Known primarily for writing movies and TV series that buzzed with humor and moral wrangling (“A Few Good Men,” “The West Wing,” “The Newsroom,” “The Trial of the Chicago 7”), Sorkin adapted the novel for a 2018 Broadway production that became the second-highest-grossing nonmusical in Broadway history, after the two-part “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”

Contributing to that no doubt was the popularity of the original, said to be the most widely read novel about racism in America and yet also one that is consistently among the top 10 books subject to bans or attempted bans in schools and public libraries across the country. Sorkin’s reputation surely contributed to the draw, as did the presence in Broadway’s original of Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch, a righteous lawyer whose trial defense of Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, traumatizes Finch and his children, tomboy Scout (age 6 in the novel, seemingly 8 or 9 in the play) and her brother, Jem, a few years older.

But the production, under the direction on the road as on Broadway by Bartlett Sher, succeeds as its own work of stage drama. Almost half of the book goes by before the trial takes place, but Sorkin puts it at the center of the play. The trial starts almost immediately, with the script filling in backstory by separating courtroom scenes with other, earlier episodes set elsewhere, including the front porch of the Finch family home and an abstract space that looks to be the basement of a prison, where, in a framing device, Scout, Jem and their fun friend Dill address the audience and speculate about the story they’re being told by adults. Dill says, “Like the others, I will be narrating and also part of the narrative.”

Another of Sorkin’s changes was to put Atticus at the core of the story, giving narrator duties to the trio of kids, not just Scout, as in the novel. The touring production has an outstanding leading man, Richard Thomas, now 50 years beyond his role as a teen in TV’s “The Waltons” and still a busy actor on Broadway and off — and on the road. (He starred in the multi-Tony-winning play “The Humans” that visited Proctors four years ago.)

Thomas is captivating is Atticus. Sorkin’s script gives the character more flaws than in the novel, and thus the opportunity to grow, an alteration that caused legal objections from the Lee estate prior to the Broadway production. His profound moral grounding leads to both powerful outbursts and the revelation of blind spots that his children must consider. By casting small-framed, youthful-looking adults as the kids, a choice that the audience accepts almost instantly, the production gives the actors — Melanie Moore as Scout, Justin Mark as Jem, Steven Lee Johnson as Dill, all excellent — the opportunity to seem somehow more like children yet emotionally able to handle the racism, hateful language and violence they encounter.

Yagel T. Welch is appropriately outraged and resigned as the innocent but doomed Tom Robinson; Jacqueline Williams gets to deliver some of the play’s best dry and wry humor and insight as the Finch family maid, Calpurnia; Joey Collins brings repellent, virulent racism to Bob Ewell, who accused Robinson of raping his eldest daughter, Mayella Ewell; Arianna Gayle Stucki gives Mayella the bearing of a trapped animal that is by turns coweringly timid and spasmodically violent; and Richard Poe is immensely enjoyable as the judge trying to preside over a case he knows is a hateful spectacle with an essentially foregone verdict. Fun fact: Mary Badham, who received an Oscar nomination for playing Scout in the 1962 movie, opposite Gregory Peck as Atticus, has a small role in the tour as the nasty old neighbor Mrs. Dubose.

What’s most depressing — but, sadly, not really shocking — about experiencing “Mockingbird” on stage is how current it feels. While I’d wager that most theatergoing audiences in the Northeast rarely encounter the N-word and other explicit racism in everyday life, much less with the frequency and intensity they’re given on stage in “Mockingbird,” the national news shows us reminders that such beliefs still manifest themselves almost daily, from racially motivated violence to more nuanced forms that are easily decoded.

Would that “To Kill a Mockingbird” could be simply a period piece, tragic but firmly in the past. As long as it’s not, it deserves to be seen, though the people that most need it aren’t going to the theater. They’re trying to keep their kids from being assigned Lee’s novel in school.