(CIBC Theatre, 8 August 2023)
"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others," is the principle attributed to Groucho Marx. But is it a good principle? And if it is not, what about the others?
The world in which every soul assesses every situation on a case-by-case basis and in accordance with his or her private ethics may be unpredictably slow and bureaucratic or unpredictably fast and chaotic but definitely unpredictable and---by failing to treat equals equally except in the arbitrariness of the manner in which justice is administered---unjust. At the same time, work-to-rule is a time-honoured tool for industrial action. At best, it sabotages production. At worst, it begets evil, a product of the failure to think, as illustrated by the story of Eichmann in Jerusalem. One cannot outsource all thinking to the past, to the founding fathers, and fear no adverse consequences.
Even though it may be wise not to commit to principles, it may be profitable to commit to a stance that would adjudicate among competing principles. Liberal Democracy is such a stance. The democratic component of the liberal democracy infuses the political process with a degree of inertia that invites deliberation and mitigates the coercion of the masses by the elites. The liberal component of the liberal democracy holds the promise of injecting political process with just the right amount of elitism to give the demmocracy a promising direction.
Liberal democracy does not obviate the juggling-in-principles act at the individual level, though. Nor does it absolve the individual of the responsibility for violating (or failing to violate) one’s own principles, the prevailing laws, or social norms.
It is better to be loyal than disloyal, mostly to principles rather than to people, although the two loyalties will mostly align under the right principles. And one ought to never stop examining one’s principles.
Richard Thomas as Atticus Finch and Aaron Sorkin, the playwright, carry the production into the territory of the excellent. Thomas has just the right amount of drawl, and his sprightly kinematics lets him (age 72) pass for a fifty-year old father. His speech is clear, and his bearing is confident. He makes Atticus's part seem easy to inhabit.
Sorkin has stepped aside and then forward a hundred years in order to write for the ages, which is what one needs to do in order to have a chance to succeed in the moment.
The choice to cast adults as children is artistically questionable. Perhaps, American children lack the free-range childhoods that would enable them to absorb enough life in order to be able to project theatre parts with any degree of authenticity. The adults in the children’s parts did not do much better than this counterfactual, though. They tried hard to act as children, while what children usually do is try hard to act as adults. After the first couple of scenes, though, the suspension of disbelief takes hold (possibly because Steven Lee Johnson joins the company onstage, and he is good), and the Thomas–Sorkin miracle manifests itself.
