‘Mockingbird’ Play Publisher Demands $500,000 From Harper Lee Estate

In a complaint seeking binding arbitration filed with the American Arbitration Association, Mr. Sergel included the original contract between Dramatic Publishing and Ms. Lee, in which she granted the rights to a stage production for a $2,500 advance. The contract allowed Dramatic Publishing to sell licenses to local theaters to stage the Sergel play, and Dramatic, in turn, would pay royalties to Ms. Lee, and now her estate.

The author earned millions of dollars in royalties from the play over the years, the complaint says.

According to correspondence filed with the tribunal, a representative of Ms. Lee’s estate specifically approved many of the community theater productions that Mr. Rudin later contested. In July 2018, after the schedule for the Broadway production was announced, Dramatic Publishing wrote to the estate to ask if nine local theaters that had already purchased rights to stage the play could proceed, including the Dayton Playhouse in Dayton, Ohio, the Grand Theater in Salt Lake City and the Curtain Call Theater in Braintree, Mass.

The estate objected to a planned production in Staten Island, saying that while it was “certainly not economically competitive, it would be preferable not to have any competing press distraction here in NYC,” but authorized the others.

Then, earlier this year, a different lawyer for the estate emailed a lawyer for Dramatic Publishing and said that several of the productions that had previously been cleared by the estate were in violation of the 1969 contract and could not go forward, and that any “prior consent by any purported representative of the Estate to the granting of these licenses is hereby revoked, and the Estate demands strict compliance with the terms of the Agreement.”

It was not clear why the Lee estate changed its position, but the controversy forced the eight small theater groups to call off “Mockingbird.” Some had to cancel at the last minute and suffered financial losses as they had to refund tickets or could not substitute another production in time.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/theater/mockingbird-broadway-harper-lee-dispute.html?partner=rss&emc=rss