To Kill a Mockingbird: Setting in the Novel and Its Dramatic Adaptation

Congruency between an original work and its adaptation is of the utmost importance to an audience familiar with the original work. Recently, an adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird was brought to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (ASF) as a play and in the interest of determining whether or not the adaptation successfully represented the award-winning novel, the production presented to theatre-goers on March 25th, 2006 was closely examined. There are many elements one can scrutinize in determining the faithfulness of an adaptation to its predecessor, but the first thing a person notices upon walking into the theatre is the layout of the stage. Was ASF's production of To Kill a Mockingbird adequately representative of the novel in terms of setting?

First of all, recognizing the difficulty of representing an entire novel with a single stage is important. In the novel, the narrator takes us from the Finch house (inside and out) to the Maycomb county square which includes many buildings like the Maycomb Bank, the Maycomb courthouse, and the county jail, to name a few. The narrator takes us also to Finch's Landing where we watch Scout visit (and, once, pummel) relatives. We are given a nice enough picture of the neighborhood surrounding Scout's home, including the homes of most of the Finch's neighbors. The narrator even takes us to some of the more unsavory locales--the Ewell place on the outskirts of the town dump and the homes of the poverty-stricken blacks not too far from that. The sympathetic critic knows that a single stage will never be adequate to fully express so many varying locales, not only because of space issues, but those of time as well.