ARTS, NO CHASER
By Dwight Hobbes
At Park Square Theatre, the historic To Kill a Mockingbird is distilled from Harper Lee’s richly dramatic novel to Christopher Sergel’s social studies lesson-cum-serviceable play.
Lee crafted a fluid, character-fueled, image-rich saga of one man’s courage against cowardly mob rule. In 1935 Alabama, it falls to attorney and atypically moral White man Atticus Finch to defend Black man Tom Robinson, charged with raping a White woman, an open-and-shut, guilty-by-accusation offense. Finch does his hard-bent duty, serving his conscience, setting an example for his admiring grade-school daughter, Scout.
Their neighbors’ blood-deep race hatred doesn’t make life one bit easy for anyone in the household. When it becomes a life-threatening crisis, a great deal comes to light about what one’s principles can cost and whether it isn’t wisest, in the end, to opt for the practical. No easy choice.
Sergel sketches a cardboard construction of good versus evil in which the hero wears a halo, the villain has horns, and a public-service-announcement plot pats Finch on the back, boos and hisses the bad guy (the supposed rape victim’s obviously lying father) and feels sorry for the figure of poor, tragic Tom Robinson. That’s the problem: The stage version isn’t populated by complex characters but by simplistic figures.
On top of which a gospel chorus is inserted — slick and cloying artifice, a wholly implausible device. What courtroom, particularly in the South in 1935, is going to have an upper floor full of folk raising a joyous noise to the Lord as Black citizens rally to support one of their own on trial? If the bailiff and sheriff’s deputies didn’t run them out, rabidly racist jurors and spectators surely would’ve. Or at the very least, spat epithets and otherwise acted ugly as sin.
Here, all reality is suspended while we have a feel-good, Lawd-listen-at-them-cullud-folk-clap-sing-and-otherwise-be-cullud opening for the second act.
The actors, basically showing up to punch the clock, aren’t afforded much artistic room to move within paint-by-number constraints. Even so, Joel Raney pulls off a frighteningly matter-of-fact portrayal of ignorant malice as Bob Ewell, boozed-up bum of an outraged father who believes railroading Tom will erase that Ewell caught his daughter trying to kiss and otherwise make carnal advances to a Negro.
Sergel cannot be altogether blamed for the Black characters’ lack of dimension — the novel’s Achilles heel is that Lee hadn’t the first idea how to flesh out and enliven them as she did her White characters. To give them depth, Sergel would’ve had to rewrite them.
Delores G. Matthews-Zeno, Nina Black-Zachary, Michael Brown, and Annamichele Spears are in fine voice as the chorus.
Warren C. Bowles, who years ago was exceptional in several Mixed Blood Theatre productions, has, in recent seasons, lapsed into mediocrity as a pedestrian actor pretty much delivering the same, uneventful performance from role to role. Here, he is “Rev. Sykes” and a flaw that’s always been with Bowles persists. Ironically, he’s most effectively employed in “colorblind casting,” but he’s out of his element in identifiably Black roles. He simply doesn’t have the nuanced sensibility or inherent sense of culture to play a believable Black man.
Pillsbury House Theatre veteran Payton Woodson is not possessed of an arching range, but works as the doomed Tom Robinson. Woodson, artfully subdued, carries the part as something of a whipped dog dispirited to the point of being numb, a cruelly trapped soul who accepts that he has no chance of escaping a predetermined death sentence.
Austene Van of Penumbra Theatre Company renown has long been a strong talent in search of a breakout vehicle. This, of course, is not it. She gives doting housemaid Calpurnia as much spirited dignity as the writing permits, dodging the caricature of Black mammy at her wits’ end, haplessly running after White chillun who just won’t behave.
David Mann directs, taking the cast through their motions, managing, here and there, to coax energy from a stubbornly inert script.
To Kill a Mockingbird runs at Park Square Theatre in St. Paul in weekday matinees (contact theater for times) through May 13. For more information, see the Spot listing on this page.
Dwight Hobbes welcomes reader responses to dhobbes@spokesman-recorder.com.
Support Black local news
Help amplify Black voices by donating to the MSR. Your contribution enables critical coverage of issues affecting the community and empowers authentic storytelling.