Brother Sixtus shares with us a recent experience in Providence, which prompted some significant memories.

Marquee for To Kill a Mockingbird in Providence

I was a tall but shy kid, so to be cast in a high school production was nerve-wracking. My main asset must have been my height because I was always cast as the dad, someone’s grandfather or, in the case of Arsenic and Old Lace, the lawyer whose imminent poisoning by elderberry wine brings down the final curtain. Little surprise, then, that my entire educational and professional career after high school was spent more comfortably behind the scenes, behind the scenery. No stage fright found there. Towards the end of my senior year of 1969-70, Miss Dossenbach, our school’s German teacher, entered me in an annual Dramatic Reading Festival held at a local university campus. My assignment: deliver the closing argument to the jury of the lawyer Atticus Finch from the 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The book was so recent that it had not yet entered the canon of required reading for high school English classes, and the Gregory Peck film version was still two years in the future. I had nothing to go on for inspiration, except maybe the old Perry Mason courtroom TV series from years earlier. My only directorial instruction from dear Miss Dossenbach had been to view the reading festival audience, interspersed with judges, as the county courthouse jury in fictional Maycomb, Alabama. The final two lines of Finch’s speech were, “In the name of God, do your duty. In the name of God, believe Tom Robinson.”

This long-buried memory came flooding back on February 11 when I attended the next to last performance in Providence of the Broadway touring production of To Kill a Mockingbird with the fine actor, Richard Thomas (John-Boy Walton) in the role of Atticus Finch. I had seen the original New York production in December 2021 starring the equally-fine Jeff Daniels on the night before our annual Board of Regents meeting. That was still Covid-time and the entire audience in the Shubert Theatre was required to wear masks to see this newest stage version by the playwright Aaron Sorkin. I had been involved in a 1995 St. Louis regional theatre production of an earlier play adaption by Christopher Sergel, written in 1990, and it must have been the repeated viewings of rehearsals and performances that have instilled in me such deep love and respect for the story. All of that, maybe, plus an opportunity to meet and speak with Gregory Peck, Mr. Atticus Finch himself, a year later.

Gregory Peck’s signature
on title page of from Freedland’s book

Besides my bread-and-butter work, pre-monastery, which appeared primarily on stages, I enjoyed a good run as an event designer. In the fall of 1996, I was called to a meeting to discuss the transformation of an entire ground floor of the vacant and dusty 1925 Beaux Arts Building in Midtown St. Louis. Gregory Peck and his wife, Veronique, were scheduled to be in town for an arts fundraiser on November 18, where the actor would share film clips, career anecdotes and insights about his work. After the main event in the symphony hall, benefactors and patrons were invited to walk across the street for a Champagne and dessert reception, and the plan was to transform the empty space into an elegant interior, most closely resembling a cozy hotel lobby or private club, where Mr. and Mrs. Peck could meet and greet the guests. I had been blessed beforehand to acquire from a vintage book dealer a first edition of Gregory Peck’s biography by Michael Freedland published in 1980. I was doubly blessed to leave the party that night with the actor’s signature on the title page. Freedland’s book is an easy read and one sentence might refer to Peck’s portrayal of the closing argument in Mockingbird: “When it came time to his delivering the nine-minute close-up speech to the court, it was clear that if he had never before done anything quite to his own satisfaction, now he had found his great moment in pictures.” Freedland also comments on Peck’s Catholic background: “he never likes to travel without a small, cheap crucifix which he has carried since the time it was given to him as a ten-year-old at St. John’s Military Academy.” This was the Catholic military school in Los Angeles into which Peck was enrolled in 1926 at age ten.