The Rep’s “Mockingbird” memory

At the Rep, To Kill a Mockingbird relates a tragic narrative of racist injustice, but does so almost incidentally.

Christopher Sergel’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s iconic American novel places us in the grown-up mind of Jeanne Louise, known as Scout in her youth. In the novel and the play, Jeanne Louise/Scout stands in for Harper Lee.

Deborah Staples plays Jeanne Louise, the grown-up narrator of her own story. Sergel and director Aaron Posner surround her with townsfolk of Maycomb, Alabama, 1935. They keep their distance and listen to the story along with us until they emerge as needed to play the scenes.

Jeanne Louise’s immediate circle — the lawyer and father Atticus Finch, older brother Jem, Scout, young neighbor Dill and their housekeeper, Calpurnia — orbits more closely and more frequently enact the story as Jeanne Louise tells it.

The structure removes all trace of the melodramatic, liberal civil-rights fable this story can become. At the Rep, To Kill a Mockingbird becomes a memory play, the story of one telling summer in the life of a little girl and in the woman she would become. This production makes Lee’s moral and political points without earnest preaching. It looks and feels honest, not least because it’s not only about race. It’s about life, and this play hasn’t purged the warmth and humor from it.

Lee E. Ernst’s Atticus lives by a moral code that is firm but accounts for human frailty — even his own. I don’t recall such nuance from the famous Gregory Peck film. The Rep’s Atticus Finch is no liberal idealist out to undo the evil racists. He understands the toxic stew of ignorance and desperation that could get a black man hanged for a rape he clearly did not commit. He uses the law to tilt at this condition, and does so with the implacable patience of water wearing away stone. This Atticus is a realist, but one who always strives to do the right thing.

Ernst’s carriage suggests a man utterly comfortable in his own skin. He listens carefully even to racist nonsense; he wants to understand. He lays out his points methodically, developing themes, controlling pace and gathering mass and force of logic in the subtlest expansion of volume and gesture.

Thomas Kindler, John Brotherhood and Mallorey Wallace play Dill, Jem and Scout without a whiff of affectation. The young actors, especially Wallace, carry big loads in this play, and they do it with the grace of seasoned professionals. They relate with easy warmth to Ernst and to Ora Jones, as Calpurnia. Calpurnia, by the way, is a role fraught with Hattie-McDaniel peril. Jones found the key to it: Her body language and vocal tone let us know that within the Finch household, she is as an equal. And she knows in her bones she should be an equal everywhere. You don’t merely like Jones’ Calpurnia, you admire her.

The large, skilled ensemble around the family resembles a Greek chorus. They frequently become a real chorus, humming and harmonizing old tunes to provide their own underscoring. Singer-guitarists Fred Pike and Cody Craven, onstage throughout, add period-sounding music. Do stick around for their closing song.

Scenic designer Kevin Depinet gave them an all-purpose, small-town, down-at-the-heels town space to play in. It evokes a time and place without getting in the way. Rachel Healy’s costumes look great, reveal character and take us back to the 1930s. But I couldn’t help wondering why so many characters wear sweaters and jackets in the middle of a long, hot Alabama summer. That outerwear struck the only slightly false note in a beautifully tuned show that has the ring of truth about it.

Due to high demand, the Rep has extended To Kill a Mockingbird through March 11. Tickets range from $10 to $65. To order, call (414) 224-9490 or visit the Rep’s online box office.

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