To Kill a Mockingbird--A Classic Comes to Life

To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic. We've all heard of it and we all read it in tenth grade or at least pretended to read it and watched Gregory Peck and crew in the movie instead.

It's one of those rare books dubbed classic by the literary bigwigs that has earned the same title in my own personal collection. I don't find myself slogging through with furrowed brow--looking for whatever it was that earned its place in that category. I love it. Every time I read it, I love it more. Like a handful of others that stick out in my mind (the Harry Potter books among them), the story unfolds effortlessly and even the moral lessons are woven into the story organically. I have to agree with Enrique Jardiel Poncela, though, who said, "When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing."

The story feels so real, you know the author is intimately familiar with the content and the ideas, even if it is going to have a the fiction label on the spine. Harper Lee grew up in Monroeville, a rural Alabama town now famous for its catfish and yearly production of To Kill a Mockingbird. Much speculation has gone into the inspiration for the story, but that's not my purpose here.

My purpose is to encourage people to attend the production if they have the chance. The actors are local volunteers--the drunkard father of Mayella Ewell, for example, is the town's District Attorney.

The first act takes place outside and includes those special touches that cause a thrill for the audience--like period clothing and even a period car that drives up next to the audience with the town drunks hanging off of it and stumbling out of it to confront Atticus.

The second act takes place in the courthouse. I wondered how they'd pull the scenes off that didn't take place in the courthouse, and I was pleasantly surprised by the clever effects.

This is a uniquely Alabama experience that makes it on the must do list for me. The production plays for a few weekends in the late spring each year. See the website for details.

There is one performance left this year--on May 16th. Bring some bug spray and some Kleenex.