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Page to Stage
The Craft of Adaptation
By Vincent Murphy The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2013 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-07187-6
CHAPTER 1
Building Block One
Find Literature That Compels You and Define Its Theme
We carry stories with us, beginning with the tales read to us in infancy. We wrote novice reports in junior high school on Silas Marner, The Color Purple, or Catcher in the Rye. These stories were all prologue for the fiction, nonfiction, poetry, New Yorker articles, and other reading we've done since. And anyone reading this book, with or without theater experience, can use a ready imagination to adapt a favorite piece of literature for the stage. When a particular story enthralls us, we can look to the stage as a place to share what engaged us.
Choosing literature for adaptation is first about a strong connection to your building materials. While still a liberal arts undergraduate, I first encountered William Blake and found the dichotomies of life that are so present to a nineteen-year-old vividly expressed in his two-hundred-year-old prose, poetry, and art. His Songs of Innocence and Experience and his evocations of heaven and hell prompted me to cull from the canon of his work a two-hour theatrical event. In subsequent decades, powerful writing by James Baldwin on the nature of race; Michael Ondaatje's brilliant, image-rich evocation of Billy the Kid and the American West; and the despairing beauty of Samuel Beckett's fiction each challenged me to find a home for them on the stage.
We read literature first for the pleasure of discovery. Reading is a wonderful and solitary experience, as we find literature that engages our imaginations, emotions, and realities. The joy of anticipating the next Harry Potter installment was, for many, a waiting for the quiet pleasure of entering a world both familiar and fantastic. One's imagination plunges into a pool of fascinating characters, real and improbable places, and an array of desires, fears, and possibilities that we also face in our own lives. Interestingly, the reviews of the early Potter films critiqued the too-literal translation of the books into film. The pleasure of adapting into another medium, like the pleasure of reading itself, is in the permission you have to engage your own imagination and experience with the art at hand, in making manifest those personal discoveries.
Ways to Think about Choosing Material
Joseph Chaikin, the legendary founder of the Open Theater, once gave an amusing analogy for the consequences of making choices lightly. During a winter workshop in New York City, he explained that choosing material that only "interests" you — whether to adapt, act, or direct — is like kissing someone you merely "like." Your involvement and returns only diminish each time you return to the material, as the choice lacks passion, connection, and a future. When you choose material that you feel passion for, it's like the thrill of playing sports, making love, or learning something revelatory. You are both within the experience and sensing it from the outside, in an ecstatic connection. You hunger to go further, to probe deeper, to open up to what you already know, as well as to the unknown.
Frank Galati has successfully adapted stage plays not only from John Steinbeck but also from literary sources as diverse as William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and Vladimir Nabokov. He received an Academy Award nomination for his film adaptation of Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist. Talking about adaptation in an interview for American Theatre magazine, he emphasized the importance of the quality of his source material: "If one is to be lucky in the task of adaptation, first find a novel that has a real play in it, for it's not so much the skill of the adapter as the skill of the novelist that creates the success" (20).
Horton Foote, a playwright and adaptor for more than one medium, has described his process for choosing adaptation material this way: "To be really successful adapting, one must like the original work. I don't have to always understand it, but I have to like it and be willing to try to understand it and go through the painful process of entering someone else's creative world" (7). Discussing "The Displaced Person," a Flannery O'Connor story he adapted for the American Short Story series on the television show Playhouse 90, Foote talks about how his entry point is specific to each piece: "For this one, it was the characters that intrigued me most and proved wonderfully comic companions in my stay in the O'Connor country" (8). Most important: "There is only one rule I'm sure of. Do something you really admire" (20).
Simon McBurney, actor and acclaimed artistic director of several theatrical adaptations for Britain's Théatre de Complicité, has also given us a window into his selection process: "I'm not attracted to literary, narrative, or prose work as an idea. I became interested in a particular subject matter. And there will be urgent concerns, urgent ideas, urgent stories within my own life. There is no formula. The desire to take a work of prose is, you suddenly have a desire to make it present."
What is essential for you as an adaptor is to feel that desire to make it present. You can't always know all the reasons why a particular story compels you, but you need to connect with the piece. And the effort to articulate why you do connect with it will often point you toward the best place to start your work as an adaptor.
Discovering Your Theme
To find the play in the literary source, you need to decide what it is about. What idea fascinates you? This theme will be the foundation of your adaptation. It is the metaphoric floor to which you will add the walls, roof, and various rooms, that is, the characters, language, settings, and conflicts, to build a satisfying adaptation. In the writing and subsequently in the production, how an adaptor and then collaborating theater artists follow through on a theme decides what a play is about. While there may be several themes, the adaptor is charged with finding and dramatizing the one that best evokes the story.
There are dozens of adaptations of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Those most resonant with the original novel focus on Scrooge's redemptive transformation, a spiritual and socioeconomic journey into his past. From Atlanta to London, I've walked out of reductive versions in which the adaptation got lost in special effects and exotic characterizations. Losing sight of the theme negates the focus on Scrooge's true journey and the redemptive power of his transformation.
Theater responds to the present moment more fully than any other art form. Often theater is the first art form attacked in repressive political situations due to its ability to put words and body — a human face — to the protest. Theater lives in the political farces of Dario Fo, the histories of Shakespeare, the street theater of El Teatro Campesino. It lives in Samuel Beckett's woman buried up to her neck in his play Happy Days or in the husband's desires for his wife in his short story "Enough." Both pieces by Beckett work because he knows how to share his story with an audience hungry for knowledge and experience. The success of your adaptation depends on finding that kind of connection.
What often compels you relates to either personal or social issues you feel vexed with at a given moment. This might be an ongoing sense in your life of feeling conflicted or thinking in two contradictory ways about something that matters, such as marriage, worthy careers, or true friendship. The duality found in National Book Award winner John Barth's plaintive short story "Petition" explores that double, schizophrenic sense in the story of Siamese twins joined chest-to-back: the back brother delicate and introspective, the front hedonistic and explosive.
Respect the intelligence, needs, and imagination of the audience as if they are friends and family invited to your metaphoric campfire to share the tale. To make your material relevant, keep in mind the place in which you live, because your task will be to connect the story to what your society finds vital. You should please yourself first: you are the society in microcosm, so pay close attention to your observations as you contemplate what affects you.
Your main theme helps flesh out and counterpoint the story. When you've decided on a theme that is evocative and resonates with the text you've chosen, say it out loud, then close your eyes and watch which moments from the source material come up in your memory and imagination. You know you are onto a vibrant theme when at least three vivid moments come to mind. (My rule of three in the arts is that a critical mass is achieved when you discover three good examples of what you are searching for, including themes, a character trait, a major conflict, or the nature of a relationship.)
Naming Your Theme
There are two ways to think about naming your theme. The first is a word or phrase that names an idea: transformation, loss, passion, chaos. It may be a word that comes up explicitly in your original text or an implicit idea that strikes you as important as you read. You may arrive at this word by noticing your characters' qualities: desperation, ambition, honesty, duplicity. Relationships could cue you: clinging, loyalty, domination, playfulness. Or your characters' actions may give you a vital theme: dancing, hunting, embracing, sniping. Images in your material could spark a theme idea: collapse, from a collapsing house; or peace, from the peacefulness of your character's secret retreat.
Once you have a word or phrase that defines your theme, the second way to articulate it is in a sentence or question. Give your theme idea a context: what happens to this idea in your story? You can create a question to which your story explores a possible answer: "Where does relentless ambition lead?" or "What is loyalty?" in a story with characters whose actions offer two different, competing versions of an answer to that question. Or if you see your adaptation's verdict on this theme as clear, you can state it in a declarative sentence: "Relentless ambition reaps loneliness and loss." As you begin the work of your adaptation, start with at least one question. By the time you finish drafting your script, you may have an answering sentence.
The strong foundation of theme allows you, your fellow artists, and your audience to move horizontally and vertically through the expanse of the story. That is, you can build a sturdy framework of plot from your source with a strong theme. You can build the spaces that your characters travel through. With a clear theme you will have a solid floor as you define the visual, spatial elements of your production that guide you in constructing the roof and rooms of your adaptation with the related materials of character, place, conflict, and relationships. Your main theme allows you to delve into other, related themes that intersect with your main idea.
Considering Your Landscape and Neighborhood
You may come to this book already knowing what you want to adapt. Perhaps you have already found a story that leaps off the page. Or you may be working within other parameters. An organization or a teacher may have asked you to choose material for an adaptation. To be successful in building a clear story, your adaptation has to take the following key external factors into account.
Why are you doing the adaptation?
As you discover novels and short stories that feel captivating enough to adapt, the bedrock consideration about working on your adaptation is whether or not you feel a compelling reason to tell its story onstage. You need at least one vivid connection to the language, a character, a place, or a relationship that you can imagine in a three-dimensional space.
My first example of connecting to literature and adapting it happened in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War. For an English class assignment, my high school friends and I adapted into a short theater piece Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," a story about ordinary human beings' inherent violence. We seized on the story and the image of a baby carriage as a link to compelling current events witnessed each evening on the news. We outlined a play, improvised the dialogue, and set out a baby carriage to be stored facing upstage, away from the audience. What fascinated and hit us with horror was the story's ability to help make sense of the many atrocities being reported from the war. The inhuman trait of seeing those not like us as objects and the hysteria embedded in mob rule were clues to the infamous documented atrocities of the village of My Lai, where Lt. William Calley and his squad of American troops slaughtered innocent families.
If your source story is assigned rather than chosen, the challenge is to find your personal and topical connection to the material. You will use the construction exercises to look for those connection points.
But if you do have the freedom to choose your own material, then your task as you read potential texts is to stay alert to themes that are of personal importance to you.
Who is your intended audience?
At times you are the audience: you write to make discoveries and to please yourself. Occasionally you have specific audiences.
Black Witness, my adaptation of material by African American novelist and social critic James Baldwin, was created for people in Boston who were trying to make sense of a local, in-the-headlines murder. Inbred racism had persuaded them to blame a black man for the murder of a white woman, who was ultimately found to have been killed by her white husband, who had accused the black man of the crime.
My adaptation of Crow, former British poet laureate Ted Hughes's beautifully bleak apocalyptic poems, was staged to mark the arrival of his archives at Emory University's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library and the opening of the grand Schwartz Performing Arts Center. Consider who will see your piece and let that shape the way you connect with the material and, therefore, with the audience.
Where is your adaptation likely to be produced — in what kind of space?
Seeing theater in a variety of spaces — proscenium, blackbox, found spaces — guides your intuition toward a possible place for staging your adaptation. As you finalize your selection, begin to envision some of your choices as an adaptor. Consider how you can pare down the original material. For your play to work, you will need to be able to scale the material to a live theater space.
Although naturalism and kitchen-sink realism can be powerful styles in which to tell a story, adapting literature often calls on us to think outside the accepted conventions of place, time, and character. Whereas film tries to signal a change in location — from Boston in one moment to Atlanta the next — with visual cues (perhaps from footage actually shot in those two cities), and fiction can simply tell the reader that the action has shifted to a new location, theater finds more visceral ways to represent that shift. For instance, an actor who remains physically present through the transition from one scene to the next can shift from a northern accent to a southern one right in front of you, thereby signaling the change of scene.
What copyright restrictions, if any, are you working within?
After seventy-five years, most literature loses its copyright protections and enters the public domain. Texts can then be cut, reordered, and added to, without permission of the original author. Copyright laws can be complex, so doing a little research into the relevant rules for your chosen original material is a good idea and may even force you to make a different choice. Material still under copyright restriction must be cleared with authors or their representatives before an adaptation can be performed. One typically gets in touch with the author's agent or publisher, but if you can reach the author directly, you may have a better chance of successfully pitching your ideas and passion for the work.
Institutions such as universities or nonprofit theaters are often given limited-use options for adaptations. As a condition of receiving permission to adapt the piece, the adaptor agrees to restrict the performances to the host theater or a short-term run.
How I Choose Material to Adapt
I had the unique opportunity to read an early draft of Frank Manley's novel The Cockfighter a few years before it was published. I am always on the lookout for adaptable material when I read, and I had previously workshopped and directed premiers of plays he had written. After reading it to give Manley some feedback, I found myself haunted by this story of a southern boy at puberty caught in a tug-of-war between his parents. Whenever a story captures me this way, I begin to investigate its theatrical possibilities. The climactic scene depicts the boy handling his father's prize-winning bird in a to-the-death championship match.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Page to Stage by Vincent Murphy. Copyright © 2013 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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