To Kill A Mockingbird, book and play

This class is necessarily mostly about drama in various forms and not about books, and while I'm interested in all the new forms and theory we've been gathering this term, I'm still a book person at heart. When I went to see Mockingbird, it made me feel overwhelmingly sentimental, not just in sympathy with the character of the play, which is firmly fixed in the past, but also for my own childhood when I read To Kill A Mockingbird. One of the chief sources of pleasure in watching the play was remembering the book. It made it difficult for me to think analytically about the play as a play. I liked Adult Scout because having her as a narrator allowed them to quote long passages from the book, but I can see how a less literal interpretation of the book could have been a more powerful experience for the audience. Here are a few quotes that were in my mind as I watched, but were left out of the play:

After the death of Mrs. Dubose, Atticus tells Jem that she was a great lady:

"She was. She had her own views about things, a lot different from mine, maybe . . . son, I told you that if you hadn't lost your head, I'd have made you go read to her. I wanted you to see something about her--I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew."

From the children's visit to Calpurnia's church:

That Calpurnia lead a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages.

When Dill runs away to come visit them:

"Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly taking himself to sleep and me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of a gray house with sad brown doors."

When Atticus and Calpurnia tell Helen Robinson that Tom is dead:

"Sam was trotting behind his mother when they came up. Dill said Helen said, 'Evenin', Mr. Finch, won't you have a seat?' But she didn't say any more. Neither did Atticus.

'Scout,' said Dill, 'she just tell down in the dirt. Just fell down in the dirt, like a giant with a big foot just came along and stepped on her.'"