The New Atticus Finch

Richard Thomas as Atticus Finch in the touring production of To Kill a Mockingbird (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

In every play, there is one pivotal scene that the audience would imagine would be rehearsed to perfection. But when Richard Thomas takes to the stage to deliver Atticus Finch's summation in To Kill a Mockingbird, he has no idea what the moment will bring.

In that moment, Thomas explains, "[Atticus] literally doesn't know what he's going to say," and he decided that his performance must reflect that. "I don't craft that speech at all," he says. "I go on there every night not knowing how it's going to go because he doesn't. It's the opposite of a measured, well-thought-out, and noble closing argument."

It is, however, still a highlight of the touring production of To Kill a Mockingbird, currently playing at the Bass Concert Hall as part of the Broadway in Austin series (see our review here). The show is scheduled to run through Summer of 2024, but right now it's on a Southern swing, playing Austin through May 14, then on to Dallas and New Orleans. "Atticus is really Southern," Thomas says, "and the play, the language, it's beautiful, the cadences of it and how he's captured the feeling of the South."

"He" being Aaron Sorkin, who adapted Harper Lee's 1960 novel of racial injustice for Broadway in 2018. So the dreaded word looms over the conversation: Sorkinesque. "He's known for that snappy dialectic and that back and forth, and that could so easily end up a Newsroom, or Atticus could so easily sound like a Chicago lawyer. But he's given him this really Southern flavor which allows it to sit within its cultural context."

Thomas is used to working with writers whose names are also adjectives for a particular style, having been directed by the equally distinctive David Mamet in the 2009 Broadway production of Race. But he argues that it's a false conundrum, this idea that some writers are more restrictive than others. "My job is not to create the voice on stage, my job is to interpret the voice of the playwright, and any good playwright has a voice. I've played Mamet, I've played Williams, I've played McNally, I've played Shakespeare, and now I'm playing Sorkin, [and] one of the great joys is accommodating to the playwright's voice, because that's our job." As an actor, he says, "You never have to find space for yourself because you're going to be there on stage."

"[Aaron Sorkin] has given us an Atticus whose loss of innocence mirrors that of the kids." Richard Thomas on the new version of Atticus Finch in Sorkin's To Kill a Mockingbird. Left to right: Justin Mark as Jem Finch, Thomas as Atticus Finch, Melanie Moore as Scout Finch, and Steven Lee Johnson as Dill Harris. (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

And this touring production means a fresh space, a new stage, every week - quite literally. For many, Thomas will always be synonymous with the part of eldest son John Boy Walton in the long-running series The Waltons, but he was a stage actor first, debuting on Broadway in 1958 at the Cort Theatre with Ralph Bellamy in Sunrise at Campobello. He's been a regular on the Great White Way ever since, most recently as Hubert Humphrey opposite Brian Cox as LBJ in The Great Society.

But he has a particular love for touring productions. Mockingbird is actually his third, having gone on the road with 12 Angry Men and Stephen Karam's The Humans. It's a scene now mostly dominated by musicals (Mockingbird is the only drama out of the 16 productions playing as part of Broadway in Austin across the 2022-3 and 2023-4 seasons), and that's a trend Thomas hopes he can reverse. "Touring was a part of most theatre actors' lives for a long time," he says, "and my stealth mission is to get more plays on the road. ... I can't tell you how many people will speak to me after the show and tell me that not only have they never seen a show on the road, they've never seen a play."

Touring is undeniably a different experience to a run at a single theatre, especially for an actor like Thomas whose apartment is a 10 minute walk from Broadway, and he admits that it's not congenial for everyone. "Touring is very strenuous," he says. "You have a day off on Monday, you travel, and you do the show on Tuesday. Or you travel on Monday, you take a day off on Tuesday, and you open the same night." But there's nothing like the excitement of the first performance before different audiences in different cities and their different response - an experience he equates to having a new opening night every couple of weeks. "The young actors in our company who have never toured before, it's a great experience for them. Most Broadway houses will house a play of like 1,200 seats, 900 seats, right in that playhouse size. We played the Fox Theatre in Saint Louis and that's 4,500 seats. ... For an actor it's really a wonderful training ground, because you're constantly adjusting to different acoustics, different sight lines."

And there's a size element to this production. "I'm also the shortest actor to play Atticus," he laughs.

"He is not a white knight, but a man in crisis, observing Black trauma for the first time." Richard Thomas (with Yaegel T. Welch as Tom Robinson) on the journey of Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin's stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

That seems like a self-deprecating aside, but it's another new aspect of the character. Both Gregory Peck, who played the lawyer in the 1962 film version, and Thomas' friend and peer Jeff Daniels, who brought Atticus to the stage in the first run of Sorkin's Broadway production, measure in at over 6 foot. While not short, Thomas is shorter, and so when vicious racist Bob Ewell (played in the touring production by Joey Collins) comes to his house, the farmer looms over the lawyer, who leans back just a smidge. It recontextualizes both Atticus' moral fortitude but also his avoidance of physical conflict. "Me being less physically imposing as Atticus - if not vocally less imposing - places him within the community."

And that, for Thomas, is the cornerstone of Sorkin's script. As in the book, his daughter Scout (Melanie Moore) remains the narrator, this time in concert and squabble with brother Jem (Justin Mark) and neighbor Dill (Steven Lee Johnson). But in this iteration, it's Atticus who is the protagonist, and so the text becomes a moral test of this iconic embodiment of faith in the system. "You can't play icons," Thomas warns. "You can only play people."

That's why Thomas describes Sorkin's work as "a deconstruction of Atticus. ... First of all, he's given him a sense of humor - thank god - because the comedy of the first act earns the tragedy of the second act." More especially, it's that "easy and free and dry" sense of humor that speaks to the South of that era. But the real change that Thomas sees in Sorkin's script is "a more approachable and a more teachable Atticus. He's given us an Atticus whose loss of innocence mirrors that of the kids. He has a journey to take, and in doing so Atticus has to interrogate all of his own unassailable virtues: His sense of community, his sense of what it means to be decent and good." This Atticus Finch, he observes, "is not a white knight, but a man in crisis, observing Black trauma for the first time."

Broadway in Austin’s To Kill a Mockingbird 

Bass Concert Hall, 2350 Robert Dedman, 512-471-2787
texasperformingarts.org
Through May 14
Running time: 3 hrs.