill a Mockingbird”
WHEN: Through April 9
WHERE: Au-Rene Theater at Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale
COST: $35-$125
INFORMATION: 954-462-0222; browardcenter.org
