Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” — a prodigious Broadway hit this season — will begin a two-year national tour with a launch at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in August 2020, the show’s producers and the center announced Thursday.
Rarely does a straight play generate the audience appeal to allow it to vie on the road with the passel of musicals old and new that routinely make the rounds of the country’s arts centers and commercial theaters. But “To Kill a Mockingbird,” based on Harper Lee’s beloved novel, has been performing more like a musical, smashing box office records at Broadway’s nearly 1,500-seat Shubert Theatre and boasting advance sales at the moment of more than $22 million.
Sorkin, author of plays such as “A Few Good Men,” screenwriter of “The Social Network” and creator of TV’s “The West Wing,” said in a phone interview that “Mockingbird’s” success “is something of a much greater magnitude” than any of his previous stage work. “The critical response, the size of the whole thing. But most important to me is the way it is landing with audiences.”
“To Kill a Mockingbird’s” life on the road will begin Aug. 18, 2020, and remain in D.C. for six weeks, until Sept. 27.
Scott Rudin, “Mockingbird’s” lead producer, said the Kennedy Center was a natural choice for the tour’s kickoff. “It’s a political play being put in a political context,” he said. “It’s a play that deals with the central issues of American history, which is why it has mattered for 60 years.”
If the Broadway experience is any indication, demand for tickets to “Mockingbird” will be enormous. (A dispute with amateur companies across the country that were staging an earlier adaptation of the novel was resolved after producer Rudin gave those groups the rights to Sorkin’s version without charge.)
Washington warmup
The tour of “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be directed, as it was on Broadway, by Bartlett Sher (who also directed “My Fair Lady.”) Casting for the road company is underway, but the show’s relationship with the nation’s capital starts sooner — this coming Tuesday, in fact. That’s when Sorkin and members of the Broadway company, including Jeff Daniels, who portrays the story’s hero, Atticus Finch, are traveling to Washington at the invitation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
In Washington, the cast will present selections from the play for local schoolchildren at the Library of Congress, hosted by Pelosi and in conjunction with the Educational Theatre Association. At a dinner in Washington on Monday, the production will present a $10,000 college scholarship to Brannon Evans, a high school senior from Omaha who won a Democracy Works essay contest.
For Sorkin, meanwhile, the success of his dramatization has taken the anxiety-producing weight of history and fond memories of a novel off his shoulders.
“It was a relief,” he said, “that I didn’t ruin anyone’s childhood.”
