To Kill A Mockingbird
Friday, November 3, 8 pm, Saturday, November 4, 8 pm, Thursday, November 9, 10 am, Friday, November 10, 10 am & 8 pm, Saturday, November 11, 8 pm
$10 and $5 for students and seniors
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Roxbury Community College (RCC) proudly presents Nelle Harper Lee’s Pulitzer prize-winning classic To Kill A Mockingbird, a coming-of-age story about innocence and injustice, friendship and intolerance, good and evil in the Deep South. The novel, published in 1960, is studied in classrooms and has been adapted into numerous stage productions and into an Academy Award-winning film. This production will be performed by a talented cast of actors from all around New England, and directed by Marshall Hughes in collaboration with Emerson College dramaturge Robbie McCauley. A profoundly influential literary work, To Kill A Mockingbird sells nearly a million copies a year. In 1991 American librarians voted the book the best novel of the 20th Century. That same year the American Film Institute (AFI) rated the film version as the 34th best film ever made; and in 2003, the AFI chose Atticus Finch as the greatest hero of American cinema. In 2005 Time Magazine named To Kill A Mockingbird one of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present.
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Set in the Great Depression of the 1930’s, To Kill A Mockingbird takes place in Maycomb, Alabama, but most agree it is a story about the human experience and could happen anywhere. The novel replays three key years in the life of Scout, the young daughter of Atticus Finch, the town's principled lawyer. Scout's narrative relates how she and her elder brother Jem learn about fighting prejudice and upholding human dignity through the example of their father, who has taken on the legal defense of a black man who has been falsely charged with raping a white woman. Lee’s themes include racial justice, and the obligation we have to follow our own internal ethical compasses; class, and our tendencies to stereotype people for our own convenience; and tolerance, and the need to be accepting of all people, especially those unlike ourselves.
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Robbie McCauley has been an active presence in American avant-garde theater for more than three decades. Her early work in New York included performances in plays by Lanford Wilson at Cafe Cino and by Adrienne Kennedy at the New York Shakespeare Festival. On Broadway, she appeared in the original cast of for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange. In the 1990s, she received both an OBIE Award (Best Play) and a New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award for Sally’s Rape, which she wrote, directed and performed in many locations nationally and internationally. Robbie recently directed A Streetcar Named Desire, voted one of the 10 top shows to see in 2006 by the New England Entertainment Digest, and Twelve Angry Men, both on RCC Mainstage, and will appear in the upcoming premiere of Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar at Mainstage in the spring. She is currently associate professor of theater at Emerson College in Boston.
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Marshall Hughes, the Director of Visual, Performing, and Media Arts at Roxbury Community College is founder and director of Opera unmet, an urban opera company that has performed in major venues over the past decade including the Hatch Shell, Symphony Hall, and First Night ceremonies. Marshall conducted SANS, an International Choral Exchange Choir, for over fifteen years, leading tours to the former Soviet Union, Russia, The Balkans and China. He has performed extensively on the international stage, including Holland, Europe and the United States, and has directed major theater productions at several colleges, including Emerson College in Boston. Marshall has been on the faculties of Emerson College, New England Conservatory of Music, Boston Conservatory of Music, and Wheelock College, and is currently on the dance faculty of Emmanuel College.
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