To Kill A Mockingbird Brings its Message to the
Kennedy Center
Most of the time, Charlie McCorvey is a County Commissioner in Monroe County, Alabama, and a teacher at the local high school. But for several weeks every year, he adopts another persona. He becomes Tom Robinson, the doomed black sharecropper in Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "To Kill A Mockingbird."
For the past ten years, the residents of Monroeville, Alabama - the real-world counterpart of the book's Maycombe - have staged a two-act adaptation of the play at the courthouse in town. So universal is the message of the book that they've also performed it by invitation in Jerusalem and in England. It celebrates its tenth anniversary with a limited run at the Kennedy Center from June 14-17.
The setting of the novel is the fictional town of Maycombe, Alabama in 1935. Tom Robinson, a black farmer in the isolated, rural town, is accused of beating and assaulting a white teenaged girl. He's defended by Atticus Finch, a white lawyer. Even though Finch proves Robinson's innocence, the all-white, all-male jury finds the sharecropper guilty. The book is an indictment against prejudice and a tribute to those who spit against the wind by standing for their principles.
CONTINUES......
© Fran Severn
