Review: Umbrella Stage Company's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD Keeps Harper Lee Classic Vividly Alive

Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” about the fictional small town of Maycomb, Alabama, in the Depression-era South grappling with violence and racial inequality, along with issues of class, courage, and compassion, is a classic of modern American literature and one of the best-selling books of all time.

As told by Lee – a Monroeville, Alabama, native – the book is a semi-autobiographical story of almost-six-years-old Scout, her older brother Jem, and the upending of their tranquil childhood one very hot summer when their widowed father, Atticus Finch, is appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a young black man accused of raping a white woman, and their town’s low-simmering racial tensions begin to boil over.

The novel was an instant bestseller, and a 1962 feature film adaptation, with screenplay by Horton Foote, introduced Lee’s characters to an even wider audience. The film starred Gregory Peck as Atticus, a role that won him the Academy Award for Best Actor.

In the more than 60 years since the film was released, a stage adaptation by Christopher Sergel has been widely produced, including locally at Gloucester Stage in 2017 and at the Umbrella Stage Company in 2018, and, now through March 22, once again at Umbrella Stage in a perfectly cast new production.

A 2018 Broadway adaption of the play by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) – presented in 2022 by Broadway in Boston at Citizens Opera House – centered the story on Atticus, but the Umbrella Stage version is Sergel’s tried-and-true take, with the bright and sensitive young Scout (a winning Shelly Iris Knight in her Umbrella Stage debut) once again the main character and the story’s narrator, dealing with her increasing awareness of the consequences of bigotry.

In press materials for the current Concord production, director Scott Edmiston, recipient of the 2011 Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence and known for his stagings of classics like “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "The Little Foxes" and “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” says, “At its core, this is the story of three children who learn that the world can be unjust; to kill a mockingbird literally means the death of innocence."

That death is depicted delicately by a stylishly groomed Amelia Broome – in her fourth production with Edmiston – as the adult Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, sharing narrating duties with her younger self in this memory play revolving around Scout’s father, Atticus, played here by Barlow Adamson – also a longtime collaborator with the director in this his ninth Edmiston production, and last seen at Umbrella Stage in “Network” – as an understated man of quiet dignity, less saintly than in Peck’s portrayal, but wise and with the strength to follow his conscience even when his fellow townsfolk disagree with him.

And disagree with him they do, of course, when an overwrought, and ultimately entirely unsympathetic, Mayella Ewell (Clara Havia in her Umbrella Stage debut), goaded on by her lowlife father, Bob Ewell (Craig Ciampa), wrongly accuses Tom Robinson (a heartbreaking Bryce Mathieu) of rape, unleashing a torrent of malicious gossip, an eager-to-pounce lynch mob, and the uncorking of corrosive racism throughout the town.

An initially separate subplot finds Scout, Jem, and Dill intrigued by the reclusive Boo Radley (Joe LaRocca), who not only never shows his face in public but who also, according to Jem (Ryan Spry in his Umbrella Stage debut), lives on “raw squirrels and whatever cats he can find.” Knight, Spry, and Joseph Hobbib (in his Umbrella Stage debut) as Scout and Jem’s visiting friend, Dill, capture the inherent charm of adventurous youngsters approaching the age when they’ll understand how challenging everyday life can be even when you think you’re among friends.

One of the children’s truest friends is Finch family housekeeper, the kindly and stalwart Calpurnia, played in her Umbrella Stage debut by Carolyn Saxon. When Atticus decides the three children should not attend the trial, it is to Calpurnia’s chagrin that her minister, Reverend Sykes (a moving Damon Singletary), arranges for Scout, Jem and Dill to watch from the “colored balcony.”

The estimable Edmiston’s traditional staging of the iconic courtroom scene achieves its full emotional impact through the excellent scene work of Adamson, Mathieu, Havia, and Ciampa, as well as David Berti as the impatient Judge Taylor.

The cast also includes Steven Barkhimer (Sheriff Heck Tate), Karen Dervin (Maudie Atkinson), Aliyah Harris (Helen Robinson), June Kfoury (Mrs. Dubose), Jason Myatt (Mr. Gilmer/Mr. Cunningham), and Ellen Peterson (Stephanie Crawford).

Lighting designer SeifAllah Salotto-Cristobal and sound designer Chris Brousseau collaborate copacetically with set designer Janie E. Howland, the 2024 recipient of the Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence, and Costume Designer Rachel Padula-Shufelt, whose crisply tailored three-piece off-white suit for Atticus is spot-on, to create a freshly envisioned but familiar ambience. The mood is also enhanced by an original score composed and performed on-stage by Valerie Thompson.