'To Kill A Mockingbird' flying to Broadway, with Aaron Sorkin adapting
Harper Lee and her Pulitzer Prize-winning classic To Kill A Mockingbird are once again in the news, this time for a Broadway-bound play.
It was announced Wednesday that a stage adaptation of Mockingbird is being readied for the 2017-18 Broadway season, with Oscar winner Aaron Sorkin writing and Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher — a celebrated interpreter of American classics, currently represented on Broadway by The King And I and Fiddler On The Roof— directing.
Sorkin, whose most recent screenplay was Steve Jobs, was last represented on Broadway by 2007's The Farnsworth Invention. His A Few Good Men was produced there in 1989.
The reclusive Lee, 89, was catapulted back into the public eye last year with the release of Go Set a Watchman, a “newly discovered” novel she wrote in the 1950s and only the second book ever from the writer.
'Train,' 'Grey,' 'Watchman' top book sales
Watchman essentially is an early draft of 1960's Mockingbird; most shockingly, it revealed Atticus Finch, Mockingbird's hero, to be a racist. The controversy over the novel, and worldwide publicity over the reemergence of the elderly writer, made Watchman an instant best seller. It also increased sales of Mockingbird, a perennial classroom classic.