"We express who we are not just by telling stories but by re-telling the stories of others, emphasizing different details, putting our own spin on things," says writer/director Aaron Posner. "The re-telling of stories is a basic human need."
But one particular way of re-telling stories, turning literature into theater, is especially tricky. In some ways, classic and popular novels provide ideal source material for plays — familiar titles, characters and settings, thoroughly developed stories, proven appeal. But the two forms work by different rules and reach us in different ways. The love a reader has for a book quickly can turn bitter if the stage version doesn't fit the version in her imagination.
Such are the promises and pitfalls in a project such as Seattle playwright Kevin McKeon's adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," which has its world premiere Wednesday at Portland Center Stage.
"You have a starting point that you don't have when you're creating something new," says former Portlander Marc Acito, whose musical adaptation of E.M. Forster's "A Room With a View" (with composer/lyricist Jeffrey Stock) premiered last month at the Old Globe in San Diego. "On the other hand, you have a lot of work in deciding what to change and what not to change. One issue is that you have to consider audience expectations — what you absolutely have to deliver and then what's up for grabs."
McKeon's task with "Anna Karenina" included finding ways to tell a story that's several hundred pages long in a comfortable sitting. "I have to read the book like the worst editor in the world, with the idea of cutting it severely to fit it into 2-1/2 hours of stage time, " he says.
Posner, who grew up in Eugene and now lives in Maryland, had to beat the clock when adapting Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion" for Portland Center Stage in 2008. "I remember the pain," says Mead Hunter, who was the theater's literary manager at the time. "Aaron would actually groan whenever he had to cut something else out."
Acito says an adapter always has to ask, "How do you get from point A to B to C in the fewest moves? "You look for hot spots, the fence-post moments. And you steal the best of what's in there already."
Retaining original dialogue or description doesn't necessarily mean just retyping the book, though. "A technique a lot of writers use is to cut and paste from different parts of the novel, so the effect is of skidding across the surface of events," Hunter says.
Portlander Louanne Moldovan, whose Cygnet Productions staged literary adaptations regularly from about 1993 to 2005, says she "never short-shrifted the text" but to that end tended to choose short stories or episodic, epistolary source material. She also frequently used a device that McKeon relies on in "Anna Karenina," in which actors speak explanation and commentary directly to the audience, between lines of dialogue.
"I always liked the way that provided another layer for the actor to inhabit the character, another way to get at subtext and intention," she says.
Actors, designers, musicians and so on share the weight in carrying a story from page to stage.
"That's the beautiful part — you are not adapting the book alone," Acito says. "As a novelist, I have to create the field of flowers, the streets full of people. If I'm writing a play, that can be three lines – haiku for the stage designer to take off from."
Acito also points out that most novels deal at length with the internal states of their characters, whereas theater is external, relying on action, or at least dialogue. "And what's fascinating on the page can be inactive and boring on the stage."
But that's one of the places where the real writerly art of adaptation comes in.
"You have to ask: What is at the core of this story, what makes it operate, and how do I put that onstage," says Posner, who'll be back in Portland later this year to stage "And So It Goes," his adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut short stories, at Artists Repertory Theatre. "If there's something in the story that has to be expressed, you have to find the best possible way for that to live onstage, whether that involves music, poetry, projection, narration."
It's important, too, to recognize that trying to recreate a book onstage is a fool's game. "Anyone who says they can adapt a novel without losing nuance and texture and detail is just lying to you," Posner says. 'You can't come close to it."
On the other hand, a theatrical adaptation opens a story up to other ways of telling, other sensations, other ways of layering emotions and ideas.
"It's successful," Hunter says, "if it delivers the story that the audience expects to hear, but at the same time brings something fresh to it and helps you see it anew."
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