Actor walks in Atticus' shoes in 'Mockingbird' - Cincinnati.com |
| Actor walks in Atticus' shoes in 'Mockingbird' - Cincinnati.com Posted: 03 Dec 2010 07:01 AM PST In 2003, the American Film Institute voted Atticus Finch the greatest hero in American film. Finch is, of course, the widowed father, attorney and man of honor and integrity of Harper Lee's great novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" and its equally great film adaptation. Kieran Cronin is currently playing Finch on stage at Northern Kentucky University. "It's daunting," Cronin says. Set in 1936 in 'Maycomb,' Alabama, the narrator is Finch's six year-old daughter, Scout. It's a pivotal summer in her young life; her father has been appointed by the court to defend a black man who has been accused of raping a young white woman. "On the surface Atticus seems stoic, collected, but there's so much going on underneath." Cronin, an NKU senior who grew up in Kennedy Heights and Pleasant Ridge, has been avoiding the film version with Gregory Peck's indelible performance, but it's waiting on his Netflix list for after the run of the show. "Atticus is unorthodox. For him, idealism is reality - all men are created equal. He's complicated and intense." The cast and production staff of NKU's "Mockingbird" spent a weekend in Alabama at the beginning of November, with stops in Monroeville (the model for Maycomb), Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. Cronin explained that production director Daryl Harris "thought it was important for us to see what Harper Lee was talking about." Among the highlights, the troupe rehearsed the pivotal courtroom scene in the town's old Court House (now a museum) and met with two members of the historical society. In Tuscaloosa, they visited the University of Alabama and learned more about author Lee. The field trip's final stop was in Birmingham and the Civil Rights Institute. "We looked out the window, it was across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church" (where four African-American teenaged girls were murdered in 1963 in a racially motivated bombing). "It opened our eyes," Cronin said. "You can read all the textbooks you want, but being there really underlined the connections to today - about issues with race, gender, sexuality. "A big part of 'Mockingbird' is about the lessons kids learn about walking in someone else's shoes," Cronin says. "Everyone was hit so emotionally by the entire experience" of the Alabama trip. "We bonded as a cast, too, which is important for this production." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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