The Long, Strange Flight of ‘Mockingbird’

TO THE CASUAL THEATRE OBSERVER, A NEW stage version of To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Jeff Daniels, with a script by Aaron Sorkin, burst onto Broadway last winter, selling out every single seat for every performance and shattering box-office records for an American play. More informed theatre mavens first heard about this new Mockingbird some months earlier, when it was reported that the estate of the original novel’s author, Harper Lee, sued the production over playwright Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation, only to be countersued by the show’s producer, Scott Rudin.

Now, as the play is again making headlines for the controversial last-minute cancellation of Mockingbird productions around the country—effected by legal threats from Rudin’s company, but with the silent backing of Harper Lee’s estate—the classic novel’s long, strange relationship with the theatre is finally coming to light.

The saga began shortly after Lee’s first novel became an unexpected smash. Since its publication in 1960, the book has sold more than 40 million copies and won the Pulitzer, while becoming a (mostly) beloved fixture of middle and high school reading lists. It was also adapted into an Oscar-winning film written by Horton Foote, starring Gregory Peck. All the attention proved too much for Lee, who gave her last interview in 1964 and never published another book.

But in 1965, Christopher Sergel, a playwright whose family ran the play publisher Dramatic Publishing (DPC), asked for permission to create a low-profile adaptation for schools, who were eagerly