The Art of Adaptation Read online

  The Cherry Orchard turns a microscope upon the similar passing of an old order. It looks at the theme worked out on a human scale. It looks at how the human being grapples with change—copes, justifies, rails, and reacts against.

  Even the broader tapestries of many of Shakespeare’s history plays or a historical play such as The Royal Hunt of the Sun still keep the human subject in focus. The sweep of events isn’t as important as the human psychology and interactions of King Richard the Third, Prince Hal, or Pizarro.

  When theatre tries to do too much and moves away from the human focus, it dissipates its energy. Audiences become lost and disinterested. The magic disappears.

  THEATRE EXPLORES HUMAN-CENTERED THEMES

  Theatre does much better than film at exploring both internal human struggles and broad human themes. If you wanted to explore the dreams, concerns, strivings, and yearnings that are common to all artists, you might write a play like A Chorus Line (written with the help of dancers and a long-running tape recorder). If you wanted to explore the interaction between the human and the divine, you might write Jesus Christ Superstar. And if you wanted to explore a psychiatrist yearning for a lost passion for life, you might write Equus.

  Notice, none of these great plays made particularly good films. At their most basic, they were highly theatrical pieces. The theatrical space, the spectacle, and the energy between audience and actors—everything that made them great theatre was untranslatable into film.

  THEATRE CAN USE ABSTRACT SETS AND SPACES

  Theatre doesn’t need realism to work. Molière said that all he needed was a “platform and a passion or two.” Thornton Wilder said that all he needed for the climax of his play Our Town was “only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.” All that is necessary in theatre is a space for dramatic interaction.

  In fact, as long as the human being remains paramount in a theatrical work, the actual sets can be quite nonrepresentational, even abstract. When we enter the theatre we know that we have entered an artificial, symbolic space. The three walls clearly are not a house, the two flags represent the whole army, and the three boxes only suggest a carriage. When we enter the theatre, we have already suspended our disbelief. We are already making a leap of imagination.

  THEATRE USES FLUID SPACE

  In theatre, the space is fluid. Peter Brook says in The Empty Space:

  The absence of scenery in the Elizabethan theatre was one of its greatest freedoms … . Their cinematic structure of alternating short scenes, plot intercut with subplot, were all part of a total shape. This shape is only revealed dynamically, that is, in the uninterrupted sequence of these scenes. Compared to the cinema’s mobility, the theatre once seemed ponderous and creaky, but the closer we move towards the true nakedness of theatre, the closer we approach a stage that had a lightness and range far beyond film or television.”

  In theatre, actors move easily from space to space. On one corner of the stage, we accept that they’re in a field, at the other, that they’re in a castle. Theatre has no need for the realism of film. In fact, realism can interrupt the action and destroy the magic.

  Plays that are particularly well known for their theatricality depend on this fluid abstract space. Sometimes this space covers great distances, such as in Henry V, where armies are on the battlefields of England and France, or The Royal Hunt of the Sun, about the conquest of Peru by Pizarro. In Driving Miss Daisy, the space is used to represent a car, a home, a graveyard, a supermarket.

  Sometimes this space is generalized—we don’t know quite where we are. In Godspell we are … where? On a road? In a room? By a fence? It doesn’t matter. The play Children of a Lesser God takes place “in the mind of James Leeds. Throughout the events characters step from his memory for anything from a full scene to several lines. The stage is bare, holding only a few benches and a blackboard and permitting characters to appear and disappear easily.”

  Theatre is fluid even when it takes place in an enclosed space. These small spaces provide a tight focus for the characters, intensifying what they are doing and revealing.

  Steel Magnolias takes place in a beauty parlor, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in a “Day Room in a ward of a State Mental Hospital.” The Little Foxes, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses all take place in living rooms. Harold Pinter has said that when he starts to write a play, he imagines a room with a couple of people in it and someone comes in.

  These contexts enable the play to look carefully at the human themes, to reveal what’s in the human heart, whether it be the tyranny of Nurse Ratched, Regina’s malice and cruelty, or Valmont’s unexpected capacity to love. This philosophical and thematic focus of the theatre emphasizes the element that best conveys ideas while revealing character—language.

  THEATRICAL DIALOGUE: EXPLORING IDEAS

  Film is a medium of images. It doesn’t need a great deal of dialogue to move the story or to reveal character. In theatre, however, language is a key element, a means to explore ideas. The dialogue reveals humanity. Dialogue uses rhythms, a turn of phrase, a particularly well-chosen word to convey subtext. It focuses on the interplay of theme, character, subtext, and language, rather than on the story.

  When a play is well written, even a bad actor looks good, almost as if the power of the language ennobles the actor. I was once told that Tennessee Williams’s dialogue was so good that it could be read like a telephone book and it would still sound beautiful. I have seen two productions of Williams’s plays done by mediocre actors who gave their best performances because of the strength of his words. In college, I performed one of my best scenes from the Tennessee Williams play Something Unspoken (and I was a “C” actor in almost all my other acting work).

  In theatre it’s not unusual to see a long speech of a page or more. Many of the most memorable lines in theatre come from long monologues. In film, that can be deadly. It can slow down the movement, interrupt relationships, and misplace the emphasis of a scene.

  Film depends on much more than dialogue and the actor to make it work. Film is the director’s medium, dependent upon the images and contexts that surround the actor. Theatre is the writer’s and actor’s medium, where great dialogue makes visible what is invisible, revealing important ideas and creating strong characters.

  Great theatre, like the great novel, tends to be thematic and idea-oriented. In a novel, words are used to describe, reflect, and explain meanings and significance. A play puts these words into dialogue as it explores the ideas. Dialogue becomes an exchange between the actor and the audience. In The Empty Space Peter Brook says:

  A word does not start as a word—it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behavior which dictate the need for expression. This process occurs inside the dramatist; it is repeated inside the actor. Both may only be conscious of the words, but both for the author and then for the actor the word is a small visible portion of a gigantic unseen formation … .

  Dialogue contains subtext, hidden meanings that are revealed through the vehicle of the actor. Brook goes on to say, “The vehicle of drama is flesh and blood and here completely different laws are at work. The vehicle and the message cannot be separated.”

  This of course makes theatre more character-oriented than story-oriented. It puts the emphasis on the dialogue and the interrelationships between characters. This language of theatre is not just about talk, but about revelation; it’s not about a message, it’s about characters revealing the truth about humanity. It’s not about somebody standing up and lecturing and telling us, it’s about human meanings and human feelings.

  Not just dialogue, however, reveals the human condition, but also the language of sound, the rhythms of the word, the texture of the words, the sounds in themselves.

  In many of the absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco’s plays, language is used to confuse communication, rather than help it. In one of my favorite plays, Ionesco’s The Leader,
one character says the words, “Let’s go to the market and get some eggs.” The other character replies, “Oh, I love them as much as you do.”

  When I directed the play during college, one of my teachers helped me to understand some of the underlying meanings of Ionesco’s nonsense words. In this case, the meaning of the first character’s lines was explained to me as “Let’s go make babies”—a rather unusual way to communicate that desire.

  Occasionally there have been plays where the actors speak in abstract sounds that signify what is happening internally. In Ionesco’s play The Chairs the actors have moved from dialogue to sound, ending the play with these “words”:

  ORATOR:

  Mmm, Mmm, Gueue, Gou, Gu, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm.

  In many of these absurdist plays sound signifies the vain search for communication, the emptiness of our lives, the superficialities of relationships in which we never truly reach each other. Sometimes the message tells us that when we talk we say absurd things. The most essential communication is beyond words.

  CHOOSING THE PLAY TO ADAPT TO FILM

  Clearly, much in theatre is untranslatable. Millions of dollars were spent trying to bring A Chorus Line, Equus, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Godspell to the screen, with little return on the investment. There are certain plays that seemed difficult to adapt, and yet the films worked beautifully, such as Driving Miss Daisy and Amadeus. What, then, do you look for?

  Look for a play that can work in a realistic context. Even though Children of a Lesser God and Amadeus and Driving Miss Daisy used fluid, abstract sets, they implied real rooms and cars and carriages and concert halls. Nothing was lost by creating a realistic world.

  Look for a play that can be opened up. The Little Foxes is set in a living room, but offstage characters go upstairs, travel on the train, live next door, and work down the street. In the film it was easy to include actual scenes showing these implied scenes. The play Steel Magnolias took place in a beauty parlor, but for the film it wasn’t difficult to add bedrooms, living rooms, an outdoor reception, and a county fair, since the dialogue referred to action that took place in other spaces.

  Look for a play that implies a story line. Some plays have little story, but when the play is converted to film, the story will need to come to the forefront. The play Les Liaisons Dangereuses was very stylized, placing its emphasis on subtext and dialogue. The film placed the emphasis on the story. In this play there was a story line that could be strengthened to help create a successful film. In the case of A Chorus Line, however, there wasn’t.

  Make sure that the play does not achieve its magic through its unique use of theatrical space. The sets of Man of La Mancha, Godspell, Equus, and Hair were an intrinsic part of the success of the plays, but that context could not translate into film. The way the abstract theatre space engaged the audience is what made these plays work. As soon as the settings became realistic, they lost an essential ingredient. I, for one, refused to see the film of Equus because I had no desire to see real horses blinded, and as soon as that scene was acted out realistically, it lost the symbolic meaning that made the play work in the theatre.

  Find the play where the human themes can be expressed through cinematic images rather than through language. Many good plays rely on the richness of the spoken word. But film is essentially visual. If you can’t see the play in motion, it may not be workable.

  And if the play worked because of the special energy that comes from the audience-and-actor interaction, reconsider trying to adapt. Watching a film is not the same as watching a play. The energy of the theatrical experience can cover many flaws.

  There have been many more failures in the translation of theatre to film than successes. At first glance.it seems as if plays are the closest to film and are naturals for adaptation. Yet the play is not the thing, it’s the experience. The essential magic that creates theatre can’t be translated; but with the right play, new magic can be created for film.

  Perhaps Shakespeare best described the transitoriness and magic of theatre in The Tempest (Act IV, Scene i):

  Our revels now have ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air;

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  CASE STUDY:

  Driving Miss Daisy

  Driving Miss Daisy began as a play in the seventy-four-seat Off-Broadway theatre Playwrights Horizons in New York and later moved to the John Houseman Theatre.

  Playwright and screenwriter Alfred Uhry charts the course of the play as it moved from the theatre to film. “To start with, about the third week of the run in this small theatre I was approached about shooting the play, just as it was, for television. Then the next week I was offered a cable television deal, and the next week, Angela Lansbury wanted to do a Movie of the Week. Then several different movie companies became interested in it. Originally Rob Reiner, Sam Goldwyn, and the Zanucks were interested. I eventually went with Zanuck and Brown, because their record was so extraordinary, and they had made so many pictures that I admired. I told them that I’d rather have no movie at all than have it be wrong, and that’s why I wanted to try and write it. By wrong, I meant the wrong accents, the wrong words. In this delicate play, much of it has to be unsaid for it to work.

  “Dick Zanuck found out that [director] Bruce Beresford was available, and in twenty-four hours, I was sitting with Bruce Beresford, and he chose, out of all his many projects, to do ours.

  “At first, the studios all wanted it and then, all of a sudden, nobody wanted it, which was fine. I wasn’t surprised. I never thought anybody would want it in the first place—a play about an old lady and an old man. But they said, it’s beautiful and it’s wonderful, and nobody will go see it. Finally Warner Brothers financed about five-sevenths of it and Jake Ebert in London financed the rest of it. The cost of the picture was seven and a half million dollars and it was shot in forty-six days.

  “When you write for the stage, you have to tell people a lot of things, but in a movie you can show them everything. You can be much more subtle in a movie than in a play. You can say much less and show much more.

  “The film is different from the play because it’s more populated. In the play, Hoke sits on a stool and pretends to drive a car. However, the play implies all the realistic sets.

  “The play was not abstract, which helped the adaptation. It contained twenty-six short scenes which were almost cinematic. When I wrote the play, I was aware of this cinematic action. I saw my work for the film as filling in the scenery, filling in the blanks, and filling in the colors. I didn’t want to change the focus, and I didn’t.

  “I thought a movie with three people in it would be monotonous, so I made a rule for myself that I would bring in all the people I talked about in the play and no more. I brought in Florine, the wife of Boolie, Idella the maid, Uncle Walter’s birthday party with the whole family, and the people that were there when Boolie gets his award. I wanted to keep the focus where it was, and I didn’t want to make up any subplots. I’ve seen plays adapted for the screen where they put in subplots which weigh it down. I thought of it as focusing on two and a half people, Miss Daisy, Hoke, plus the smaller role of the son.

  “I cut any dialogue that I could show rather than tell about. I found that some things in the play were repetitive. In a movie you can say much less and show much more. I kept the dialogue at a minimum, while trying to re-create the way that people talk. When adapting your own work you have to be ruthless about making it into a movie. You can’t fall in love with the sound of your wor
ds. You have to see it as a film and not just as some actors saying your words. A good actor in a movie has to say about a third of what a good actor has to say on the stage. So much of what they say is subtext. People like Hoke and Miss Daisy who have an ongoing relationship generally say the same things, yet I still needed to pick interesting things for them to say. I wanted to keep the dialogue at a minimum, while still re-creating the way that people talk.

  “Morgan Freeman added some dialogue, since he had created the part in the play. And he’s exactly my age and also from the South, so there were certain words that he remembered, such as ‘chifferobe,’ which is a Southern word for bureau. Jessica played it exactly as written.

  “Adapting is a bit like redecorating. You have to rethink the script. Why is this a movie? It’s a movie because it’s fluid, it moves around. I was excited about really recreating the Atlanta of my childhood. I could describe the way the neighborhood looked, that remarkable house, and real cars.

  “Some of the characters needed some rethinking. Lili Zanuck was convinced in a draft that Florine was turning out to be a bitch, and I said, ‘I don’t mean her to be a bitch. I just mean her to be a flirtatious person.’ When Lili made that comment, I went back and reexamined her.

  “After Jessica had agreed to play the part of Miss Daisy, Dick Zanuck said, ‘There’s got to be somewhere where Jessica can smile. She seems so grim all the time, and Jessica’s got the most beautiful smile in the world.’ We added the smile at the birthday party when her older brother cuts the cake and she gives that picture perfect, wonderful smile.