Reclusive author attends 'Mockingbird' play

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- A high-school play based on Harper Lee's classic "To Kill a Mockingbird" brought together black and white high-school students to tell the classic story of racial injustice -- and even drew out the novel's reclusive author.\nWednesday night's invitation-only performance was organized to celebrate diversity and arts education in Alabama, the home state of the novel's author, whose book and the movie made from it won immediate acclaim at a time when Alabama was still rigidly segregated.\nThe 80-year-old Lee was invited as a special guest to be honored by education and arts officials. Lee did not address the crowd but later talked to students at a private reception. The author, who rarely speaks publicly but does occasionally meet with students, has not published a book besides 1960's "Mockingbird."\nThe students began working on the project -- the brainchild of Mountain Brook High theater director Pat Yates and Fairfield Prep choir director Patsy Howze -- last August. Since then they've performed it several times, receiving wide media coverage.\nRon Gilbert, policy analyst for Alabama Arise, a coalition that represents the poor, said the project highlights the fact that many communities remain economically segregated.\nThe two public schools near Birmingham are only about 16 miles apart. But Mountain Brook is one of the state's wealthiest communities, with a median home price of about $300,000, while the same figure in Fairfield is about $68,000.\nMountain Brook High draws from an overwhelmingly white suburb, while Fairfield students are from a mostly black district.\nThe performance has helped the students transcend not only the 30-minute distance between their communities, but a cultural divide as well. The Montgomery performance was in Troy University's Davis Theater, directly across the street from the bus stop where civil-rights icon Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man 51 years ago.\nThe symbolism of the location was not lost on Regan Stevens, a 17-year-old Mountain Brook senior who plays Scout, the book's main character in the fictional Southern town of Maycomb during the Depression.\nScout recounts how her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, fought in vain to save a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman.\n"I hate to say life's not fair," Stevens said backstage after lamenting the play's sad, but realistic ending. "But it's just that things are not always where they need to be. The great thing about Harper Lee's novel is that it helps us address that because it shows us the problem areas that we need to work on and that's what the civil rights movement thankfully did"