Two books, two roles

Boy oh boy do people get stabby when you mess with the classic stories they grew up with. Two of my favorites, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank, are in the news this week. This year marks the 50th anniversary of TKAM, so much revisionist literary criticism is called for. And a British writer has written a novelization of Frank’s Holocaust captivity, which has come under fire because of its depiction of a relationship between Frank and Peter van Pels (van Daan in the original edition of the published diary).

I’m not just a lover of these two books. I also appeared in community theatre adaptations of both when I was in high school and college – as it happens, two of my favorite roles.

Let’s take Anne first, because I played her first – twice, actually, in 10th and 11th grades in productions for local school children. It’s interesting to me that people are freaking out at the idea that Anne and Peter might have crushed on one another, given that the Goodrich/Hackett theatre adaptation went there about 50-some years ago: the play has them going on a “date” in Peter’s small room and kissing. Even the more historically accurate version of the play that opened on Broadway in the late 90s saw Anne and Peter spending a lot of time together, and added monologues (direct from the diary) where Anne talks pretty frankly about her sexuality.

That’s how I tried to approach her. Yes, Anne Frank is an icon of innocent idealism destroyed by bigotry, but before all of that she was a person – a girl who bitched about her family, who tore pictures of movie stars out of magazines and taped them to her wall. She was a girl that, at 15, I could identify with easily. Doesn’t part of Anne’s appeal, 65 years after her death, lie in the fact that teenage girls everywhere feel what she felt? That we’re special, that we’re misunderstood, that we just can’t wait for the one person who will instantly know these things about us? These are universal emotions.

Of course novelizing the life of a real person is going to raise eyebrows. But, please, don’t make Anne Frank a marble statue.

Atticus Finch has kind of been turned into a marble statue over the years, at no fault of To Kill a Mockingbird or its film adaptation, or the play version that I was in when I was about 20. Atticus seems to be the locus of the “TKAM isn’t THAT great” crowd’s criticism, with the Wall Street Journal calling him “a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams.” His main offense seems to be the scene early in the novel where Atticus tells his daughter Scout that the KKK is foolish, and nothing to be feared.

Let’s remember that Scout is six years old when this scene happens, so Atticus is perfectly justified in downplaying the brutality of the organization he’s about to go up against. (What is he supposed to say. “Yeah, they lynched somebody just last week, six-year-old. Let me tell you all about it...”) And, more importantly, let’s remember that the entire rest of the novel refutes this moment where Atticus gives his daughter a little comfort. Whether it’s Atticus facing down the KKK at the courthouse, classmates and relatives calling Scout a n****-lover or, you know, the entire plot of a racially motivated trial – TKAM’s theme that racism a) exists and b) is both harmful and stupid, couldn’t possibly be clearer.

My role in the theatre production of this story? I played Mayella Ewell, the woman who accuses Atticus Finch’s client Tom Robinson of rape. It’s still probably my favorite role, because it was just such a stretch for me. Unlike Anne Frank, I had next to nothing in common with Mayella. My job was to find some way to connect with her so that she wouldn’t be just a caricature. I focused on passages in the novel – Mayella hauling extra water for the flowers she grew at her house, thinking about the extra work that meant for her, and why she would take that on with everything else she had to do. Thanks to the part where Mayella talks about making shoes for herself and her siblings out of old tires, I even picked up a tire tread from the side of the highway so I could feel what it was like to walk on.

My hope is that I presented a character with which the audience could empathize, even as she did terrible things. I didn’t have to create Mayella’s humanity on my own; I had quite a bit to go on thanks to what Harper Lee wrote decades earlier.

So, when someone complains that TKAM is simplistic in its morality, I’m mystified. Maybe that reader who feels that way didn’t have the proper context of life in the South in the 1930s, when it takes place, or 1960, when it was published – but that’s hardly the novel’s fault. I’m not going to knife-fight people who don’t like TKAM because they think it’s too one-note. But I am going to pity them, because they’re missing out.