Sixty-four years after his Broadway debut, Richard Thomas is back onstage in the Aaron Sorkin adaptation
“To Kill a Mockingbird” published in 1960 in a country undergoing a profound racial reckoning. In February of that year, Black students staged a sit-in in the white-only section of a Woolworth’s lunch counter in North Carolina. Three years earlier, the Little Rock Nine had been blocked from entering an Arkansas high school.
“This adaptation gives Atticus a story which interrogates all of those unassailable virtues,” Thomas said. “The novel is very much about the loss of innocence of these children. Aaron has made it also about Atticus’ loss of innocence. And that’s a beautiful thing for me, because icons are unplayable.”
“You have to maintain your ideals about the kind of person you’re going to be, and how you want to treat people. But you have to do it with your eyes open and you have to see how the world is made. Your ideals cannot trump the reality of what you’re dealing with,” Thomas said. “He’s a man under extraordinary circumstances who actually did try to do the right thing. We should applaud it, but we shouldn’t valorize it.
For those too young to remember, Thomas’ big break came with “The Waltons,” which he starred in from 1972 to 1977. He won an Emmy playing John-Boy Walton, a character that follows him to this day.
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