Aaron Sorkin Bringing To Kill a Mockingbird to Broadway

It's already been made into an Oscar-winning movie; now To Kill a Mockingbird is being transformed into a Broadway production. The New York Times reports that Harper Lee's acclaimed 1960 novel will be adapted for the Great White Way by Aaron Sorkin, best known for his work on The West Wing and The Newsroom. The rights to adapt the book to the stage were snatched up by producer Scott Rudin, who worked with Sorkin on the movies The Social Network and Steve Jobs. The play, set for the 2017-2018 season, will be directed by Bartlett Sher; Playbill notes no specific theater or cast members have been announced.

Lee's literary agent told the Times in an email that his client has long been wary of letting her book be brought to theater's biggest stage, but she decided Rudin "would be the right person to embrace this." Sorkin, meanwhile, seems thrilled to try his hand at telling the story of Scout, Atticus, and Boo Radley. "To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most revered pieces of 20th-century American literature," Sorkin says. "It lives a little bit differently in everybody's imagination in the way a great novel ought to, and then along I come." He's quick to add: "I'm not the equal of Harper Lee. No one is." (There's buzz of a third book after Lee's Go Set a Watchman.)