Offscript - Why plays aren’t movies

Only at their peril should playhouses compete with cinema, and Georgia Ensemble Theatre’s To Kill a Mockingbird, playing through March 9, is a prime example. Local audiences will always be drawn to Harper Lee’s novel, one of the most beloved books about the South ever written. But Christopher Sergel’s adaptation is nowhere near the league of either the book or the 1962 film, which had an Oscar-winning script by Horton Foote.

To stage the theatrical version of a work that’s been superbly filmed and is available at any self-respecting video store, is an invitation to unflattering comparisons. Georgia Ensemble Theatre certainly could find no better local choice than Mark Kincaid to play Atticus Finch, country lawyer and paragon of integrity and good parenting. Although Kincaid gives Atticus a vivid, truthful interpretation, he simply can’t escape the shadows of Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning performance.

Of course, if playhouses rejected scripts just because better or more famous actors had appeared in them, theater as an institution would become pretty barren. But in other areas, the theatrical Mockingbird proves better suited to screen than stage. During the mad-dog scene, the film could show us an actual rabid canine, which the play can only leave to our imagination.

Inevitably, theater can end up being more about telling than showing, a point emphasized, with inadvertent comedy, by both Laurence Olivier’s and Kenneth Branagh’s film versions of Henry V. In each movie the chorus bids us to imagine the clash of armies: “Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?” Then the films actually show huge battle scenes, making the chorus’ disclaimer invalid.

Georgia Ensemble Theatre’s Mockingbird also requires us to imagine the costumes the children wear for a school pageant, and even the crucial, knot-holed tree via which the kids bond with the enigmatic Boo Radley. When it doesn’t try to beat cinema at its own game, the play fares a little better at evoking the feel of small-town, Depression-era Alabama, with the show’s 16 actors representing a diversity of social strata. Yet Robert B. Putnam’s set looks like a museum exhibit of rocking chairs and sepia-colored small-town locales, and Sergel’s narration strings together too many Southern cliches.

Mockingbird’s centerpiece courtroom scene, however, works quite well by being the most theatrical — instead of cinematic — part of the story. Whether live or on celluloid, as Atticus defends a black man wrongfully accused of a crime by a poor, vicious white family, the action takes place in a single interior room, which sets sharply defined characters in opposition, teases out surprise revelations and lets its tensions rise and fall.

These are the kind of virtues that go unappreciated by young movie audiences with short attention spans and the filmmakers who cater to them. Yet they can make for great movies as well as great plays. Being a film buff actually made me into an admirer of theater. I’d thrill to the visceral experience of, say, early Spielberg, but I found that the works with real staying power were the ones with strong theatrical roots: The Lion in Winter, Sleuth, The Ruling Class, Mr. Roberts, Amadeus, etc.

Movies that hew closely to their theatrical origins get criticized for being “stagy,” which often means that they emphasize substance over superficial style. Theater doesn’t have the resources to compete with film on that level and can’t always tell the same stories. Georgia Ensemble Theatre’s To Kill A Mockingbird proves that Harper Lee’s story sometimes doesn’t want to be a play. It would be better for theaters to embrace works that are fully theatrical rather than try to beat movies at their own game.

Time of the Season

The New Jomandi Productions, despite its difficulties in recent years, has announced the lineup for its upcoming 25th anniversary season, which features two new plays and two revivals. It begins Sept. 12-28 with the world premiere of Unfinished Business by Faye McDonald Smith and Janice Coombs Reid. On Dec. 1-21 the company offers its perennial holiday show Black Nativity. Autobiography of a Homegirl, running Feb. 9-29, considers the significance of the first African-American woman to win the Miss America pageant. And the season concludes with a revival of its superlative 1997 production Home, with dates to be announced.

Milestone

On March 7, Peachtree Playhouse’s comedy Peachtree Battle shifts into the passing lane to overtake Driving Miss Daisy as the longest-running theatrical production in Atlanta history. The play, which opened Sept. 7, 2001, is currently expected to close Aug. 3, but surely they’ll extend it to its second anniversary.

Opening Out of Town

Two scripts by Atlanta playwright Rob Nixon, “Casse-Tete” and “The Lies of Handsome Men,” will be produced by Los Angeles’ Hudson Street Theater for six weeks beginning in April.

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com

Off Script is a biweekly column on the Atlanta theater scene.