Prompt 6 Response - Mockingbird (Derek)

Within the play To Kill a Mockingbird (attended Sept. 9), I feel that the adult characters want to regulate the children's seeing, sympathizing, and knowing. Atticus and Calpernia repeatedly tell the children to not try to see Boo Radley, to leave and not watch Atticus shoot the dog, to not follow Atticus to the town jail at night, to leave the courtroom: "It's not right for children to see such things," they say repeatedly. However, it is important for children to see such things, and for them to discuss what they've seen with adults who can help them to contextualize and understand and make meaning--although as Scout, Jem, and Dill each demonstrates, children will make meaning on their own. Children live in the community, in the larger society; they are not only passive spectators, they are active meaning-makers as well as agents of change. In To Kill a Mockingbird, theatricality enables meaning making both for the child characters such as Scout as well as for the audience. A good example of this occurs in the night scene when Atticus, the lynch mob, and the children are gathered at the town square in front of the jail.

Atticus is sitting by the Civil War memorial in the town square at midnight when the lynch mob arrives. The ensemble actors enter the theater from the doors at the rear of the orchestra (i.e. behind the audience), and walk down the aisles to approach the foot of the stage. My attention was split between looking at the stage and looking at the ensemble cast members standing next to me. This drew my attention to the fact that I was a spectator; it heightened my self-awareness and my awareness of the collective experience of being in the audience. Sitting near the ensemble actors standing in the aisle, I could also see how the director was asking the audience to consider themselves as part of the scene (this happens again later during the court scene when Atticus addresses the audience as the jury). I felt myself being asked to decide, to make a choice, for example, whether I would align myself with the lynch mob, or with Atticus, or with the children, or make my own choice. As the scene continued, and the ensemble cast moved up onto the stage proper, I found myself thinking primarily about what choices I would make as Atticus, and then later what choices I would make as Mr. Cunningham (?) -- the lyncher that Scout talks to so freely. Atticus wants to send the children home, and the lynchers do too. However, the children want to stay with Atticus. Their refusal to close their eyes and remain ignorant/innocent shames the men in the lynch mob. This is observable most clearly in Mr. Cunningham when Scout starts talking to him about his son and what they've been doing in school, and she asks him to say hello to the son for her. The young girl playing Scout spoke unhesitatingly, with a natural effluence that we sometimes see in children, which gave me the impression that her character was oblivious to the gravity and danger of the situation. The more Scout talks to Mr. Cunningham, the more shame he feels, until his aggression evaporates in a recollection of Self, popping him out of the lynch-mob mentality. It is a return from a state of deindividuation. "Recognizing the gap between signifier and signified, truth and effect," I did not believe the 21st-century actors really experienced the emotions sincerely during this scene (Davis, 142). I saw the adult actor portraying an adult, intending to do an immoral act, suddenly recollecting himself as a role model for children, and changing his mind. While I couldn't sympathize with being in a lynch mob, the abstract dynamics of the situation are familiar to me, and I would assume to most adults. As for the child actors, I felt they gave the portrayal of an emotion, but did not live the emotion.

After the lynching party is broken up and everyone goes home, Scout has a chance to reflect on the events that transpired that night, and the narrator (adult-Scout) says that when the full meaning of the events hit her in bed, she started crying. This indicates child-Scout's awareness of the theatricality, although meaning-making was delayed until bedtime when she had time to reflect and think. Similarly for the theater audience, full meaning-making most likely occurs after the play ends and one has time to digest the theatricality more fully, perhaps while walking home and talking it over with a fellow spectator, or perhaps later while thinking in bed, or perhaps not until those thoughts are written down. Just as adult-Scout demonstrates meaning-making through writing in narrating the play, the latter is demonstrated by us in writing these responses (or by Taylor writing about 9/11).