Topic: To Kill A Mockingbird

Mataya

Date: 2016-07-17 09:47 EST
Cast

Narrator - Dru Granger Atticus Finch - Jonathan Granger "Scout" Finch - Mairead Harker "Jem" Finch - Doran Ilnaren Dill Harris - Robert Mallory Calpurnia - Leah Fuller Boo Radley - Josh Stuart Miss Maudie Atkinson - Annabeth Caldwell Bob Ewell - Aristotle Kruger Allen Mayella Ewell - Lirssa al Amat Tom Robinson - Byron Warren Aunt Alexandra - Phyllis Miller

Mataya

Date: 2016-07-17 09:49 EST
Synopsis

The story takes place during three years (1933"35) of the Great Depression in the fictional "tired old town" of Maycomb, Alabama, the seat of Maycomb County. It focuses on six-year-old Jean Louise Finch (Scout), who lives with her older brother, Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus, a middle-aged lawyer. Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who visits Maycomb to stay with his aunt each summer. The three children are terrified of, and fascinated by, their neighbor, the reclusive Arthur "Boo" Radley. The adults of Maycomb are hesitant to talk about Boo, and few of them have seen him for many years. The children feed one another's imagination with rumors about his appearance and reasons for remaining hidden, and they fantasize about how to get him out of his house. After two summers of friendship with Dill, Scout and Jem find that someone leaves them small gifts in a tree outside the Radley place. Several times the mysterious Boo makes gestures of affection to the children, but, to their disappointment, he never appears in person.

Judge Taylor appoints Atticus to defend Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell. Although many of Maycomb's citizens disapprove, Atticus agrees to defend Tom to the best of his ability. Other children taunt Jem and Scout for Atticus's actions, calling him a "nigger-lover". Scout is tempted to stand up for her father's honor by fighting, even though he has told her not to. Atticus faces a group of men intent on lynching Tom. This danger is averted when Scout, Jem, and Dill shame the mob into dispersing by forcing them to view the situation from Atticus' and Tom's points of view.

Atticus does not want Jem and Scout to be present at Tom Robinson's trial. No seat is available on the main floor, so by invitation of Rev. Sykes, Jem, Scout, and Dill watch from the colored balcony. Atticus establishes that the accusers"Mayella and her father, Bob Ewell, the town drunk?are lying. It also becomes clear that the friendless Mayella made sexual advances toward Tom, and that her father caught her and beat her. Despite significant evidence of Tom's innocence, the jury convicts him. Jem's faith in justice becomes badly shaken, as is Atticus', when the hapless Tom is shot and killed while trying to escape from prison.

Despite Tom's conviction, Bob Ewell is humiliated by the events of the trial, Atticus explaining that he "destroyed last shred of credibility at that trial." Ewell vows revenge, spitting in Atticus' face, trying to break into the judge's house, and menacing Tom Robinson's widow. Finally, he attacks the defenseless Jem and Scout while they walk home on a dark night after the school Halloween pageant. One of Jem's arms is broken in the struggle, but amid the confusion someone comes to the children's rescue. The mysterious man carries Jem home, where Scout realizes that he is Boo Radley.

Sheriff Tate arrives and discovers that Bob Ewell has died during the fight. The sheriff argues with Atticus about the prudence and ethics of charging Jem (whom Atticus believes to be responsible) or Boo (whom Tate believes to be responsible). Atticus eventually accepts the sheriff's story that Ewell simply fell on his own knife. Boo asks Scout to walk him home, and after she says goodbye to him at his front door he disappears again. While standing on the Radley porch, Scout imagines life from Boo's perspective, and regrets that they had never repaid him for the gifts he had given them.

((Here we are, my lovelies, the 100th production the Shanachie ever put on (in theory!). Here's where your experiences go - respect the setting and the actors, please, but have fun with it!))

Blood Sister

Date: 2016-07-17 14:25 EST
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Being based on one of her favorite books, Lydia purchased one of the first tickets for opening night of the Shanachie's "To Kill A Mockingbird". She was not disappointed.

Mairead Harker's Scout embodied the perfect childhood innocence. Lydia wondered if Maggie was aware of the setting around her, since she seemed just as immune to the racism, sexism, and bigotry as Scout had been. As the story went on, the schoolteacher didn't doubt Maggie or her abilities as she fully absorbed the part of the tough-as-nails little girl who climbed trees and beat up boys. The boys were just as wonderful. Doran's Jem was the quintessential protective older brother and Robert nailed the challenge of the eclectic, "tell it like it is" Dill, giving a fresh perspective for the siblings he hung around with for the summers.

Josh Stuart's Boo Radley was just as sweet as the children never would have imagined and Annabeth's Miss Maudie was everything Lydia had hoped for. She may have said Atticus was "the same in his house as he is on the public streets" but she never put on any false airs herself either, treating the children with the same respect she gave to everyone else, except when her sharp tongue was cutting down the town gossips. And then there was Atticus, himself"

Jonathan Granger held himself just as professionally as Lydia had always envisioned for Atticus, especially in the courtroom as he defended Byron's Tom Robinson. Lydia watched as Lirssa's Mayella Ewell took the stand against Tom, claiming he had assaulted her. Lydia watched, hating her and pitying her at the same time. She was nothing more than a poor, friendless girl who was forced to take care of her siblings while her drunk father did nothing but collect a government check. Lydia tried to remind herself that she couldn't truly hate her, for her only mistake was asking for help around the house from a sweet man who she made the grave error of kissing, just as her father came home to witness her "crime". A white woman kissing a colored man. In their day, it was as unimaginable as the crime she accused Tom. The only difference was that she was guilty and Tom was not. She and her father knew it.

Kruger's Bob Ewell was impeccable. Lydia soon forgot the man she was watching was the fun loving dueler and soon hated him for being such a terrible father to Mayella and being a sorry, drunken excuse for a man. She watched as he lied his way through his testimony of what he "witnessed" Tom doing to Mayella. By the time Atticus called Tom to the stand, it was even more obvious that the kind-hearted man who took pity on the poor girl was less guilty than most of the men sitting it the courtroom audience that had tried to lynch him the night before.

The jury was out for a long time, but that was the only victory as they came back with a "guilty' verdict. The courtroom soon filed out, as if it was an everyday thing to condemn a colored man to death, but the colored audience in the balcony above the courtroom remained in their seats. Atticus finally stood and began to get his papers together off the desk in front of him, unaware of the audience above which included Jem, Scout, and Dill who had snuck in to watch the trial. As Atticus stood, so did the people in the balcony. One by one, they all stood silently in respect for how Atticus fought so hard for what even they knew was a losing battle, leaving Lydia to tear up for the countless time during the production. Only Scout was left seated.

Reverend Sykes looked down and said to Scout softly, "Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passing."

As Maggie stood, so did the crying Lydia. Just as Atticus had been, she was unaware of the few people behind her that stood moments after she had. Not long, one by one, the majority of the audience of the Shanachie stood in respectful silence. As soon as Atticus Finch had walked out of the courtroom, and Jonathan Granger walked off the stage, what seemed like the entire audience erupted into simultaneous applause.

Dru Granger

Date: 2016-07-20 01:05 EST
Narrator.

That was all her script had said in place of a named role. It had taken Josh to point out to her that the narrator was Scout, all grown up and remembering. Dru had never read the book, or seen the film. She wasn't familiar with the culture, or even the world, from which the story had originated. But that didn't matter so much. The themes were universal. And for her, they hit home harder than she had ever thought would be possible.

Tirisano, her home, was as xenophobic as you could care to name. Anything from outside the borders, any person who hadn't been born and raised there, was viewed with suspicion and distrust. It was a part of their culture, and for a long time, she hadn't even questioned it. Not until she ran away from the home she had always known and found herself here, in a city that embraced all cultures and races. Things might not go smoothly all the time in Rhy'Din, but differences were tolerated with an easiness that might never come to pass in Tirisano.

She had worked hard with Maggie to get the accent just right, wanting people to recognize the link between the narrator and Scout without needing it to be pointed out to them as she had needed it. She'd watched as the Repertory company grew to inhabit their roles, to become the people from this classic piece of literature that taught a moral which should have been self-evident. Should have been.

She was moved by the narrative. By Scout's innocence, by Jem's struggle toward understanding, by Atticus' quiet strength in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. She was glad she had nothing to say at the end of the court case, for by the time Reverend Sykes spoke his line, she always found herself crying at the sheer injustice that had been done to an innocent man, simply because he was different.

But most of all, she was moved by Boo Radley, and every night, she struggled to keep her voice level as she spoke the last lines of the play. Because she, the heir to the Tirisano throne, saw herself in Boo Radley. Cut off from the world through no real fault of his own; treated differently, as an object of morbid fascination; made to be the face of the demons everyone held in their own hearts. It was not so very different from being what she was, held to a different standard and blamed when that standard failed.

Each night, as Maggie walked Josh across the stage and let him go through the door to the Radley house, Dru spoke over them, each word reverberating inside her with a twang that was almost painful.

"Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.

"In my mind, the night faded. It was summertime, and two children scampered down the sidewalk toward a man approaching in the distance. The man waved, and the children raced each other to him. Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day's woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive. Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog.

"Summer, and he watched his children's heart break. Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him ..."

Boo's children needed him. Boo's children. Not his own flesh and blood, but the children he watched every day, the children he grew to love from a distance. Dru saw herself there, too. If Tirisano was Maycomb, and its princess was Boo Radley, then Boo's children were the people who lived within its borders. The people who were by turns afraid of, and hostile to, anything and anyone that was even a little bit different. They might pick her to pieces in the magazines, gossip about her on the streets, criticize and assign blame to her, but they needed her.

Dru's people needed her. They needed her to lead them out of their darker thoughts, away from the fear that painted the world outside their borders black. They needed her to be brave for them, and perhaps they would be brave because she was, too. Without her, there was no hope for Tirisano, no chance to step forward into the world that moved around them. She could give them that hope, she and Josh together; the next generation that would no longer allow their people to hide behind prejudice and fear. Boo's children needed him.

She would never have realized it had she not come to Rhy'Din. Though the Grangers were still a privileged sort of class in the mish-mash of cultures that made up Rhy'Din, they had given her a point of view she would never have found had she stayed at home. Without seeing the world from another point of view, she would never have proven to her people that she trusted them, by riding openly past the very same spot where her mother and uncle had been so horribly killed. Her people had needed her to be brave, and she had been, not just for them but for herself as well; a bravery she would never have discovered in herself without Josh's belief in her.

And that, too, was reflected in this astonishing work; in the last lines spoken before the lights went down, as the audience watched Atticus and Scout curled together to watch over Jem through the night to come.

"Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.

"Just standing on the Radley porch was enough ..."

Roach Lee

Date: 2016-07-20 06:36 EST
"Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad. "

Curtains fell. The house lights opened again and applause broke out across the theatre. Roach could only sit there dimly, staring straight ahead into thin air as she went over and over the words in that one passage that had hit her hard, taking a few moments before clapping along with the rest of the crowd.

Why it was she had lingered outside the theatre and decided to trail in after the people for the performance, could not be said, only that she did so on a whim. Roach was not a cultured woman in a broader sense; her sophistication got about a high as top shelf liquor and no further. Her love of old blues and jazz, many old black and whites and a few crinkle-paged novels was passed onto her by her now deceased Grandmother, but her life situation had never allowed for that love for those things to be cultivated. Instead, they were relegated to the back of her mind and the bottom of her heart.

But, the performance that night had given her back some of that feeling. A belief too, that had Grandmother would have been clapping and whistling a riot, thrilled with the emotional charge of the actors who from the first scene had drawn her in. So it was that when the house lights flashed bright and life came running back into the theatre, the story folded back into the wings, she kept sitting in her seat long after the final bow from the cast; sunk down low and eyes lost ahead of her. The last to leave and only because an usher had gently interrupted her distant musing and gestured to the door with a kind, patient smile.

Out on the street in the dark, fallen admittance tickets scuttling along the ground by her feet, she lit up a smoke; as she inhaled she was surprised to find that her eyes were stinging and her cheeks were wet. Stepping away from the building, she was both moved and frustrated at the ache blooming in her chest. She had a Boo Radley. And she would repay him.

"...We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad."

KhaoticBliss

Date: 2016-07-20 11:48 EST
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Having never seen a play, Saila came for two reasons. The first was perhaps the most obvious - to check that off the impossibly long list of things she hadn't yet experienced. The second was almost as obvious - she'd chosen this play in particular mainly to support Lirssa.

Unfamiliar with the story and having no idea what to expect, Saila was lost at first. With no frame of reference that fit the initial narrative, she watched in silence, her fingers occasionally flaring nervously at her side as she tried to absorb and process what she was seeing.

Clarity and comprehension hit her like twin lightning bolts, though, when the vague sense of unease that had been pulling at her all along resolved itself into something familiar. A man was killed not for what he'd done but for who he was.

Saila sucked in a breath, her strange eyes widening. Now where had she seen that before?

She glanced around suddenly, half expecting to find the ghost beside her, chain-smoking his way through another ferocious scowl. He wasn't, of course, but the sensation lingered even after the play was over, the actors had been congratulated, her steps had carried her back out into the street.

"Atticus, he was real nice..."

"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."

Lirssa Sarengrave

Date: 2016-07-21 16:43 EST
The cast dressing room glowed with sound and light. Lirssa sat at the dressing mirror applying the thick stage makeup, washing out her features and shadowing haunting valleys in her cheeks and beneath her eyes. Everything had to be more in the power of the stage lights, so even pale, wan looks required makeup. 100th production. A play. A part unlike Lirssa had ever performed. To do wrong, to lie and doom another person out of fear. Fear. To fear the one person in her life that should have been protecting her, caring for her: her father. Lirssa knew that kind of fear only second hand. She thought of all the daughters she had found on streets, in dens of abuse, and the defense they would profess of their fathers. They would say it was their fault, speak lies, do whatever their fathers had told them to do for that slim hope of affection. It gripped Lirssa's heart and burned an angry fire inside. She owed them to be honest to their experience.

She owed Trialin, Anathea, Penny, Sunny,....so many more. And she took that hate and turned it inside, feeding the performance. It heightened the passion and terror, informed everything behind her words that condemned an innocent man. The scene brief. The time to hate short. Lirssa was able to step away from that all. The end of every night, after curtain, she would smile and hug Kruger and joke about seeing him in the dueling venues. She would wash away the makeup, brush her hair smooth and clean, and greet wellwishers outside stage doors; surprised and delighted to see Saila one evening. Restore herself by embracing joy and leave behind the acting.

She could do that. Others —others who lived it— could not. Life is like a play, Shakespeare had said, but some had no exits.

Kruger

Date: 2016-07-21 18:21 EST
There might have been some irony in the bruises that Lirssa wore, and in the fact that some of them had probably come from Kruger. It may even have been more ironic that she needed to cover those so that she could apply made up ones instead. It was her jokes on the matter that kept him from falling too deeply into Robert E, Lee Ewell. It was a despicable role to play, one that required him to tap into those most loathsome parts of his mind. It was what he'd wanted, what he'd asked for from Ludo, to be the villain. There was villainy, and then there was Bob Ewell.

The hugs helped, but Kruger wasn't really certain if Lirssa knew that was what she was doing. He would often step away after the curtain calls, after the back slapping and attaboys that came from cast and crew. Their performances had been nearly flawless, even his own had started to feel a little too real. He'd spent hours being this man, surely they wouldn't begrudge him a few minutes to let him go. Annabeth always seemed to find him, she said little, enough to let him know she was near before stepping in behind to embrace him.

That was how his nights went, unless she had a shift. On those nights, she would stay only briefly, to let him know she understood he supposed. Then she was gone, and he would find himself alone, cleaning off the makeup. Sometimes that was enough, the man beneath was him, and would remain so until the next night. Most of the time he headed for The Annex.

Irony, Kruger wasn't immune to it, and knowing that he needed to shake off Bob, a man who beat his daughter and worse, by going to a fight night where it was entirely possible that once again he'd step in to face Lirssa, the actress who played that daughter. Sometimes it's good to be The Anvil, and sometimes you cling tightly to that persona in order to save yourself from another.

Annabeth Caldwell

Date: 2016-08-01 01:07 EST
Annabeth stood in the wings waiting for her first entrance of the last performance of the "To Kill a Mockingbird" run. She would miss this play maybe a little more than some of the others this past year. It had almost felt like home. Well, perhaps her home town 80 years ago.

The past few weeks she had worked with anyone wanting help with their accents. She watched through tears while a jury condemned an obviously innocent man to die. Worked tirelessly along with the entire cast and crew to make the 100th production at the Shanachie memorable for everyone connected with it.

She had played possibly her third favorite female part in the whole production. She had listened in awe as Phyllis delivered what was probably her favorite speech in the entire play. Aunt Alexandra's break down shows that beyond all the trappings and masks of being a gentile southern lady, beyond the fact that she disagrees with almost everything her brother has done since his wife died, her heart breaks to see him in pain. The irony that she despises the society that she spends all her time trying to impress almost breaks Annabeth.

And then there was her role, Miss Maudie Atkinson. The woman who lives within her society without succumbing to the pressure to fit it's mold. She helps Scout and Jem see their father, and in fact a lot of the "Grown up" world a lot more clearly. Miss Maudie reminded her a lot of her mother's best friend, Rebecca. They were from a different time, and a slightly different place, but they saw the world through similar eyes.

Now it was her time to step out and play her part one last time. Now was her last chance to convince an audience that to destroy someone or something that has never caused anyone or anything harm was not only a crime, but a sin. She hoped she might also help them look at things deeper and see beneath surfaces, beneath gossip, stereotypes, and rumors, and see that sentient beings are far from simple or black and white.