Around the Creek: Learn How Center Rep Will Dare to Bring THIS American Classic to Walnut Creek

Last year, when I heard that Center Repertory Company had decided to present a stage version of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird at the Lesher Center for the Arts this spring, I thought: "Very cool!" 

I e-mailed Michael Butler, the artistic director of Center Rep, the city-run theater company, saying that he likely had an automatic audience of students from local high school English classes. Surely, Lee's beloved coming-of-age novel, which examines racial intolerance in the Depressio-era South, is still required reading in high school English classes. Also, around the time I learned that To Kill a Mockingbird was on Rep's 2010-11 season, my son finished the book and declared it to be "great." He said that--as any book should--it took him to a whole different world, and he loved being immersed in it. 

My son and I also eagerly watched the 1962 film version, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. My son also declared that to be great.

The role of Atticus Finch not only won Peck the Academy Award for Best Actor but earned him icon status. Peck's Finch is "the gold standard for representations of fatherhood on film, writes Salon.com. Finch is a widowed father, raising Scout, the book and film's narrator, and her brother Jem while fighting a noble but doomed struggle to defend a poor black man wrongly accused of rape.

While I'm very much looking forward to Center Rep's production, which opens April 1, I confess to wondering how the company will sell audiences on a non-Gregory Peck version of the story. 

That's why I'm going to the downtown Walnut Creek Library this evening to  hear Michael Butler talk about bringing this American classic to the stage in Walnut Creek. Butler is directing the show. 

In his Live! From the Library talk, "To Kill A Mockingbird: From Page to Stage," Butler will be joined by cast members of this Center Rep production.  He and the actors will discuss bringing this well-known novel to the stage. History teacher Meg Honey, who last spring led her St. Joseph Notre Dame High School students on a Civil Rights Movement tour of the South, will moderate the talk and place the novel in the context of Alabama in the 1930s when the story takes place.

Unfortunately, the talk, which is free, is also full. But you can still sign up for the waiting list by going to the library foundation's website. 

In the meantime, I have a tremendous amount of confidence in Michael Butler's ability to make this a must-see show. His fall production of Dracula was one of the best pieces of theater I've seen in a long time.  It totally made me forget Bela Lugosi or Robert Pattinson.  

I've been a fan of Butler since 2006 when he directed an inventive, fast-past, hilarious version of Around the World in 80 Days, before he even signed on to be artistic director of Center Rep.  His 2008 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream made my son, then 10, fall in love with Shakespeare. Overall, Butler has brought a younger, more hip sensibility to the Lesher Center's in-house theater company. 

Center Rep's To Kill a Mockingbird plays April 1- April 30. For tickets and information, call 925-943-7469 or visit www.lesherartscenter.org.