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“It’s the most overcaffeinated city in the world. I
come here to relax.” He stands 6 ft. 3 in. and moves
through the park either unrecognized or too quickly
for anyone to snag him. “We’re walking!” he tells the
dogs, when one pauses to snuffle.
When he first left Michigan, Daniels threw a
guitar in the trunk. He still plays, often in public,
often with his son Ben, and usually his own songs.
He wrote the gentle “Hard to Hear the Angels
Sing” after reading a Kathleen Parker Washington
Post column from November 2016, lamenting a
public sphere where people talk past one another.
But Daniels also writes plays (for the Purple
Rose) and says that’s what lets him appreciate what
Sorkin, best known for The West Wing, has done
with arguably America’s most treasured novel,
which still sells a million copies a year, never mind
the iconic 1962 film. The dry humor, specifically
AMY LOMBARD FOR TIME the book,” he says. “Or take a Horton Foote screen-
tailored for Daniels, is only part of it.
“You can’t just sit up there in 24 chairs and read
play and put it on the stage word for word. That
feels like a money grab. What’s the added value of
doing Mockingbird on Broadway right now?”
The question might have been answered dif-
ferently four years ago, when the U.S. had a black
President and Lee’s previously unpublished first
‘Remind novel, Go Set a Watchman, was about to be re-
us what leased. The book includes the same trial featured
is honest, in Mockingbird, but its version of Atticus sees no
contradiction between defending a wrongly ac-
remind cused black man and sitting on a committee dedi-
us what cated to keeping the town’s African- American pop-
decency ulation subservient to its whites.
looks like.’ Sorkin’s Mockingbird focuses less on race than
on some electoral divide, with white liberals and
JEFF DANIELS,
on what his African Americans (chiefly Calpurnia, the maid)
Broadway assembled on one side, resentful whites on the
production other. This Atticus gets into a physical tussle with a
of To Kill a redneck, to cheers from the audience. Daniels sees
Mockingbird
does at its best the hunger every night.
again? What is ethical? Remind us what is honest,
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Remind us what’s right
remind us what decency looks like, remind us what
compassion looks like.”
He shrugs. “Apparently we need reminding.” 
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