A Novelist Finds the Bare Bones of a Play

A Novelist Finds the Bare Bones of a Play JOYCE CAROL OATES Adapting fiction for the stage is an extremely difficult task, though it's hard to say why. The written word and the spoken word are both words - aren't they? Yet, as soon as you begin the task of adaptation, you discover that it isn't " adapting" but " transposing" you must do. The essential difference between prose fiction and drama is that in prose fiction.it is the narrative voice, the writerly voice, that tells the story; in drama..of course, characters'.voices are usually unmediated, direct. The prose writer's sheltering cocoon of language dissolves and what is exposed is the bare skeleton of dialogue, action, subterranean-subtextual movement. Suddenly, everything must be dramatized for the eye and the ear; nothing can be summarized. Does that sound, easy? Many a prose writer has failed at writing plays for lack of, not talent exactly, but an elusive quality that tttight just be hutttility. In itself, hutttility won't make a novelist into a playwright, but it is a helpful starting point. Drama. unlike prose fiction, is not an interior esthetic experience. It is communal; its meeting ground is the point at which the sheerly imaginary (the playwright's creation) is brought into being by the incontestably real (the living stage). Unlike prose fiction, with its many strategies of advance and retreat, flashbacks, flashforwards, digressions and analyses, drama depends upon immediately establishing and sustaining visceral tension; in powerful plays, force-fields of emotion are almost visible on stage. When tension is resolved, it is in purely emotional teons. Drama is our highest communal celebration of the mystery of being, and of the mystery of our being together, in relationships we struggle to define, and which define us. It makes the point, ceaselessly, that our lives are /lOW; there is no history that is Dot now. When I write poetry and prose fiction, every punctuation mark is debated over in my head; my poetry is a formalist's obsession, in which even margins 2 JOYCE CAROL OATES and blank spaces function as part of the poem. (Not that anyone else would notice. Poets quickly learn the loneliness of that particular obsession.) But when I write for the theater, I write reaching out in the hope of srriking an imaginative chord in a director whose sensibility is as quirky as my own. Which is not at all to say that I am 'without a deep, abiding, and even stubborn sense of what a play of mine is, or an interior vision with which it is inexrricably bound. It's just that to me, a text is a text - inviolable, yet without life. A play is something else, and so is a film. It is this "something else" - the something that is another's imagination - that arouses my excitement. Someone recently asked me, "Doesn't it upset you to see your characters taken over by other people, out of your control?" My answer was a mildly puzzled, "But isn't that the point of writing for the theater?" A few years ago I saw the premiere of a play of mine, The Triumph ofthe Spider Monkey, at the Los Angeles Theater Center. As directed by Al Rossi and featuring Sean Cassidy,. my grimly satirical confessional play about a young mass murderer who becomes a fleeting media celebrity in Southern California had been transformed into a fluid sequence of brief scenes, with a rock music score and arresting stage devices. Friends and fellow writers had to hide their surprise, and, I suppose, their disapproval, to hear that I had had no part in preparing this stylish production - which received some enthusiastic reviews -- except to agree, by mail, to the director's suggestions for rearranging scenes, making cuts and introducing music. (Directors with whom I've worked since 1967, when Frank Corsaro directed my first play, The Sweet Enemy, for the Actors Studio, know that I am th6 most agreeable of playwrights. To be any more agreeable, I would have to be posthumous.) But when I saw The Triumph of the Spider Monkey, it was no longer my play; " my" play consisted of words...