In the Huntington Theatre’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Broadway vet Andrew Stevens Purdy taps into his inner-child to play the precocious Dill.

By Kilian Melloy

Massachusetts native Andrew Stevens Purdy grew up in Franklin and attended Walnut Hill School for the Arts, a performing arts high school in Natick. “I’m now a part-time dance instructor there on my Mondays off from rehearsals,” Purdy tells QulturVultur during a recent interview, “so I get to teach dance at my alma mater.”

That return to his old high school parallels another professional homecoming for Purdy. Currently based in New York City, where he starred in The Book of Mormon on Broadway for a four-year run, the actor is poised to take the Boston stage in Huntington Theater Company’s production of Aaron Sorkin’s 2018 stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird.

A veteran of numerous musicals in addition to The Book of Mormon — including Newsies, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Producers, and Crazy for You — Purdy will portray Dill, a precocious boy of ten or eleven who comes to a small Southern town to live with relatives for a summer. While there, he befriends Scout and her brother, Jeremy, the children of lawyer Atticus Finch. Scout and Jem live near the famously reclusive Boo Radley, a local man reputed to be of such vile character that he supposedly once stabbed his own father. The kids go to lengths to try and catch a glimpse of the mysterious Radley, to no avail; but when a Black worker named Tom Robinson is accused of raping a white woman and Atticus becomes his defense attorney, the children will witness more acrimony, hate, and viciousness than they ever dreamed the world could contain.

“I’ve known about them forever,” Purdy says of the Huntington, “but now I get to be a part of it, which is really exciting.” While this is the first full Huntington Theater production for the actor, he workshopped John Kolvenbach’s play Aunt Jo with the company in 2024. Reatd on to learn about Andrew’s take on his youthful character, how 2026 relates directly to the 1930s setting of To Kill A Mockingbird, and what it means for theater to reflect on our times.

Andrew Stevens Purdy (Nile Hawver)

QulturVultur: You’ve done quite a lot with musicals — The Book of Mormon on Broadway, as well as regional theater productions of Newsies, Hair, The Producers, and I don’t know what all else.

Andrew Stevens Purdy: Yeah, Jesus Christ Superstar, and so many others.

QulturVultur: Is it a different experience when you’re doing a straight play as opposed to a musical, or does it feel like it’s kind of the same thing, but you’re using your instrument in a different way?

Andrew Stevens Purdy: There are definitely some similarities, just in essence of what you’re doing. You are still, as you said, using your body and your instrument to tell a story. But as someone who has done so many musicals — and, you know, that’s what my foundation is in — I definitely feel like doing a play is a little bit scarier for me because I don’t have singing and dancing as a crutch, if you will. It really is a nice acting challenge for me to put all the tools I’ve acquired over the years to work and not be able to break into song and dance to get the audience’s attention.

QulturVultur: You’ve been mentoring younger performers. Can you say a little bit about that?

Andrew Stevens Purdy: So, as I said, I went to Walnut Hill for high school, studied musical theater in college at Elon, and between those two experiences and my time growing up in community theater I’ve had so many mentors who I’ve loved and admired and have really appreciated everything they’ve given to me. It’s become my mission to share everything I’ve learned from those mentors and pass that on to the next generation. During COVID, I started working for an online theater education company, which was me dipping my toe into that realm. Once I started with Book of Mormon, I started my own private coaching company. I have students I work with privately, on Zoom, in person. I’ll go to different dance studios or theater studios around the area and work with kids there, and I’ve found it really rewarding to be able to connect with young people. I see myself in so many of them in so many ways.

QulturVultur: Speaking of — your character, Dill, is precocious, but he’s 11 or 12 years old. How are you finding your way back to that mindset and balancing Dill’s precocity with his childlike aspects?

Andrew Stevens Purdy: It’s been a fun challenge. I’ve started to find the fluidity between those two places. It’s been a lot easier than I expected to tap into that childhood sense of play because I’m with two actors who are also down to clown. It’s really easy to play with them. But also, you can still have an imagination and be an adult. I’m finding those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

QulturVultur: In what way do you personally resonate with Dill?

Andrew Stevens Purdy: I see in Dill his curiosity. He asks so many questions. He wants to know everything, and that curiosity and that desire to attain knowledge is something I can relate to. He’s also very much a people pleaser, and that’s something I can relate to, as well. His natural setting is to see the best in people, and when that is crushed by the events of the play, that is a very stark realization for him.

I try to live my life as me, Andrew, seeing the best in people whenever I can, and balancing that with all of the crazy shit that’s happening in our world right now can be challenging at times. It’s been cathartic in a lot of ways to figure that out. All of those things that I aspire to be is what Dill is, and I think that’s why he’s so likable — we all kind of want to be like Dill.

QulturVultur: Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation feels very specific to the moment we’re in right now. Is that something you talk about a lot in the rehearsal room?

Andrew Stevens Purdy: Definitely. I think especially the portrayal of Atticus and Tom, and Calpurnia, is very different from how they have been represented in the book, in the movie, in the original play. Atticus is the white savior in the book, and in the movie, and in those prior adaptations. While he’s certainly noble in Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation, it also looks at the complexities of impact versus intent. He intends to do good in all these ways, and he intends to be virtuous. But then we see, on Tom and Calpurnia’s end, the impact that his actions are having on the Black people in this town. Even though they’re setting out to do good, it has life and death effects on other people.

[The play is] examining the complexities of trying to do good versus actually doing good, and what that means, and you see Atticus go through this realization. Calpurnia helps him realize, “Look, you are doing this noble thing. However, look at what’s actually happening here.” It’s not a “good people on both sides” situation, which feels very relevant. Sometimes you have to reckon with the fact that there are good people, and there are also bad people in this world doing bad things. That’s been very interesting to examine, and I’m excited about telling the story through a more modern lens.

QulturVultur: Even if Atticus is right that these are fundamentally good people, there’s maybe no difference between a good person and a bad person if a good person is doing bad things or going along with bad things.

Andrew Stevens Purdy: Yeah. You can’t talk your way [around taking part in] lynching a man. That is non-negotiable.

QulturVultur: To Kill a Mockingbird depicts an America that is a little Norman Rockwell in certain ways. There’s a real nostalgia about it. It’s almost like that amazing golden age that we keep hearing about, but it’s also painfully contemporary in some of the most challenging ways. How are you balancing that?

Andrew Stevens Purdy: I think, in essence, the show is a portrait of a community. That is something that is universal. On the kind of darker side of that, I think on paper our treatment of Black people in America has improved since the 1930s, but those [racist] ideologies still remain, and we see them everywhere. People have felt emboldened to really let those deeply held beliefs out, and it’s a scary time [in which we] see the things that Bob Ewell is saying in To Kill a Mockingbird. People are still saying those same things. While the Jim Crow laws might not still be in effect, the effects of them are still very much real, and the ideologies behind them are still very much real.

Theater can be about holding up a mirror to the audience, and so if this gets people to reflect on their own beliefs, and whether you see yourself in Atticus or you see yourself in Scout or Dill or Calpurnia or Tom — or Bob — it can be an opportunity for people to reflect on their own biases and deeply held beliefs and look at whether they’re actually serving the community or not.

QulturVultur: You think people might see themselves in Bob Ewell?

Andrew Stevens Purdy: Some people might see themselves in Bob. You know, hopefully not.

QulturVultur: Being that you’re a song and dance man, do you also want to pursue a career, maybe in recording?

Andrew Stevens Purdy: Interesting. I haven’t really thought about that much, honestly. But I certainly would be open to it. I mean, I I love music. Music is like we our dramaturg Charles made a playlist of like songs that were popular at this time in 1930s Alabama, and I’ve been listening to that a lot. And music has like always been my like primary form of artistic expression. I would say. So yeah, I mean, I would love to like record music at some point. I have no idea what that would look like, or what that music would be, but it sounds fun.

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The Huntington Theatre’s production of To Kill a Mockingbird runs October 8 to November 8 at the Huntington Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA. Follow this link for further details.