Page to Stage: The Craft of Adaptation

7. Balancing the Blocks

123 7 Balancing the Blocks There is an intensely delicate balance to the building blocks. Creating three-dimensional characters with complex relationships and vital conflicts in a stageworthy environment takes playmaking choices that resonate with each other while striking that balance. The raw power of live theater allows the paradox of both dynamic immediacy and meditative perspective, and the two combine and combust aesthetically and emotionally when a production achieves a balance of theme, language, character , image, story, and actions. Different plays give different weights to the content elements, depending on the unique demands of their stories. Some are more weighted and driven by character, such as the back brother in Me and My Shadow, or by relationships, such as the Joad clan in The Grapes of Wrath. Storyline elements drive some plays, for example, political events and the AIDS epidemic invading the lives of the characters in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, or prior circumstance in Ibsen’s Ghosts. And a few plays structure themselves around a theme, such as transformation in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses. Depending on the needs of the story, the playwright usually finds one performance vocabulary particularly strong for the expressive demands of a piece. Language tends to be a pivotal element in any play, and in some this is especially true. An Oscar Wilde play, such as The Importance of Being Earnest, is a luscious illustration of a language-activated piece. Playable physical action is an important building block in theater, and in some plays it is the dominant tool for expression, such as the Molière farce The Forced Marriage. Some plays place particular emphasis on incorporating image throughout the script and performance as their animating expressive element, as in The Cockfighter, the cockfighting ring shaped 124 Page to Stage my choices about what to keep and what to leave out, as well as how to conceptualize the story’s staging. Success in completing the construction exercises is in being able to compare your first instincts with your subsequent discoveries about these elements. Look at the material you have culled from the text to substantiate each point. You can test it against what you already know from another building block such as theme, principal character, or storyline. There is an interplay between knowing your principal characters and fleshing out their story: what they are like, what they care about, how they sound, who they relate to and how, what conflicts they attempt to overcome, what in the past influences them, and where they live. What you have learned can give you a wide array of materials with which to finish shaping the construction of your adaptation. As you evaluate your current draft of the script to discern its strongest elements and discover which you might have neglected, you may be surprised at what you find at this stage of the construction process. Stay open to those surprises. If you realize, for instance, that you are onto a powerful stageable image, don’t be afraid to let that realization give new direction to your final rewrites of the script. What Is Your Significant Content Element? All three building blocks that involve content materials—theme, character and relationship, and storyline—are indispensable to a good play. If you have actors onstage, there is some form of character to follow. And a play is a story in some way or other, even an experimental piece in which the story is less obvious. Theme is inescapable: there is an idea and an interplay between ideas, manifesting somehow in your play. The question worth asking about a play is this: which of these elements is primary in this particular story? In a character- or relationship-driven story, what propels the series of events forward comes from within the characters, from decisions they make or actions they take. A character has a thought or feeling and acts on it, and those actions are the central events of scenes. The conflict in such a character-driven play is an inner one, while in a relationshipdriven play it’s between particular characters that we get to know well. The turning points in the story are more about what the characters do than what gets done to them. Human beings struggling within them- Balancing the Blocks 125 selves or with other individual human beings, all in ways the audience gets to see and feel, dominate character-oriented stories. In...