Actress brings Detroit lessons to Broadway hit 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
For as long as she can remember, "To Kill a Mockingbird" has loomed large for Celia Keenan-Bolger.
"I remember my mother reading it to me before I could read, and we watched the movie. It was just very much in line with the principles of our household," says the 40-year-old actress and three-time Tony Award nominee, who grew up in Detroit in a family that prioritized working for social justice.
In her family, the classic 1960 novel by Harper Lee wasn't only a great piece of literature. It was a tool for building a caring, empathetic approach to life.
On Dec. 13, when the Aaron Sorkin adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird" officially opens at the Shubert Theateron Broadway, she will be playing the role of young Scout Finch.
Film and TV star Jeff Daniels has the lead role of her father, Atticus Finch, the white lawyer in the racist Jim Crow South who defends a black man falsely accused of rape.
Preview performances have been drawing sellout audiences. Advance sales reportedly are running ahead of any other Broadway show this year, with $1 million in tickets sold within 12 hours after a Thanksgiving weekend "60 Minutes" segment featuring Sorkin and Daniels.
It's a great opportunity for Keenan-Bolger to be featured in a production sure to receive national attention. But landing the part was much more to her than a career move.
"I remember feeling I've been waiting my whole life to do something that combines the political and social justice aspects of my life with a beautiful, beautiful story," she says.
The novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" has sold more than 40 million copies globally. A staple of student reading lists, it was voted America's best-loved novel in October by PBS' "Great American Read."
While staying true to the essential story, Sorkin emphasizes the relevance of "Mockingbird" to today with his play. In his interpretation, Atticus is on a complex journey toward becoming the icon of fairness of the book.
The main African-American characters, defendant Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and the Finch family maid, Calpurnia (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), emerge from the background and are given a larger voice.
Also a key change? The choice of adult actors to portray Finch's young children, Scout and her brother, Jem (Will Pullen, 27 in real life). During the play, the characters go back and forth from their childhood versions to their grown-up selves.
Sorkin, the maestro behind NBC's "The West Wing" and the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "The Social Network," says Keenan-Bolger had an innate grasp of who Scout is, even during the first reading of his adaptation.
"Scout has the first lines in the play, and I was floored the moment Celia began reading. It seemed like a magic trick. By making the slightest, seemingly effortless adjustments to her voice and posture, she slipped back and forth between the woman Scout is and the girl she was," says Sorkin via email. "It turned out it wasn’t magic, she’s just an extraordinary actress playing a very difficult role."
According to Sorkin, she continued to improve her portrayal.
"Honestly, I’d have been thrilled if the performance she gave on the first day of rehearsal was the performance she gave on opening night, but every day, brick by brick, she’d find more layers and more moments and more humor than Scout’s ever had. It takes the audience less than a minute to fall in love with her."
In both Lee's novel and the Oscar-winning 1962 movie starring Gregory Peck, a constant thread is the importance of parents as a moral compass for their children.
Sorkin said that message is as crucial now as it ever was: "What Atticus teaches his kids is decency. In 2018, nothing is more important than that."
It's a lesson Keenan-Bolger absorbed growing up in Detroit, which was home to several generations of her family.
Her late grandparents, William and Leota May (Lee) Keenan, are remembered as a kind couple dedicated to volunteering their time, mentoring young people and supporting integrated communities at a time when unwritten racial boundaries were the norm in the city.
Says Keenan-Bolger, "I remember hearing a story about a black family that lost their house to a fire. There were seven kids and this family came and lived with my grandparents. That was sort of a big deal."
Her father, Rory Bolger, recalls another story that's been passed down, this one about a makeshift cross being burned on the lawn of his in-laws.
As a young couple, Rory Bolger, who now works for Detroit's City Planning Commission, and his late wife, Susan Keenan, a public school teacher who died of breast cancer in 2001, had the same focus on helping others and doing what's right.
They made a conscious decision to send their three children to public schools in the city. Their daughter proudly recalls being immersed in activism as a kid.
"My mother was arrested protesting the Vietnam War. We were brought up just going to protests in Hart Plaza, marching in the Labor Day parade and marching in any number of protests," says Keenan-Bolger, speaking by phone from New York City during the break between matinee and evening performances of "Mockingbird."
Starting sometime in her junior high years, Keenan-Bolger relied on a monologue from "To Kill a Mockingbird" for local acting auditions. She is certain it was her mom's idea. "We cobbled together the Mr. Cunningham speech from the book," she says, referring to the scene where Scout speaks to a mob that's formed to lynch Tom Robinson.
Acting is something she's wanted to do since she was 5 and saw a community theater performance of "The Sound of Music."
"I do vividly remember seeing that production and having a conversation, a 5-year-old's conversation, saying, 'I wanna do that,' " she says.
She began performing with community theaters and children's troupes, where she became friends with another member, Sutton Foster, the Broadway musical veteran and star of TV Land's "Younger."
She kept studying acting at Detroit's School of Arts High School and the city's acclaimed Mosaic Youth Theatre. "I know (my parents) were so happy because they didn't have to drive me 20 miles out to the suburbs," she says with a laugh.
Ironically, it was her younger siblings – actress/playwright Maggie Keenan-Bolger and Broadway actor Andrew Keenan-Bolger ("Seussical," "Beauty and the Beast") – who got the first crack at appearing onstage in earlier versions of "Mockingbird." They played Scout and Dill, a friend of the Finch siblings, in local Michigan productions.
When she was 11, Celia Keenan-Bolger almost landed a part in a touring company of "Les Miserables." Former Free Press theater critic Martin F. Kohn, who happened to be covering the 1989 auditions, says, "She just impressed the heck out of the casting director because she sang so well. She was wearing braces at the time and he wanted to know if they could take her braces off, because he was really serious about casting her in the show."
Keenan-Bolger recalls the heartbreak that followed. "I remember not getting that part and going home and just lying on the couch and crying and crying. (But) I learned early on that even though it was really sad, I could handle it. I liked acting enough that I kept pursuing it."
What she didn't know then: After graduating from college and moving to New York City, she would have a chance to play Eponine in "Les Miz" on Broadway.
The University of Michigan musical theater school alumnus has worked steadily in new plays and revivals, dramas and musicals. In 2005, she got her first Tony nod for the quirky musical "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee." She was nominated again in 2011 for "Peter and the Starcatcher" and in 2014 for playing Laura in a revival of "The Glass Menagerie."
In both "Putnam County" and "Starcatcher," Keenan-Bolger played girls more than half her age. She considers her ability to tap into her inner child as something of an inherent gift.
"The truth is there was a time where I was like, 'I don't want to do this anymore. I'm in my 30s – and now I'm 40 – and I have a lot of other things I want (to do). But I liken it to somebody who has a really beautiful soprano voice and who plays a lot of ingenues. That's what you're sort of born with. If there's something you can access that the industry needs, and you keep getting called on to do it, that's what you do."
When "Mockingbird" had its first table read, producer Scott Rudin suggested asking adult actors to do the children's parts, which presented the biggest casting challenge. As Sorkin wrote last month in Vulture.com: "We’d told them it was a one-time thing and they wouldn’t be moving on with the play, but as they read, it all just seemed … right. Even inevitable."
Keenan-Bolger recalls being happy about the opportunity, but expecting nothing in return. She was a huge Sorkin fan and she'd worked previously with the play's director, Bartlett Sher. "It was sort of like, 'I'll be able to go in and show off; maybe they'll cast me in something else and they'll see that I'm good.' "
On the second day, Sher told her that they were thinking the play might work without child actors. "The next morning, I got an email at breakfast from Scott Rudin that was like, 'Do you want to play Scout on Broadway?' "
After preparing with two workshops, six weeks of rehearsals and nearly six weeks of previews, Keenan-Bolger says still she feels "an enormous responsibility" in playing Scout. That's what preoccupies her thoughts now, not the sheer excitement of appearing in a standing-room-only sensation.
"The script is so incredible and, obviously, the source material, what Harper Lee made, is so special and brilliant. I think Aaron has adapted it in such a particularly relevant way to the time that we're living in."
Keenan-Bolger, who's acting with Daniels for the first time, says it's been fun to tell him about her trips to his Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea. She admires his decision to live and raise his family in the small Michigan town and to create a theater there, providing jobs for fellow actors.
These days, she's carrying on her traditions of home with her husband, Broadway actor John Ellison Conlee, and their 3-year-old son, William. She still marches for causes, only now it's in New York City. A profile done last year described her taking her son to a protest denouncing hate and racism after the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
She was wearing a shirt that said "The Future is Female." He was wearing a "Black Lives Matter" onesie.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Actress brings Detroit lessons to Broadway hit 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
