Page to Stage: The Craft of Adaptation

5. Construct the Storyline

90 5 ✦ Building Block Five Construct the Storyline As John Barth puts it, “The story of our life is not our life, it is our story.” Just as personality is too immense to define but character can and must be captured to be playable, so constructing a storyline involves making choices as you build your script. Even a play based on a biography cannot include everything about a person’s life, nor can you include every event from even a short novel in an evening of theater. The building block of storyline is about learning which events to keep and which to cut. Defining the storyline of the literature you’re adapting, using a theme you’ve chosen, is an important step in giving you a focus for what should move from the page to the stage. I encourage anyone working on an adaptation to distill the story down to one simple declarative sentence. Even when the story is immense, as in Hamlet or a Dostoyevsky, Dickens, or Alice Walker novel, state the story as you would to an eight year old. This is not to trivialize the material but to challenge yourself to say what is happening in its simplest form. You need a strong anchor to proceed with the art of adaptation, and the storyline is an invaluable place to secure adaptation structures. By the end of this chapter you will have that simple statement. If you are working through the steps in the order I’ve presented them, then you now know your main theme, the scenes you want to include, your primary characters, and your evocative stageable image. These will shape your choices about the arc of your storyline. In this chapter we will delve into the main conflicts in those relationships, identify the central event of the story and key scenes, and determine what prior circumstances are essential to understanding your characters’ story. If you begin this chapter uncertain of your theme or what the key relationships are, your work on the storyline should help you to finally define them. There is a fruitful interplay between the building blocks in which one can help Storyline 91 you clarify another. And, within this chapter, finding a central event can point you toward naming a main conflict that has potentially eluded you. Conversely, having a clear notion of what the main conflict is can help you to find the central event, since it is the actual moment when the conflict shifts decisively. To find the play in a work of literature, one must first come to terms with the principal building blocks of both literary and dramatic forms: the story and the theme. A story strings together events with a suggested beginning, middle, and end. The story is all the events and actions we can see or infer. The theme helps us see what the story is about—why it moves us and should be told to others. Building a Storyline on Your Foundational Theme Laurence Olivier intones at the beginning of his Hamlet film, “This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.” Olivier is guiding us, in such a reductive-sounding storyline of a monumental work, toward the theme of indecision. He is focusing thematically on Hamlet’s indecision , his oscillation, and his need, ultimately, to make a choice. The text clearly establishes Olivier’s context for exploring this theme in its “O that this too, too solid flesh would melt” and “To be or not to be.” There are adaptations and cuttings of Hamlet that focus on Ophelia or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but Lawrence Olivier’s theme of “a man who could not make up his mind” places the story firmly on the character of Hamlet, the conflicted prince. Your success in this building block will be in having a storyline that acts as a sturdy framework for the myriad materials you can use to build the adaptation. There is a temptation to try to squeeze all aspects of the story into your one declarative sentence. But for Oliver to telescope Hamlet down into a man who could not make up his mind temporarily sets aside the intricate politics, the blood rivalry, the love story, and the madness. These can be added onto the solid frame of the character’s journey. Learning more about the characters and structure may change your storyline as you write your adaptation. But do formulate a statement of your storyline by the time you...