'To Kill a Mockingbird' gets fresh update starring John-Boy from 'The Waltons'

Let’s get this out of the way immediately. Yes, this Richard Thomas – the one who plays Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” opening May 31 at the Aronoff Center – is the same Richard Thomas who played John-Boy in “The Waltons.”

John-Boy was the dramatic anchor of the wildly successful television series, which was set in the Virginia mountains during the Great Depression. “The Waltons” ran for a decade, though Thomas left after the fifth season. He fretted that the enormous fondness audiences felt for his character would come to typecast him. His strategy didn’t work.

Despite his early departure, John-Boy’s nice-guy appeal was so profound that it came to define him for a generation of TV-watchers. Unlike many actors, though, who grow resentful of being identified by a single, long-ago role, Thomas still has great affection for the series, which he left in 1977.

“I was so proud of that show,” he said recently. “I’m still proud of it. I loved watching it with my mother and then my grandma. Now my children watch the show.”

So if you can’t outrun the memory of a particular role, how do you advance your career? How do you broaden the range of roles you play?

Thomas sighs. It’s a question he's been asked many times before. He’s 70 now and he understands that many people still view him as that affable, quick-to-smile 25-year-old back on Walton’s Mountain.

“I’m an actor,” he said. “It’s what I’ve done all my life. A long time ago, I came to understand that I’m not in charge of how people perceive me. You just have to find ways to help people’s image of you as an actor grow. You have to keep working at it. If you are lucky enough to keep working, that is.”

And Thomas has kept working – a lot. Indeed, he’s hardly slowed down since he made his Broadway debut at the age of 7 in “Sunrise at Campobello,” which featured the legendary Ralph Bellamy as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a 27-year-old newcomer named James Earl Jones.

Thomas was surrounded by the arts from the time he was born. His parents, Barbara Fallis and Richard Thomas Sr., were noted ballet dancers.

“I have such happy memories of those early years,” said Thomas. “Home life was centered around dance, which was a good thing. I loved being raised by dancers. I took class with my folks. Actually, when I was 12 or 13, I joined the children’s corps de ballet in ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Raymonda’ when the Kirov Ballet was at the old Metropolitan Opera House.”

Since then, he has moved back and forth from television to film to theater, building a resume that would be the envy of any actor. He’s performed in works by Shakespeare and Arthur Miller. He’s performed in theatrical premieres and Emmy Award-winning TV shows.

So it’s probably fitting that, at this time of his life, he is tackling one of American literature’s iconic characters, a white lawyer who represents a Black man unjustly accused of rape in a small town in 1930s Alabama.

The production that is coming here, one of the rare non-musical shows presented by Broadway in Cincinnati, is an adaptation created by producer/screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing,” “Steve Jobs,” A Few Good Men”).

While leaving the Harper Lee story in place, Sorkin did a good deal of tweaking to the details to improve what he felt were some of the novel’s dramatic shortcomings.

“How did Harper Lee get away with having a protagonist who doesn’t change,” Sorkin said in a story for the Atlantic. “I absolutely wanted Atticus to be a traditional protagonist, so he needed to change and have a flaw … It turned out that Harper Lee had (already) given him one; it’s just that when we all learned the book, it was taught as a virtue. It’s that Atticus believes that goodness can be found in everyone.”

Similarly, though the story had to do with racial justice, the only two Black characters were rarely heard. And when we did hear them, they didn’t expound on the injustices they saw.

Soon after Harper Lee died in 2016, her estate sued to stop the Broadway show from opening. They felt that some of the liberties Sorkin had taken with the script went too far. In time, the suit was resolved and the production went ahead. But the play that we will see here has some essential differences from the Oscar-winning movie.

“Aaron has created a more flesh-and-blood Atticus,” said Thomas. “He’s given him a more complicated journey. He’s also dealt with the White Savior issue of Atticus Finch.”

It has made Atticus a far more complex character. But it has also made him a more real, said Thomas.

“As an actor, you can’t play an icon. You can only play a person. The most important thing is that Aaron has written a wonderful theater experience. He hasn’t just adapted a novel’s storyline. It’s not a novel, not a movie. He’s created a terrific piece of theater.”

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Broadway in Cincinnati brings new 'To Kill a Mockingbird' adaptation