Moving
Damon Lincourt, with Debbie Reed as Calpurnia
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. —from To Kill a Mockingbird
past him and a passenger leaned out the window and made a rude gesture. Hearing of the events two days later, I was speechless—sucker-punched back to reality. And those events reinforced in my mind that the play we staged and the environment to which we attempted to transport our audiences was not the stuff of legend. We still have a long way to go.
MOCKINGBIRD HAS BEEN DESCRIBED as one of the great children’s books of all time. Yet its themes are hardly typical childhood fare, and there is no happy ending. Tom Robinson is found guilty— though even the prosecutor knows it’s a sham—and is shot dead in prison not long after. Bob Ewell continues to walk the streets spouting racist garbage and is later killed by Boo Radley, the white recluse who is never charged or brought to trial. Harper Lee taunts readers with the notion that Maycomb is making “baby steps” toward basic human rights. She also makes it clear that meaningful progress will take generations. That progress won’t happen, as Atticus Finch says, until we consider things from the other’s point of view, until we “climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Perhaps what made our production so successful was our ability to do just that. As teachers, we saw a new multi-racial
world through the eyes of the kids in our local schools. African-American actors, discovered new pieces of their own history, and helped to educate the cast and our audiences. White actors came to feel the bitter sting of racism. Wabash students gained an appreciation of the power of community theater and the hard work it takes to sustain it. Local actors, veteran and novice, came to see Wabash’s students, faculty, and staff quite differently. And parallel with the story’s central relationship between Atticus and Scout, one father got to see himself through the eyes of his daughter, and one daughter came to know her father as someone other than the guy who does PR for Wabash. Thank God for the train.
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