View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Missouri: MOspace ADAPTATION: RE-CREATING THE NOVEL AS A STAGE PLAY __________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri _________________________________________ in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy ________________________________________ by Lania Knight Dr. Marly Swick, Dissertation Supervisor May, 2010 © Copyright by Lania Knight 2010 All Rights Reserved The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled ADAPTATION: RE-CREATING THE NOVEL AS A STAGE PLAY presented by Lania Knight, a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. ____________________________________ Professor Marly Swick ____________________________________ Professor Heather Carver ____________________________________ Professor Andrew Hoberek ____________________________________ Professor Trudy Lewis ____________________________________ Professor Maureen Stanton ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Professor Marly Swick for her sustained belief in me as a writer and for her guidance through the process of fulfilling my degree. I would like to thank Professor Heather Carver for her generosity of spirit and her insight into writing and adapting for the stage. I would like to thank Professor Andrew Hoberek for his expertise in all things literary and for being an inspiration in all things academic. I would like to thank Professor Trudy Lewis for her careful, thorough insights into and support for my process of becoming a writer and an academic. I would like to thank Professor Maureen Stanton for her commitment to my growth as a writer and for her unrelenting dedication to her students. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………….ii ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………….iv CRITICAL INTRODUCTION The Novelist/Playwright: on Externalizing Interiority for the Stage.......1 THREE CUBIC FEET, A NOVEL…………………………………………….15 THE LAD SKETCHES, A PLAY…………………………………………....205 VITA………………………………………………………………………….258 iii ADAPTATION: RE-CREATING THE NOVEL AS A STAGE PLAY Lania Knight Dr. Marly Swick, Dissertation Supervisor ABSTRACT The critical introduction examines Linda Hutcheon’s notion that the process of adaptation is worthy of observation, and that in analyzing a novelist adapting her own work for the stage, we begin to see how the interiority of characters can be externalized for the stage. First, I look at Norman Mailer’s adaptation of his novel, The Deer Park, for the stage. Using Robert Breen’s method of chamber theatre as a lens, I examine Mailer’s stage directions and changes to dialogue. Next, I look at my own adaptation of my novel, Three Cubic Feet, into a stage play, The Lad Sketches. By adding a magical character and incorporating an object into the action of the play, among other changes and additions, I was able to externalize for the stage the inner lives of my novel’s characters. I conclude that observing a novelist adapting her own work for the stage is particularly revealing of the process of adaptation and helpful to all adapters of fiction into stage plays. The second section is the text of my novel, Three Cubic Feet. The novel is about Theo, his family, and his boyfriend, Jonathan. In a small college town in Missouri, life for a gay teenager can feel stifling and bleak. When a chance encounter with a young professor ends in seduction, Theo Williamson must decide how much to tell his boyfriend and his family, and in the end, he must overcome his own guilt and fear to see that his allegiance lies not with everyone else, but with himself. This is a story about the body, iv how it can be broken, violated, and sometimes used to violate others, and yet we go on, we heal, and life continues. The third section is the text of my stage play, The Lad Sketches. The play is based on four of the main characters from Three Cubic Feet, Theo, his parents, and his boyfriend. Set in a pizzeria in a small town in Missouri, Theo is confronted by his parents when they discover through his sketchbook that he is leading a secret life. The play traces Theo’s struggle as he realizes he must break off his relationship with his boyfriend and break away from his parents. Issues of sexuality and secrecy are explored in the play through Theo’s relationship with his parents and his boyfriend, as well as his parents’ own histories of childhood abuse. v CRITICAL INTRODUCTION The Novelist/Playwright: On Externalizing Interiority for the Stage Many novelists have tried their hand at playwriting, and some have adapted— successfully or not—their own works for the stage, including Alexandre Dumas, fils, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Salman Rushdie, and Leslie Epstein. One of the biggest challenges a novelist faces in adapting fiction for the stage is to show to the audience what was previously told to the reader. This is especially true when a writer tries to externalize for the stage the inner life of a novel’s characters. In her book, A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon challenges the cliché that interiority is the terrain of narrative and that exteriority is best handled by drama (56). She examines adaptations of several novels into film, opera, and musicals, but she says little about novels that have been adapted into stage plays. Generally, there is little scholarship on adaptations of novels into stage plays, and even less about the writer’s process. There is a need for scholarship about adaptation that includes writers’ reflections on the experience of adapting their own works for the stage—these insights will provide a deeper understanding of the process and the possibilities for all adapters of fiction for the stage. In this essay, I will take up Hutcheon’s call for testing out “theoretical truisms or clichés against actual adaptation practice” (52) and show how the particular situation of a novelist adapting her own work for the stage—both the move toward collaboration and the shift in medium—enables the writer to externalize the interiority of a novel’s characters. 1 *** Fiction is literature, but drama is embodied literature. The transition from novel to stage play is a move from telling a story with words on a page to showing a story with spoken words, live action, and constructed sets. When a novel is adapted into a play, as Hutcheon explains, “description, narration, and represented thoughts must be encoded into speech, actions, sounds, and visual images” (40). Some adaptations of novels, such as those done in the style of chamber theatre, are designed to serve the original text, to increase the audiences’ “critical acumen” (211) in understanding literature. Robert Breen, a professor at Northwestern, developed chamber theatre as a tool for teaching literature to students, a kind of readers theatre where the text is strategically divided among multiple readers, which was designed to help students understand literary texts better than if they were just reading the texts on their own. Much scholarship has been devoted to adaptations intended to serve literature, such as chamber theatre, as well as to evaluating the fidelity of an adapted text to its original source material. A more recent turn in adaptation theory is to look, instead, at how we can analyze an adapted work as an adaptation. Linda Hutcheon suggests that the presence of the original text and the fidelity of the adaptation to the original need not be the “criterion of judgment or the focus of analysis” (6), but rather, that we can look at adaptation as an active process of creation and interpretation (7-8). This process, when the adapter is transitioning back and forth between the novel and the script, is a locus for understanding how the inner lives of fiction characters can be externalized for the stage. 2 One of the basic differences in the process of writing a novel and the process of writing a play is that playwriting is collaborative. Unlike the months and years of solitude required for writing a novel, playwriting demands a shorter timeframe; troupes of actors don’t have years to dedicate to the development of a play. The playwright depends upon the actors as they interpret and embody the characters, and the writing is propelled by the collaborative effort of the entire group dedicated to developing the play, which includes limited schedules. Leslie Epstein, professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, describes writing a novel as, “on average, six years of solitary confinement. But it takes only six months to write a play, and if you’re lucky, the balance of the year is spent in collaborative effort ….” (para. 9). He adapted his novel, King of the Jews, a year after its publication in 1979. The play was given a public reading at the old Phoenix Theater in New York, but the theater went bankrupt before mounting a full production. Later, in 2007, Epstein had the chance to further develop the play through readings at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. The script went from twenty-five parts to twelve. Before rehearsals began, the producer and the director’s questions pushed Epstein to drop lines and further develop what he’d thought was an ensemble piece into an ensemble, as he put it, that finally had a conductor (para 7). Once rehearsals began, actors came to him with questions, and more changes were made. Developing the play became a collaboration “with people who have the heightened ability to sense the inner lives of others” (para. 9). As the actors found a “lapse in motivation [or] some note that was false to a character,” (para.