Page to Stage: The Craft of Adaptation

4. Choose an Evocative Stageable Image

75 4 ✦ Building Block Four Choose an Evocative Stageable Image Theater exists in the three-dimensional present. When we experience great theater, it can be a production of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town in a high school auditorium, where the searing innocence shines through; the Broadway musical Chicago with its sassy sexuality; or Franca Rame’s Tomorrow’s News in an experimental space in the bowels of a boiler room, where we can bear witness to state terrorism. When we experience it, what ignites our connection is both a personal relationship with the material and an active interplay of stage, audience, and actor. The actor in front of us is often our biggest focus and strongest memory of a theatrical event. What contextualizes the event is knowing where the thing is happening. And our careful attention to where we grew up, where we lost our virginity, went to school, got married, or felt the presence of God, testifies to the deeply ingrained physical memory that place conjures for us. The environment is the wild card element in an adaptation; it can add an unexpected dimension. You know that most novels have specific places in which the character likes to work and play. Theater often evokes these places using imaginative methods, so that the story can stay focused on the people and not on design elements that will upstage the actors. Often one location will stand out; it’s the place where the central event happens or the conflict occurs. The theme is the essential floor of the adaptation you’re constructing . If we accept the design as the roof of the world your characters inhabit, then finding the evocative stageable image is having your feet grounded on that floor and reaching for the ceiling. Your intellectual and artistic challenge is to imagine how to fuse what the story is about— the theme—with where it happens: the locations from your adaptation. How do these two meet where your characters will live? 76 Building Block Four Finding the Theatrical Environment Staging is the term for the arrangement of actors onstage, for where and how they move. It is primarily actors that animate the theater space, by using their bodies and voices. Lighting, scenery, props, and sound scoring add support in varying degrees. Plays and adaptations face decisions about the visual world in which the actors will realize their characters. To work, staging needs a resonant sense of place, of where. Environment gives us the context within which our lives unfurl. Most stage sets, even within the limited confines of a theatrical stage, are realistic : a kitchen, a dark street corner, the edifice of a college entranceway, a bed, or an altar can all be re-created on a stage. For practical and financial reasons, theater must be quite selective as to what it shows in the stage setting. In a literary adaptation, in which characters and language often dominate, we usually need to have a specific idea for the onstage environment of the piece. Using the play’s theme to help you imagine a space that will work metaphorically is a vital technique for shaping an evocative environment that will also work practically with your adaptation. A metaphoric space is suggestive, evocative, and detailed enough to suggest the larger world that encompasses the play. Balancing the play’s theme with the practical needs of staging actors and objects on a stage will uncover the idea for such a space. An evocative stageable metaphor should have a sense of location and theme built into it. To evoke the husband theatrically in my first production of Samuel Beckett’s “Enough,” the woman’s hands animated his size-twelve shoes. One sequence of my staging had her creating a syncopated walk with the shoes played against her marching in place. In The Grapes of Wrath the wildly varied laundry suspended on a clothesline across a Broadway stage was enough to conjure a massive squatter’s camp. It usually takes a knowledgeable scenic designer to do a great design for an adaptation. Designers are familiar with different architectural spaces, from Broadway-style prosceniums to thrust stages, blackboxes, and found spaces. Others who can think innovatively about ways to use space, such as a visual artist or an architect, might also do good design work. It helps to have a designer who also has some sense of what actors need and production timetables. You may even get the opportunity to work with a scenographer in the...