The legal battles surrounding Aaron Sorkin’s Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird seem to have finally settled down. The play is currently running on Broadway after battles with Lee’s estate. But because of snafus with the publisher’s rights, regional productions of an older stage adaptation were hit with cease-and-desist orders from Broadway producer Scott Rudin and Lee’s estate. “The attempts to stymie way-way-off-Broadway productions of the source material was met with so much backlash,” says Rolling Stone, “that Rudin has offered a compromise: The theater companies can still stage their Kill a Mockingbird productions, but they must use the Sorkin script.” It’s nice that high school productions aren’t being sued anymore, but does everyone really want to do the Sorkin version? This is the play that Lee’s estate found so divergent from the book that they sued. Fourteen productions of the previous adaptation by Christopher Sergel now have the option of showing real courage by soldiering on with Sorkin’s version.
