60 Minutes - 11/25/2018: Chaos on the Border, Robots to the Rescue, To Kill a Mockingbird

Episode Date: November 26, 2018

It has been a chaotic two years on the U.S Mexican border -- and this past week, a federal judge struck down the president's latest immigration order. Scott Pelley reports. Award-winning actor Jeff Daniels is heading to Broadway. As he tells Steve Kroft -- he plans on re-originating the role of Atticus Finch in "To Kill Mockingbird." Seven years after a powerful earthquake and tsunami caused a massive nuclear meltdown in the Daiichi Power Plant, Lesley Stahl reports on the unprecedented cleanup effort. Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This is a Department of Homeland Security arrest warrant issued during the child separations last spring. The target of the arrest is a three-year-old named Emers. Tell me about the moment that Emers was taken away from you. His father ever told us, I never thought that they would separate him from me. But an immigration agent said, your son is going to be taken away, and then a judge will decide what will be done with you. We take better care of people's effects when we send them to jail than we took care of the children who we took from their parents. Seven years after Japan's catastrophic nuclear disaster, the reactors are still far too radioactive

for humans to go inside them. Cue the robots. Working robots with 3D scanners and sensors that can fly, slink, climb stairs, and swim as they look for the nuclear fuel that still poses a massive threat. Tonight, we'll raise the curtain on one of the most ambitious theater projects in recent memory. Tom Robinson?

Yes, sir? I'm Atticus Finch. An all-star cast has adapted an American classic to kill a mockingbird for Broadway. Excuse me, Mr. Finch. But some changes have been made to the masterpiece, and that's always risky business. This is going to be incredibly exciting. I get to do a play again, I get to be involved with this material,

and I'm never going to make it out of this alive. Really? Yeah. You know, the book is revered. What could I possibly do but screw it up? Have you screwed it up? I'm Steve Proft. I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer,

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that over-deliver. This past week, a federal judge struck down the president's latest immigration order. It's been a chaotic two years on the border, as the administration imposed barriers with little consideration of their legality or consequences. The 2017 ban on travelers from Muslim countries was so abrupt, it surprised the officers who had to enforce it. Before the midterm elections, President Trump ordered thousands of troops to Texas to stop what he called an assault by a caravan of Central Americans. That caravan is now at the border of California. But the most tumultuous order of all was this

summer's separation of children from their parents, which Mr. Trump had to quickly withdraw. Our investigation has found that the separation of families began far earlier and detained many more children than the administration has admitted. This is a Department of Homeland Security arrest warrant issued during the child separations last spring. The target of the arrest is a three-year-old named Emers. Tell me about the moment that Emers was taken away from you. His father ever told us, I never thought that they would separate him from me, but an immigration agent said, you're going to be separated, your son is going to be taken away, and then a judge will decide what will be done with you.

Emers and his father crossed the border illegally, but presented themselves to the border patrol and requested asylum. Ever, the father says he was shot in the back in Honduras, a country at war with gangs and drug cartels. As asylum applicants, they're permitted by law to stay until their hearing, usually in two or three months. Before, most asylum seekers were released at that point. But under the Trump administration, they were arrested and charged with a crime. Because children can't be incarcerated, Emers was sent to a foster family in Michigan. If you're going to separate families in the pursuit of an immigration policy, it was irresponsible to push that on top of a system that

wasn't prepared on the back end to allow the families to be reconciled later. Scott Shukart was surprised by the new policy, even though he worked at Homeland Security headquarters at the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. He told us the order was so abrupt, it bypassed the usual review. If they had come to you, what would your office have said? We would have had advice on the way that needed to be done, on the record keeping that needed to be done. And our advice on that wasn't sought out. And when we tried to provide it, it was ignored. What do you mean by record keeping? Making sure

that we knew where everybody was at all times so that they could be put into contact and reunited later. People were removed to other countries without there being good records of what adult went with what child. That's what we found in this Homeland Security internal investigation. It says one border station made no effort to identify and reunite families prior to their removal from the United States. The DHS inspector general says the agency was not fully prepared and struggled to provide accurate, complete, reliable data on family separations.

The report found that incompatible computer systems erased data that connected children with their families. I don't know what part of your soul has to be missing to say we'll take an infant from its mother with no provision about how they will ever get back together again. They might never see each other again. Cecilia Munoz handled immigration in the Obama administration as the director of the Domestic Policy Council. She says that even though apprehensions at the border have been trending down for a decade, many administrations struggle with the patchwork of U.S. laws that require border security

and protection of asylum seekers. You know better than most that there are people watching this interview who are saying they shouldn't have come. We have a broken immigration system. I've been working in this policy area for 30 years. I'll be the first to say we have a broken immigration system. The question is what we do about that. And we lack the political will to fix it. And we will continue to create crises, crises of our own making, until we fix it. And at some level, that's on us. We live in a democracy. We all know everybody who,

no matter how you feel about immigrants, including the people who don't like immigrants, we all agree this thing is broken. When the Trump administration made the decision to separate children from families, that order. We take better care of people's effects when we send them to jail than we took care of the children who we took from their parents. And that's because these decisions were clearly made at the top and pushed down to the agencies without thinking through the ramifications and without thinking through the potential harm. I was having trouble sleeping at night. Psychiatrist Dr. Pam McPherson and internist Dr. Scott Allen were also caught off guard.

They, too, worked for Homeland Security, inspecting government detention facilities. They were already concerned about the poor quality of health care for a limited number of children in custody before the new order. There was an episode where children in a mass immunization program were immunized with the wrong dose, adult dose instead of child dose, because the providers at the facility weren't used to working with children and didn't recognize a very common color coding that would denote adult versus pediatric vaccines. They'd been writing reports of poor pediatric care in federal custody for four years when they heard that thousands more children were going to be cared for by the government,

some of them in tent cities. This is what caused us great concern with the disclosures that this policy was going to be ramped up and rapidly expanded, we understood that that action would create an imminent threat to the harm and safety of children. Dr. McPherson, what were your concerns in the mental health field? I had concerns about the trauma that the children could experience, about the cumulative traumatic stress that could lead children to have delays in developmental milestones, difficulties with their memory or thinking later, difficulties forming relationships and regulating their emotions.

Three-year-old Emers, the boy with the arrest warrant, was placed by the government with a foster family in Michigan for 73 days. This was his reunion with his mother. She's saying, I'm your mother, honey. What is wrong't my son anymore. It felt like a She says since detention, Emers has been withdrawn and moody. And from that day until today, she said, it's been very difficult to deal with him. When a child looks to their parent for comfort and the parent's not there, the child quits looking for comfort.

Once the child detaches, they can have lifelong difficulties forming relationships. Emmer's father told us he was separated from his son without notice. After a court hearing, he went straight to detention without seeing his son to say goodbye. Homeland Security's inspector general found parents often did not understand their children would be separated and they would be unable to communicate with their children after separation. It became such a horrific scene that they started telling the parents, oh, your child is just going to take a shower or just going to get

some medical treatment, and then the parent would never see the child again. Lee Gelernt is an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. In July, he convinced a federal judge to order the reunification of the children. But when the government realized it lost track of many of the parents, the Trump administration told the court reuniting the families was the ACLU's problem. The government took these children away from their parents and then deported hundreds and hundreds of the parents without the children. The judge said, these parents need to be with their children. And the government said, well, if you want to find the parents, we don't know where they are.

Let the ACLU look for them. This is the Homeland Security order to arrest and detain all adults who crossed illegally to seek asylum. The copy released to the public was censored by the administration, but we've obtained what the White House didn't want the public to see. The document reveals that child separation began nine months earlier than the administration acknowledged. There was a pilot program in the busy El Paso sector from July to November 2017. We don't know how many children were taken in those five months. The censored part of the memo explains a reason for the policy, deterrence, as it will have the greatest impact on current flows of immigrants. But Cecilia Munoz says the Obama

administration found that deterrent messages failed to turn back immigrants. And the reason for that is if your child was told today by the gangs, your life is at risk unless you start running drugs for us, you're thinking much more about their safety today and tomorrow than you're thinking about what's going to happen once we get to our destination. We are not going to let the country be overwhelmed. Security was the stated reason for the policy change. One top White House official called immigration an existential threat to America. But Homeland Security's inspector general found the chaotic implementation of the policy

undermined law enforcement. The report says instead of patrolling and securing the border, officers had to supervise and take care of children. And those officers weren't prepared for their new role, according to Scott Shuchart, who recently left Homeland Security. I can't believe that we sent Border Patrol agents out to take people's children from them without training on the appropriate and humane way to do that. It was just the machine moving forward with enforcement without an appropriate consideration of how it affected all of the people who were involved. You quit your job at Homeland

Security. I wonder why. I had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. We were being asked as a department to do something that violated the civil rights and civil liberties of persons, and my office was being frozen out of that process. There wasn't a job, responsibly, for me to do. Emers, who was taken from his family for 73 days, was reunited with his parents after the court order. An immigration judge ruled that Emers' father does have a well-founded fear of returning to Honduras, and his asylum claim is being considered. I didn't like the sight

or the feeling of families being separated. No senior official would speak to us for this story. But President Trump ended his separation policy after 11 weeks. The White House says more than 2,600 children were detained, but reports from various agencies show that at least 5,000 children have been held since Mr. Trump's inauguration. The White House says only 25 remain to be reunited with their families, but given the bungled record-keeping and no public accounting of the mysterious El Paso pilot program, there may never be an accurate count

of how many children were taken from their parents. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Sometimes historic events suck.

But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. More than seven years have passed since a monster earthquake and tsunami struck northeast Japan and triggered what became, after Chernobyl, the worst nuclear disaster in history at the

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. When three of its six reactors melted down, hot fuel turned to molten lava and burned through steel walls and concrete floors. To this day, no one knows exactly where inside the reactor buildings the fuel is. And it is so deadly, no human can go inside to look for it. So the Japanese company that owns the crippled plant has turned to robots. There are four-legged robots, robots that climb stairs, and even robots that can swim into reactors flooded with water. They're equipped with 3D scanners, sensors, and cameras that map the terrain, measure radiation levels, and look for the missing fuel.

This is part of a massive cleanup that's expected to cost nearly $200 billion and take decades. Has anything like this cleanup, in terms of the scope ever happened before? No, this is a unique situation here that's never happened in human history. It's a challenge that we've never had before. Lake Barrett is a nuclear engineer and former Department of Energy official who oversaw the cleanup of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, Three Mile Island. He was hired as a senior advisor by TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company that owns the plant and is in charge of the effort to find the missing fuel. He's also advising

on the development of new robots, like this six-legged spider robot that engineers are designing to hang from scaffolding and climb onto equipment. He describes them as... Very advanced working robots that will actually be the ones with long muscular arms, laser cutters and such that will go in and actually take their molten fuel and put it in an engineered canister and retrieve it. Should we think of this as a project like sending someone to the moon? It's even a bigger project in my view, but there's a will here to clean this up, as there was a will to put a man on the moon, and these engineering tasks can be done successfully. Why not just bury this place? Why not do what they did at Chernobyl?

Just cover it up, bury it, and just leave it here, all enclosed. Number one, this is right next to the sea. We're 100 yards from the ocean. We have typhoons here in Japan. This is also a high earthquake zone, and there's going to be future earthquakes. So these are unknowns that the Japanese and no one wants to deal with. The earthquake that caused the meltdown measured 9.0, the most powerful ever recorded in Japan, and triggered a series of tsunami waves that swept away cars, houses, and entire towns, killing more than 15,000 people. At Fukushima Daiichi, the enormous waves washed over the plant, flooding the reactors

and knocking out power to the cooling pumps that had kept the reactor cores from overheating. Lake Barrett took us to a hill overlooking the reactors, where the radiation levels are still relatively high. So this is actually right where it all happened, the heart of the disaster, right here. Correct. There's reactor number one, reactor number two, reactor number three. And when the earthquake happened 100 miles away, these buildings all shook and these towers all shook. But the design was such that they were safe. But 45 minutes later, waves were racing in, tsunami waves from the earthquake. And there were seven waves that came

in at 45 feet high and put the station in what we call station blackout. They had no power, and the cores got hotter inside and hotter and hotter again until the uranium started to melt. How many tons of radioactive waste was developed here? Probably 500 to 1,000 tons in each building. So how long will it be lethal? It will be lethal for thousands of years.

What we're talking about, really, is three meltdowns. Yes. It was truly hell on earth. The meltdowns triggered huge explosions that sent plumes of radioactive debris into the atmosphere, forcing the evacuation of everyone within a 12-mile radius, about 160,000 people in all. Weeks later, TEPCO officials engaged in so-called Khao Tao diplomacy,

allowing townspeople to berate them as they prostrated themselves in apology. Thousands of workers were sent to the countryside to decontaminate everything touched by radiation, including digging up dirt and putting it in bags, lots of bags. But while much of the evacuation zone has been decontaminated, there are still entire neighborhoods that are like ghost towns, silent and lifeless, with radiation levels that remain too high. At the plant, they're capturing contaminated groundwater,

about 150 tons a day, and storing it in tanks as far as the eye can see. Water is always a major challenge here, and it's going to remain a major challenge until the entire cores are removed. The closer workers get to the reactors, the more protective gear they have to wear, as we discovered. We were zipped into Tyvek coveralls and made to wear two pairs of socks and three pairs of gloves. Not an inch of skin was exposed. The layers of protection include a mask that often fogged up and a dosimeter to register the amount of radiation we'd be exposed to.

We were ready for battle. We went with a team of TEPCO workers to Unit 3, one of the reactors that melted down on that March day seven years ago that the Japanese call simply 3-11. There you are, unit three. Watch it, step. These are shield plates because there's cesium in the ground. In the years since the accident, much of the damage to the building has been repaired. But it's still dangerous to spend a lot of time here.

We could stay only 15 minutes. There's this number I've been seeing, 566. That's telling you the radiation level that we're in. It's fairly high here. That's why we're going to be here a short time. How close are you and I right this minute to the core? The melted cores are about 70 feet that way. 70 feet from here is the melted core?

Correct. That's right over in here. We don't know quite where other than it fell down into the floor. So if you sent a worker in right now to find it, how long would they survive? No one is going to send a worker in there because they'd be overexposed in just a matter of seconds. Enter the robots. This is the robot research center. This is for remote control technology development.

In 2016, the Japanese government opened this hundred million dollar research center near the plant, where a new generation of robots is being developed by teams of engineers and scientists from the nation's top universities and tech companies. Dr. Kuniaki Kawabata is the center's principal researcher. This is the newest robot, the J11. So number 11. Yes. And it's an obstacle course. Yes.

The operators use the camera image in front of the robot, but it's so many hours required to train because it looks very easy, but it's so many hours required to train because it looks very easy, but it's quite difficult. They also train here in this virtual reality room with 3D data taken inside the reactors by the robots is projected onto the screen. Operators using special glasses can go where no humans can. So we're actually walking through a part of a reactor. You feel some immersive experience. As if you're in there.

Yes. I actually want to duck. I mean, that's how real it feels to me. Like, here we're going under this thing, I have to duck. Ah, yes. But even with all the high-tech training and know-how, the robots have run into problems. Yes. But even with all the high-tech training and know-how, the robots have run into problems.

For the early models, it was the intense levels of radiation that fried their electronics and cameras. Their lifetime was hours. We'd hoped it would be days, but it was for hours. Tell us what happened to the robot named Scorpion. This is a highly sophisticated, and I gather everybody thought this was the answer. That was going to be the first robot we were going to put inside the containment vessel, which is where we need the information the most, because that's where the core is. This is Scorpion, whose mission cost an estimated $100 million. It was designed to flatten out and slither through

narrow pipes and passageways on its way to the core. And like a scorpion, it raises its tail. The tail would come up with the camera on top with lights, because you have to have its own lights. It's all dark inside. There are no regular lights. So that was the plan. And we had great expectations and hope for that. We all did. It took a year to prepare, and it was hard work. But when Scorpion went inside, it hit some debris and got stuck after traveling less than 10 feet. I can't imagine the frustration levels. Well, but you learn more from failures sometimes than you do from success. They had more success with this robot named Little Sunfish, which was designed to swim inside one of the reactors flooded with water. In preparing for Little Sunfish's mission,

engineers spent months doing test runs inside this enormous simulation tank, fine-tuning the propellers, cameras, sensors, and 65 yards of electric cable, all built to withstand intense levels of radiation. They used nuclear reactor number five to help plan the mission. It didn't melt down when the tsunami hit, and is nearly identical to the one Little Sunfish would scout. Finally, last year, the swimming robot made its foray into the heart of the reactor to look for the missing fuel. Barrett took us into Unit 5 to show us how it maneuvered

through the labyrinth of pipes and debris inside the reactor. The little sunfish came down on the edge and it swam underwater down through this little entryway here underneath the reactor vessel. Is this the route that the little sunfish took? Yes, this is. The little sunfish swam through this portal down into this area. It went around the side. It went down through this gradient, which was gone. We are standing directly underneath the reactor vessel. Molten fuel came through here, and it jetted out under very high pressure, and then it came out slowly like lava in a volcano, and it fell down and burned

its way through this gradient down to the floor. This is what Little Sunfish saw as technicians guided it through the pipes and hatchways of the flooded interior. It beamed back images revealing clumps of debris, fuel rods, half-destroyed equipment, and murky glimpses of what looks like solidified lava, the first signs, TEPCO officials say, of the missing fuel. These robotic steps so far have been significant steps, but it is only a small step on a very, very long journey. This is going to take, you said decades with an S. How many decades?

We don't know for sure. The goal here is 40, 30, 40 years. You know, I personally think it may be to 50, 60, but... Oh, maybe longer. Well, it may be longer, but reality is this is a challenge that's never been dealt with before. But every step is a positive step. You learn from that and you go forward to another step. Your local Benjamin Moore retailer is more than a paint expert. They're someone with paint in their soul. A sixth sense honed over decades. And if you have a question about paint, it's almost as if they can read your mind. I sense you need a two-inch angle brush for the trim in your family room, Regal Select in an eggshell finish, and directions to the post office.

Benjamin Moore paint is only sold at locally owned stores. Benjamin Moore. see the love. When Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird 58 years ago in the early years of the civil rights movement, it struck a nerve in the country that remains sore today. The book has sold 40 million copies, spawned a classic movie, and was recently voted America's Most Loved Novel. It's about a small-town lawyer named Atticus Finch who was called upon to defend an innocent black man accused of raping a young white woman in rural Alabama during the 1930s,

and it raises issues that are still in the news every week. On December 13th, the curtain will go up on an ambitious theatrical adaptation involving some of the most talented people on Broadway. It's producing a lot of excitement and anticipation in New York and even a bit of anxiety in the people who have accepted the challenge of doing it. The table is set now. The play is in previews awaiting the culmination of a process that began two months ago. Hi there. Wait a minute, let me take him in.

When the cast and crew arrived for the first day of rehearsals, some of them knew each other from workshops and read-throughs that began a year ago. But it was the first time they had been together in the same room. Mega producer Scott Rudin, Tony Award-winning director Bartlett Shear, leading man Jeff Daniels, and a supporting cast of some of the best actors on Broadway, all in the same lifeboat. Tom Robinson? Yes. I'm Atticus Finch. There was a lot to do as they began working on version 22 of Aaron Sorkin's To Kill a Mockingbird. Sorkin, probably the most famous bankable scriptwriter in America, has an Oscar and Emmys with credits like The Social Network, Moneyball, The West Wing, and The Newsroom.

His career began on Broadway 30 years ago with A Few Good Men, and he was approved by Harper Lee before her death three years ago to do the Broadway adaptation. I remember what I was thinking, which was simultaneously, this is going to be incredibly exciting. I get to do a play again, I get to be involved with this material, and I'm never going to make it out of this alive. Really? Yeah. You know, the book is revered, and what could I possibly do but screw it up? Have you screwed it up? I don't think I have. I think I did get out of it alive. If that turns out to be true, it will not have been easy. It's impossible to turn

a book into a movie or a play without altering the material, and making changes to a masterpiece is always risky business. There is no event in the play that doesn't occur in the book. I haven't added new things, but those events are simply, we're taking another look at them. It's going to be a new look at familiar material. It's going to be an exhilarating night in the theater. The man responsible for lifting Sorkin's words off the page and onto the stage is Bart Scheer, maybe the hottest director on Broadway right now. Because he's trying to acknowledge that this is going to pause. Scheer creates the machine that operates the play

and is the company's conductor, choreographer, and coach. I'm interpreting, I'm drawing conclusions, I'm building a world which is going to make this language live. What's the biggest challenge of this production? The challenge is expectations. The challenge is swimming into the national memory between people who have a deep memory of the book, people who love the film, and people who are going to come into a theater and see it now. How to connect all of those

different perspectives. The defendant is not guilty, but somebody in this courtroom is. The strongest mockingbird memory swimming around in the national consciousness is that of Atticus Finch, one of the most indelible characters in American literature, and seared into our minds with the Academy Award-winning performance of Gregory Peck in the 1962 film. In our courts, all men are created equal. Tom Robinson? Yes, sir. I'm Atticus Finch. But only one actor was ever considered for the Broadway role. Both Aaron Sorkin and producer Scott Rudin wanted Jeff Daniels. Did you have Jeff Daniels in mind when you were writing this? There was never a conversation about any other actor. In fact, in that first phone call, Scott said, we'll do it with Jeff, right?

Why were you thinking of him? Well, he's one of the best actors that I know. This trial wouldn't happen on a sidewalk or a lunch counter or a park bench. It would happen in an American court of law. And you should have faith in that institution. And I knew that he wasn't going to care about expectations, whether it's from people who've read the book thinking that's not the Atticus I saw in my head or people who've seen the movie who would say that's not a Gregory Peck. He was already right away in a place that it took me about a year to get to, which is, listen, you're going to have to get

Harper Lee out of your head. You're going to have to get the book out of your head. You're going to have to get all the people who are going to say you've ruined my childhood out of your head. You took this on. You said you'd write a play. Do it. Sorkin and Scott Rudin had both worked with Jeff Daniels on HBO's The Newsroom and the movie Steve Jobs and consider him to be a master of Sorkin's dialogue. We got a good judge. We got the facts. We got the law. And if all that fails, we got an appeal. Besides being a bona fide star, he is an accomplished, versatile Broadway actor. In the future, judge, when you come to my house. Who at age 63 seems to be at the peak of a 40-year career.

I wish I could have told that 21-year-old kid back in 1976, it's going to happen for you, but you're going to be in your 60s. And you should probably read Harper Lee's Kill a Mockingbird. I'm not going to tell you when, but someday. Is this the highest profile role you've ever had? By far. Well, excluding Dumb and Dumber. Got to get that in.

It's part of the mosaic. To prepare for the role, Daniels reread the novel, the biographies of Harper Lee. Tom, the very last thing I want in the world would be your lawyer right now. Negro man, white teenage girl, I wouldn't be going in with a winning hand. And histories about the Jim Crow South, all to make sure he knew as much or more about the subject than the critics. So all these people who love this book, all these people who loved Gregory Peck, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. I'm originating the role as far as I'm concerned. There is no movie. There's a book that we're basing it on. And part of our job is to say, welcome, put the book down, put the movie away. We're going to do the

same thing. You're going to recognize it, but we're going to take you on a ride. We're going to take you over here. You think we're supposed to go over here. Well, we're going over here. We want to confuse you early. Okay, you with us now? Good. Keep up. Unpleasant things are going to be said to me, and I'm afraid they're likely to be said to you too and that's exactly what they've done the structure is changed out of practical necessity the children's roles of scout jam and dill are all played by adults looking back because the parts were simply too big and too difficult for child actors tom did, did you rape Mayella Ewing? I did not, sir. Did you harm her in any way? I did not, sir. In the book, the trial of Tom Robinson doesn't begin until chapter 16. In the play,

it's introduced in the first few minutes, as scenes shift back and forth in time and location. But the biggest change in Sorkin's play is that it was written for today's audience. We weren't going to pretend that 58 years hadn't gone by since the publication of the novel. Because the Schubert Theater isn't a museum. This shouldn't be an homage. This shouldn't be nostalgic. And in this story about racial tension, Jim Crow, injustice in the South, the only two African-American characters have nothing to say on the matter. We understand now in 2018 that using African-American characters as atmosphere in a story is offensive.

Also in this story, it's a wasted opportunity. The play allows Tom Robinson, played by Benga Akinabe, to do more than just beg for his life. Heard about a lot of people who didn't do it. I was guilty as soon as I was accused. In the part of Calprunia, Atticus's longtime cook, maid, and surrogate mother to his children has been expanded to member of the family. I never thought that my whole life almost in this house,

that I would have to remember to be grateful. Cal Pernia now has agency, that she has an opinion. A voice. Yeah, she has a voice and uses it. It's important now that she use it. The role is played by LaTanya Richardson-Jackson. He doesn't think so, but I am totally the servant in charge of Atticus, trying to infuse his thinking, trying to make sure that he's okay.

That's the impression you get from the book to a certain extent. You just don't hear the conversation. Exactly. Exactly. You can hear the conversation now. Do you think people are going to really notice all of these differences? I think the average theater goer will notice that it has been opened up to, because, you know, the thing about this book, though, it's timely. It's still now. It's still occurring. I mean, Tom's death is still happening. This whole idea of justice and what's right is still a theme that universally is being discussed. That relevance resonates throughout the play as Atticus Finch is

caught in the middle between small towntown friends and blatant racism. If you're worried about what the townsfolk would say, it'd be perfectly natural. It'd be ugly as hell. In the book, he had all the answers. In the play, he grapples with the questions. He isn't the shining white knight on the horse, the statue in the square that is Atticus. He's just a small-town lawyer who gets paid in vegetables sometimes. That's all he is. I handle land dispute service agreements,

foreclosures, and I can write a will. My first two criminal clients were the last two people hanged in Maycomb County. Was that you doing Atticus when you just went through those lines? A little bit. The accent was lighter. He's the Atticus from the book, but he goes through the change, which every leading protagonist needs to do. And that's what happens in the play. You see him become Atticus, stand on that porch and go, no, we're going to fix what's going on here. The differences are subtle, and there is no problem hearing the voice of Harper Lee. You know, Jim, before you judge someone, it's a good idea to get inside their skin for a while, crawl around. But everyone has their own expectations, including the executor of her estate, Tonya Carter, who made a federal

case of it in March by suing the production, alleging the changes had violated the spirit of the novel. The case was settled out of court, preventing what it promised to be a premature premiere in a courtroom. It's all behind us. Tonya Carter will be there on opening night. She will be? Yeah. She's read the new version?

I believe she has. We haven't heard from her in a while, except her request for 30 tickets for opening night. There are a lot of people requesting tickets. The producers say advance sales are running far ahead of any Broadway production this year. And it's sure to create controversy and conversation. Always remember, it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. The play is still being tweaked, but word of mouth is positive, and there are no signs of anyone bailing lifeboats.

Here is my hope, okay, for those who haven't read the book in 20 years and for those who read the book last week. Here is my hope. I can't help the expectations that you walk into the theater with, but my hope and my belief is that 30 seconds after the curtain goes up, you will have forgotten those expectations and you will be caught up in this new thing that you're seeing.