A Day in Stratford

I was in awe as the first actor walked on stage at the Avon Theatre at Stratford. It has been closer to a decade than not since I’ve been there. I believe the last time was a version of Little Women, inspired by one of my favourite movies (and books) as a child. This being the version with Katharine Hepburn as Jo, not Winona Ryder.

This time, it was a version of another favourite film (and book), To Kill A Mockingbird. Both the city, and the theatre were as beautiful as I remembered them to be.

Here is an excerpt of a review published by The Detroit News:

Review: Song of 'Mockingbird' rings sad and noble at Stratford
Lawrence B. Johnson / Special to The Detroit News

STRATFORD, Ontario -- If man's inhumanity to man can be hideous, our collective grace lies in our capacity for unstrained mercy. We are not defined by our worst examples, but rather by our nobler consciousness.

Such is the hopeful message of Harper Lee's 1959 novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," which playwright Christopher Sergel adapted for the stage in 1987 and the Stratford Festival of Canada offers for the first time in a production that touches the story's shadowed heart. ...

A vivid array of characters converge at the center of "Mockingbird," and director Susan H. Schulman steers them about with a clear eye. But the one who gives the story its soul and cause is Atticus Finch, a skilled and respected lawyer in the small (fictional) town of Maycomb. A widower, he has two young children, a son called Jem and a tomboy scamp of a girl called Scout. ...

It is Scout, grown to adulthood, who skirts the stage as her second self and narrates events. If one could argue some redundancy in the narrator's interruptions, informing us of what we are about to see and grasp plainly, Michelle Giroux fills the assignment with a good story-teller's command of order and impulse. ...

Essential to "Mockingbird" is an Atticus (even his kids call him that) who faces the rape trial's rising storm with calm, reason and an innate belief in color-blind fairness. Stratford veteran Peter Donaldson shows us such a centered soul, a man who knows himself and knows that constancy to himself is indispensable, if his own life is to have meaning. He speaks softly and carries no stick. ...

I also saw an emerging member of the Stratford company, Dion Johnstone, paint a complete portrait of the accused rapist, Tom Robinson, in a few impassioned lines and some deeply expressive body English. Just as unsettling were his accusers. Dayna Tekatch is Mayella Ewell, a low-caste white teenage girl, hysterically insistent in her trial testimony but also fearful of an abusive father, who may have caught her trying to seduce the black man. As the father, Wayne Best cuts an arrogant, grinning, dangerous figure, who will have his vengeance on Atticus for nearly getting Tom Robinson off.

But, of course, in that time and place, all the common sense in the world cannot save the black man. Yet, decency and fairness prove to be as infectious as prejudice and hate. When Tom Robinson, like a mockingbird innocent and gentle, is slain, goodness laments and humanity's better self ascends. Stratford's players allow us to believe in the quality of mercy.