The corruption of Atticus Finch

Perhaps the best play on Broadway this season is “To Kill a Mockingbird” the Aaron Sorkin adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel now running at the Schubert Theater on West 44th Street. Led by Jeff Daniels, the show has a superb cast but it’s the Sorkin script that shines most.

The novel is a classic and stands on its own, but Sorkin’s interpretation of the drama set in the Depression era South tells the story with a modern sensibility through several flashbacks to the courtroom where a black man, Tom Robinson, stands accused of raping a white woman. In telling the story this way, instead of a more sequential narration like the novel, Sorkin brings into high relief the essential message that is, to my tastes at least, buried under layers of childhood reminiscence and Jim Crow era Southern custom in the novel.

What becomes clear in Sorkin’s telling of the story is that Atticus Finch, a true believer in the Christian ethic of not judging anyone until “You’ve crawled around in their skin,” is finally, in his adulthood, awakened to the workings of the world. As an attorney the question that looms is whether or not Finch is corrupted to some degree. Spoiler alert–it’s not possible to go through life without at least compromising some of your cherished beliefs.

Sometimes the world is dismissive or uncaring as when Finch’s children led by the unforgettable character of Scout, get into routine childhood scrapes. But other times the world is cruel, and gratuitously so, as when Finch’s client, Robinson, is wrongfully…