The big draw of the Rochester Broadway Theatre League’s production of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, by Aaron Sorkin, was undoubtedly Richard Thomas in the role of Atticus Finch. Thomas, famous as John-Boy in The Waltons, was certainly a big factor in my mother’s excitement to see the production—and considering that many of the other people in the audience were older, I imagine that most of them had grown up with the Waltons as well. However, a celebrity lead was far from the only worthwhile element of this show.

The play itself is obviously an adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird, which is one of the most widely read and influential pieces of American literature. This can make adapting a piece like this challenging, because audiences are likely to be primed by knowing the story and may expect it to be treated in certain ways. Sorkin treated the novel extremely effectively by, on the one hand, maintaining all of the crucial elements of the plot itself, while, on the other, not merely putting the relatively linear plot of the book on stage. Tom Robinson’s trial is broken up throughout the play, being narrated and contextualized by Scout, Jem, and Dill. This non-linear structure works well for creating tension around the movement of the play while at the same time giving audiences the elements of the story that make Lee’s novel such an impactful story.

While Thomas was the main attraction—and his performance was without question extremely good, as were all the performers—the show was stolen by Jacqueline Williams, playing Culpernia, the Finch’s maid/nanny to the kids/friend of Atticus. This is a supporting role, but every time Williams spoke she got a consistent audible response from the audience. Throughout the show, the audience regularly responded with laughter, gasps, or other verbal responses. But Williams was most consistently able to draw out audience reactions with her sassy Black maid character, speaking truth to white men in the racist south. Another performer who consistently got these kinds of audience responses was Steven Lee Johnson, playing Dill Harris. He perfectly combined a kindly insight with a charming naivete that made his performance deeply endearing. Again, every actor was impressive, but Williams and Johnson took their supporting characters and went above and beyond with them.

My one issue with the production is with the dialects. Personally, I don’t like fake accents on stage. I think they’re often done poorly. And while there were elements of the dialects here that were very good, there were also lines that didn’t strike my ear as correct for an Alabama accent. Part of the challenge is for an actor to project their voice while doing an accent, which is much harder than speaking at a normal conversational volume, but I am just overall not a fan of stage accents. One thing I definitely want to give the dialect coach credit for is Joey Collins’ (playing Bob Ewell) pronunciation of the word “white,” which he distinctly pronounced “hwite,” with an audible haich sound at the beginning. This is a pronunciation that was cultivated by white southerners after the Civil War, which was meant to mark them as true southerners and true white people. So, when the racist Klan member Bob Ewell pronounces a strong haich sound at the beginning of the word, this is spot on in terms of the dialect of the time and place.