Tuesday, May 25, was opening night for the hotly-awaited Middle School play, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” This year’s production featured several important “first’s”: It was the first time the play hasn’t featured music; the first time TBS used Live Oak Theater in Berkeley; and the first time that someone other than Associate Head of School Zaq Roberts directed. Drama and sixth grade Humanities teacher Norman Johnson took on the Herculean task this year, and with Christopher Sergel’s stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s classic novel, showed that he was more than up to filling Zaq’s shoes as director. This challenging play is impressively performed by the young actors; as Norman wrote in the program notes, “Like Lee, I am puzzled by the resistant quality of the anti-black racism that took root in this nation in which I have lived for thirty years. However, I am also thrilled that I can live and work in a community that does not blink when they see a young African American actress play a white male lawyer, a black convict being played by an South Asian actor, or two students of different races play the same character as a young girl and an adult. The culture of the middle school at TBS is one where it is possible to use colorblind casting to put on a play that deals poignantly with race, without anybody batting an eyelash. This is truly Berkeley, where the radical is the casual. And this is truly The Berkeley School, where the tradition of middle school students bringing the quickness of their creativity to the stage each spring lives on.”