To Kill a Theater

Darryl Maximilian Robinson as Reverend Sykes in the 2011 staging of Christopher Sergel's To Kill a Mockingbird by the Glendale Centre Theatre of Glendale, California, via.

Heard a note on this on NPR this morning, found a more thorough treatment from Mark Kennedy/AP Entertainment at the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer:

Dozens of community and nonprofit theaters across the U.S. have been forced to abandon productions of "To Kill a Mockingbird" under legal threat by Broadway and Hollywood producer Scott Rudin. The combative move has prompted calls for a boycott of Rudin's work

Rudin is arguing that author Harper Lee signed over to him exclusive worldwide rights to the title of the novel and that Rudin's current adaptation on Broadway — written by Aaron Sorkin — is the only version allowed to be performed.

That means different adaptations have had to be scuttled in such small venues as the Grand Theatre in Salt Lake City; Mugford Street Players in Marblehead, Massachusetts; and the Kavinoky Theatre in Buffalo, New York, as well as a planned United Kingdom and Ireland tour. They had licensed the rights for a different version, written by Christopher Sergel and licensed by The Dramatic Publishing Company or DPC.

"Rudin's work", as if he'd created the thing, as opposed to scrounging the money from his social circle whose demands for profit are responsible for Broadway prices that make it impossible for most people ever to see a show. That's annoying in itself. And they're not saying Sergel's adaptation (written in 1970 and a staple of high school and college and community theaters all over the US ever since—Sergel himself died in 1993) can't ever be performed again, just that they get to decide whether a particular production can take place or not, since they plan to take Sorkin's play on the road, and the staging by the Mugford Street Players could cut into Rudin's take; if he wants to put it on in the Marblehead neighborhood local audience might think "Oh, we've already seen that" and stay home, I guess.

The all-volunteer Curtain Call Theatre in Braintree, Massachusetts, said it received a letter threatening damages of up to $150,000, a staggering amount for a venue where tickets for plays are $20 and $25 for musicals.

"Due to the substantial financial impact defending such an action would have on our small theatre group, we have no choice but to comply and, thus, cancel our upcoming production of 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' Not doing so would put our theatre at great risk," the theater said in a statement.

In Ohio, the Dayton Playhouse, an active community theater since 1959, had to abruptly cancel its "To Kill a Mockingbird." The cast and crew have been hard at work on the production for weeks.

"I feel terrible for our artists, onstage and backstage, who poured their hearts into making something beautiful and meaningful, only to have it ended so suddenly," said Matt Lindsay, chair of the Dayton Playhouse's board of directors.

This pisses me off so much. I won't go so far as to say it "goes against everything the novel is about in the first place," as Chris Peterson's Onstage Blog puts it, because I don't think it has that much to do directly with what the novel is about at all, but it certainly goes against what you might call Sorkinism, the faith that Americans are just so darn nice at heart that there aren't any real problems, just problematic style, and

an idyllic, two-term liberal presidency [in The West Wing] warmly embraces the military-industrial complex, cuts Social Security, and puts a hard-right justice on the Supreme Court in the interests of bipartisan “balance” — all the while making no observably transformative changes to American life. What matters most is how politics look and feel and whether the briskly striding people who staff the corridors of power possess diplomas from the right schools. Idealism, such as it is, has more to do with an abstract faith in American institutions and their inherent greatness (as in, “America is already great”) than any particular desire to make the world a better place or see a coherent set of values reflected within them. (Luke Savage/Jacobin)

Sorkin ought to put his money where his mouth is, or maybe conversely, and do something about this assault by the wealthy on local theater, a generous and genuinely communitarian feature of American life in "flyover country" and elsewhere.

And for New Yorkers in particular, I'd suggest joining Peterson's campaign to #BoycottRudinPlays (current and forthcoming, including the Sorkin To Kill a Mockingbird, Hilary and Clinton, Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, King Lear [some will feel justified in making an exception for that, starring Glenda Jackson as the mad king], The Ferryman, and The Book of Mormon).