Tennessee Shakespeare Company Launches Ninth Season With TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Tennessee Shakespeare Company, the Mid-South's professional, classical theatre, in partnership with Memphis' Hutchison School, will perform Christopher Sergel's revised stage adaptation of Harper Lee's daring American classic, To Kill a Mockingbird from September 20 through October 2.

Played on the Wiener Theater within Hutchison's beautiful campus in East Memphis, To Kill a Mockingbird launches TSC's ninth performance season.

The production's title sponsors are FedEx and Dorothy O. Kirsch.

Early Bird tickets are on sale now: the first 24 seats sold to each performance will be located in the new Best Seats section of the theatre. Tickets may be purchased now by calling TSC's Box Office at (901) 759-0604 or online at www.tnshakespeare.org.

Tickets are $34. Preview tickets are only $16. The September 29 performance is Free Will Kids' Night: Children 17 years and younger are admitted FREE when accompanied by a paying/attending Guardian. Senior tickets (62 years and older) are $29, and Student tickets (18 years and older) are $16 for any performance. Opening Night on September 24 includes a complimentary post-show reception with the actors.

Directed by TSC's founder and Producing Artistic Director Dan McCleary, the cast of 20 actors features Broadway veteran Patrick Ryan Sullivan as Atticus Finch, Memphian Ainsley Geno as Scout, and the return of TSC favorite Tony Molina, Jr. as Rev. Sykes.

The cast also includes Michael Khanlarian (Bob Ewell), Josh Pearce (Jem), Adela Calzada (Dill), Caroline Couch (Mayella), Ann Wallace (Calpurnia), Meredith Koch (Maudie), Jeanna Juleson (Stephanie), Carolyn Spratley (Mrs. Dubose), Chris Cotten (Boo Radley/Mr. Gilmer), Jim Dale Green (Sheriff Tate), J.D. Sutton (Jude Taylor/Mr. Cunningham), and Roman Kyle (Tom Robinson). The ensemble members are Kaitlyn Graham, CQ Gintz, Zoe Ford, Reece Berry, and Violet Wallace.

The Assistant Director is Anne Marie Caskey. The Lighting and Scenic Designer is Jeremy Fisher. DeAnna Rowe provides Costume Design. Kristen Fisher is the Associate Scenic Designer, and Meredith Koch provides music direction.

Novelist Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, and died this past February. She wrote her small town and the people she knew into her work, which won the Pulitzer Prize following its 1960 publishing. Made into a popular film in 1962, To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of the most popular books in American homes and school curriculums. Lee paints a portrait of her small southern town during the Depression of 1933-15 when she was ten years old.

Her youth looks through a lens of innocence, humor, inquiry, courage, and imagination at a hard story of a hard time. She builds her father into a model of integrity during a period of accepted racism that allows, before her eyes, to sentence to jail an African-American man for a violent crime against a white girl that he clearly does not commit. He reportedly escapes prison and is shot 17 times, unarmed.

The girl in the novel, Jean Louise Finch (Scout), her older brother Jem, and their friend Dill (based on real-life friend Truman Capote) are joyfully disarming as they discover multiple stories of innocent mockingbirds in their lives: Tom Robinson, as well as the reclusive but life-saving neighbor Boo Radley, the tortured and poor Mayella Ewell, their father Atticus who alone stands against the town's ingrained violence and prejudice, and the African-American community.

"The lessons these children learn," says McCleary, "are those that too many of us as adults have allowed ourselves to forget. Not unlike Romeo and Juliet, Mockingbird is still taught to our students because it is painfully clear we in 2016 have not quite progressed as far as our grandparents of the 1930s might have hoped. We have been too slow to accept the American ideal that all are welcome and all are created equal here. The violence that video now attests to, the bottled-up protests we experience in our cities now, and the closing of schools, certainly in Memphis, in minority communities that can no longer safely support them all agitate this production.

"TSC produces plays environmentally. That we produce Mockingbird in a high school theatre in Memphis in 2016 is artistically intentional. We embrace the environment, begin the play with modernity, and incorporate the music of the period using live strings and vocals.

"I believe the book is the American masterwork of the 20th century. It is going to be with us for generations, skillfully applying big-hearted youth and arresting humor to the plague that prevents our country from achieving the peaceful greatness imagined by our forefathers. To loosely appropriate Ben Jonson, Mockingbird is not just of a time but for all time."

Until Lee permitted the release of her novel Go Set a Watchman last summer, To Kill a Mockingbird was her only published book.

To Kill a Mockingbird is produced by special arrangement with Dramatic Publishing, Woodstock, IL.

To post a comment, you must register and login.