As a working musical theatre
writer who has—not with any deliberate trajectory, but just because
that’s how it has always worked out—toiled almost exclusively in the
vineyards of adaptation, I have discovered a principle that has held true for
every piece I’ve ever worked on, save one. It’s much more important to adapt
the sensibility of a piece than the letter of its storytelling structure. The
illusion of being faithful (and it is always, only an illusion) lies with how much you channel the
impression left by the original source material upon its readers or viewers. By
channel I don’t necessarily mean imitate, replicate or emulate; but rather give
the audience who enter as fans of the original something that satisfies their
expectations, even if it surprises them too; and something that makes equally,
if differently, satisfied newbies, who may be inspired to sample the
original source material for
themselves, also sense a real connection.
The
irony is, there’s no principle to how this gets done. Adaptation always gets
filtered through your own sensibility,
because the only reason to adapt something is because it resonates with your own
sensibility and connects with something you
want to say, which may not be
exactly what the original means to say; in
fact, it can be quite different.
Which
brings me to Desire at 59E59, from The Acting Company, a collection of six one-act plays based on short stories of Tennessee
Williams (he wrote them from the ‘40s
through the ‘80s). Under the direction of Michael Wilson, nine actors are the messengers for six playwrights
having their way with the source material and the results are as diverse as the
by-lined authors.
Beth
Henley’s The Resemblance
Between a Violin Case and a Coffin takes
a story about a teenage love triangle that is never requited and barely
articulated, and unlocks it from (while mildly retaining) its prose POV (that
of a younger brother [Mickey Theis] observing
his older pianist-sister [Juliet Brett], rehearsing with a young male violinist [Brian Cross] who fascinates them both). Elizabeth
Egloff’s Tent Worms takes a tone poem about a
marriage (Liv Rooth , Derek
Smith) falling apart due to a husband’s
encroaching mental illness and expands William’s quiet internal drama into a
full-out portrait of delusional obsession run rampant. In You Lied
to Me About Centralia, John Guare uses
“Portrait of a Girl in Glass”—the
story upon which Williams based The Glass Menagerie, which fairly closely resembles the
play, albeit in miniature—as only an inspiration, giving him license to
explore the Gentleman Caller (Theis) and his (previously) offstage Fiancé (Megan
Bartle), after he returns
from dinner at the Wingfields. Desire Quenched by Touch, in print (as “Desire and the
Black Masseur”) a haunting tale about a
consensual and increasingly sado-masochistic relationship between a white
Southern customer (John Skelley)
seeking pain and the black masseur (Yaegel T. Welch) only too willing to oblige, is transformed by Marcus
Gardley from a “simple” telling of an
insidious Southern Gothic story of twisted passion meeting quiet rage, to a
story with a flashback framework involving a police detective (Smith) and extra touches that could have it function as a
teleplay for Tales of the Unexpected, Tales from the Darkside or
maybe even the ‘80s incarnation of The Twilight Zone. In Oriflamme, David Grimm uses a short story of two character sketches as an
excuse to channel Blanche DuBois (Rooth) into a character with another name and
have her instigate a park bench encounter with a random stranger (Smith) who is
only as gracious as the libido she inflames allows him to be. And finally The
Field of Blue Children, by
Rebecca Gilman is, like the opening
play, a more explicitly dramatized iteration of a story which, on the page, is
more implicit, about romance breaking class barriers.
As
you might imagine, the anthology is a mixed bag; director Michael Wilson’s
sense of behavioral verisimilitude is not uniformly easy in all of the styles
required, and likewise, not every actor is suited to each of his roles
uniformly (with the exceptions of Liv Rooth and Derek Smith, who I think emerge
as the evening’s stars)—but this is to be expected, especially with six one
act plays to present; and the built-in challenge, as you might also imagine, is
to revel in the clear victories and manage the best you can with the
compromises; and on that level, all; hands score pretty high.
For
the curious, I, as a viewer, fell into the camp of newbies who decide to
investigate the source. I did not know the Williams short stories earlier. But
I was inspired to check ‘em out off the notion, which proved correct, that
whatever extra work and added agendas were being fulfilled by adaptation, it
was all following a path that Williams had intended to carve; and that he might
well (and I think would) have been very pleased to see what his descendants
have wrought.
Go to David Spencer's Profile
Return to Home Page