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The
Heart is a Lonely Hunter Featuring: Debra
Cardona, Moderator
So I’d like…ok I have a couple of announcements…I guess I should sit down behind this microphone. I have a couple of announcements. This is being audio recorded, its going to be a podcast on the website. And you have some evaluation forms in the back of the handout so if you could please fill those out and hand them in at the end that would be fabulous. You can make an adaptation, you can be inspired to make an adaptation of anything: a novel, a film, a play, a videogame… and so I’m just here to ask a few questions of our panel about why and the how of adaptation. And I guess the first thing would be, Rebecca, what spurred you to do this adaptation? Were you asked to do this adaptation? Was it your idea? What is it about the novel that spoke to you? REBECCA GILMAN: I was approached by The Acting Company here in New York and Margot Harley with the commission to adapt the novel for the stage and [if] people don’t know the work of The Acting Company, they’re the Juilliard program acting program graduates. It started with Margot Harley and John Houseman and they take plays, they generally do Shakespeare, and then adaptations of American classics and tour them all over the country and they have a really terrific educational program that goes along with that. And so Margot approached me probably six or seven years ago and asked if I’d like to write an adaptation of the novel and it was one of those books that I had read, I think, [well] I had grown up in Alabama and I think every southern girl probably reads this book when she’s a teenager and I had read it when I was fourteen or fifteen and I had really loved it, it was a beloved novel for me, but I hadn’t looked at it since and I had that sensation of being afraid to read it again in case I hated it, which sometimes happens. But I read it again before I spoke with Margo and not only did I not hate it, I found that I loved it even more. And, all I had really remembered from the novel was Mick, cause I think most girls you know really identify with Mick, with that character. And I had, cause I grew up in Trussville, Alabama and I’d never read a book I guess besides this one, all the politics had gone right over my head. All the Marxism and you know the critiques of capitalism had gone right over my head when I read it. So when I re-read it I was so impressed by her critical eye and the political message of the novel. And so I was really eager then to work on it, so I was really happy for the opportunity. DEBRA: And I want to put this question out to everybody in the panel: what is it that inspires you to adapt something, to reintroduce it to an audience in stage form? ANNE BOGART: Doug has to answer that… (general laughs) DOUG WRIGHT: Well I have a love-hate relationship with the process of adaptation. Because at worst you’ll be accused of desecration, and at best glorified plagiarism (laughs), so it takes, curiously I think, a real abdication of ego, because you’re technically serving another author but by the same token an enormous amount of craft. And I think one thing I’m always aware of is no matter how absolute I think my fidelity to the original author, its always, ultimately, a dramatic rendering of my experience of that original work. It’s never the pure artifact itself. And that’s I think both one of the liberating things and innate limitations of adaptation. You’re always really adapting your own idiosyncratic reading of a work no matter how fidelitous. Because there’s so many editorial decisions you’re making about the characters you keep, the moments you dramatize, the things you abridge, and so that to me is the curious, I guess liberating safety of it. It’s really not about the original author; it’s about your experience of that author. (pause) Which doesn’t really answer that question at all, but... (general laughs) DEBRA: Well I read an article in the newspaper about Anne’s Antigone, and she had said that what she mostly thinks about is what it all means now. And so very often in adaptations things are brought up to date or changed to a different time period or done in a different form, like Will’s Seven Against Thebes which was a play by Aeschylus was done as a hip hop piece with a DJ. And so what about it, what attracts you to it, what makes you want to say I need to do this now or I need to set this in the dust bowl or I need to know, you know, what is it that sets it in a new time and place that you think speaks to a new audience? ANNE: I think everything first of all is adaptation. I love your definition, Will. And I mean even this space is an adaptation. I feel like we should, sing a song from Rent, you know... (general laughs) We’re in that space, we’re in an adaptation of—it actually happened on this stage, and when I walked in, I thought, you know, what a strange configuration of all this space and I don’t know, we should face out but we want to talk to each other. And I love something that Georgio Straler said when he whenever he did, the great now deceased Italian director, who said whenever he did a classic play he felt like he was writing an essay about the play. And I certainly feel that, I certainly think that you digest, you have an experience with a piece of literature or even as Maureen suggests that I actually adapt people, I study a person and make an adaptation of my experience of them. And you know actually when you contacted me to do this panel I thought ‘oh I don’t do adaptations’ but its true, I guess Antigone is an adaptation. So it really is about how you define it and certainly, I called, I was talking to Chuck Mee this morning who should be sitting right here cause he does adaptations more than I do, and I said what is an adaptation, and he said well historically all plays are adaptations of mostly novels, you know Twelfth Night was written two years after the novel and Shakespeare based it upon something very very recent… What am I answering? I forgot… (laughs) Basically— DEBRA: …well what is it about, what is it that makes you want to take an older story and reintroduce it now? ANNE: Well certainly the choice comes from a non-intellectual place, it comes from goosebumps. In other words if I’m encountering something say a piece of literature and I start to get this feeling literally tingling in my body, which is a barometer, it has to tingle to a point that I know it will sustain me through the fundraising, the difficult process of translation, the talking people into doing it, into the difficult rehearsal moments, so I have to have enough of a charge about the original to know that that’s gonna happen. I also have to feel like it’s just a little bit out of my league, in other words that something in the interaction with it will change me profoundly. And in the spirit of standing on the shoulders of giants as Heisenberg called it that I choose either an author or a person upon whom I want to stand, I want to put my feet on their shoulders so I have to digest them, eat them, shit them out…I can’t take that metaphor too seriously. But it really, the choice of what to adapt comes from an excitement, a thrill, and the potential to stick with something long enough. WILL POWER: I want to add to that if I may, you know for me in addition to everything she said which I totally agree with, it’s for me a question you know and The Seven Against Thebes, the Aeschylus, the original version, there was this question that the characters and also Aeschylus was wrestling with which was you know do we have the power and the choice as human beings to pave our own path, or are we destined to make the same mistakes of a forefathers and foremothers, you know. And that’s something that the Greeks wrestled with, Aeschylus wrestled with it, and that question was deep for me because I really didn’t know. You know like, I’m from California so I try to stay optimistic on that sunshine type vibe, so I was like ‘Of course we got to—’ you know, ‘Of course we have empowerment!’ You know what I mean tofu and all that, be healthy, and be empowered, but in the back of my mind I was always like, well I don’t know, you know. Maybe we are cursed, whatever that means. So that question really spoke to me at the time that I started to adapt it, I mean it finally premiered here in ’06, but I kinda started working on it in like 2001 and at that time you know Bush had been elected, George W. Bush, and then you know he was the second Bush, and at that time Jeb Bush was kinda hot in Florida, and so I was like is this gonna be like the Bush dynasty, you know are we gonna have this cyclical thing going on? And also where I’m from by that time I had lived in New York for a while and I would go back to my old neighborhood in San Francisco, in California, in the Fillmore, and I would see these you know people who were young kids and now they were like older you know hustling on the street and I remember when their older brothers were on the street and then when I was a kid their fathers were… you know what I mean, so I would see these generations kind of perpetuating some of these dysfunctions. So it was a question that kinda connected to me at a national level, as Americans and also at a personal level. And so I kinda felt excited about diving into that and exploring that question and trying to answer or at least wrestle with that question for myself. ANNE: I think that’s true. I think things that endure ask really large questions and a play like Antigone asks you know the questions that just do not die. The Greeks tended to do that in spades, I don’t know why. It was a fecund period… (laughter) DEBRA: Rebecca, I want to get back to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. How, what was the process? When you got this commission, how did you sit down and start? REBECCA: (Rebecca laughs) That’s a good question. It wasn’t, I, this is the first novel I ever adapted, and I guess I wanted to be a good steward of the work. And, if, how many people have read the novel, I’m just curious? So a lot of you have. You know it had its own particular challenges which is that its about obstacles to communication its about a very internalized conflict, its about people choosing the wrong person as the repository for their confessions or for their soul mate, and so a lot of the things that are so great about the novel thematically in some ways work against a dramatization. And so I went through, you know this might be dull, but, I went through and I chose the scenes that were actual scenes that I felt could be put on stage as a scene. And there are not an enormous number of those in the book because a lot of the book is these sort of internal monologues. And then when I, and then I sort of pieced together what needed to connect those scenes. I started looking at ways to approach it stylistically, and I looked for models in the theater that I thought might work for me, and the play I was really drawn to was Our Town. And I felt like that would be a sort of stylistic entry point for me into the novel. And then I did this thing where I, I’ve never done this before usually I just write, but I put everything on index cards and I had it all arranged on a story board the way you would a film or something. But because of the process with this play, it was produced first at the Alliance Theater five years ago I guess and then we’ve workshopped it here and had a staged reading at Roundabout Theater and I sort of have kept coming back to it until we got to here and even now I did re-writes. I’ve re-written this play more than anything I’ve ever re-written. I’ve been re-writing off and on now for five years, so… I at one point had a lot of direct address in the play and this last time through, I’ve never used direct address in anything I’ve ever written, and this last time through I just thought well you know I’m only doing this because it’s a novel, because its an adaptation of a novel, and you know I don’t normally write that way. So I went through and I stripped all that out, and it was just like opening up a window in a sick room for me I was just like ‘oh thank god I don’t have to deal with that anymore’ and it really, it freed me up and so now I feel like it’s a more sort of muscular approach to the adaptation for me. But its always, you know the thing that all these guys are saying, the thing that Doug said, you know the first decision I had to make was what do I leave out. Because you want to include everything if you really love the piece you’re working on. If you don’t love it there’s no reason to do it. And so I had to make some hard decisions about what to leave out and some of them were practical. If you know the novel, I left out the story of her little brother Bubber shooting Baby and then I also left out, there’s this long sort of set piece about this crazy party that Mick has, this prom where all the kids in the neighborhood come and for practical reasons I basically left that out cause I would’ve had to have a cast of you know twenty-five child actors and I really didn’t want to do that. So those went and then other things went and then I had to fill in some blanks, places where, and this is where you start guessing, second-guessing, trying to read Carson McCullers’ mind. Like filling in some character arcs where she maybe hasn’t connected the dots entirely, so things like that. DEBRA: I read another article, Doug you once said that adapting Grey Gardens was like adapting The Bible. You do feel a certain responsibility. So I wanted to talk to you all about that because Grey Gardens had a huge huge kind of cult following as a documentary and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter everyone has read in high school so do people walk up to you and go ‘you left this out you left that out how did you…’ you know, how… DOUG: Well I would say, I did two musical adaptations for Broadway, Grey Gardens and The Little Mermaid, and working on those two they were almost the identical process because both those cultural artifacts have enormously avid fan bases and in the case of Grey Gardens its mostly gay men in their forties and The Little Mermaid its 8 year old girls, but those demographics have a surprising amount in common. (general laughter) So those were actually really similar experiences. Cause you do feel, its interesting cause you are working on a piece that has—in both those instances—pieces that have provenance when there’s a sense of audience expectation about them. And certainly when you’re hired by Disney to adapt one of their properties they’re really not asking you to reinvent or reinterpret the wheel they’re asking you to try and give audiences exactly the experience that they’re expecting. So there’s a certain knowledge of the assignment and a kind of sober undertaking of it. But it is true that with Grey Gardens people were incredibly opinionated about selective choices that we made. But it mostly, mostly it seemed, you know you’re… you must’ve felt this Rebecca, you’re trying to write for a multiplicity of audiences its not like a brand new play where everyone’s coming in with a blank slate and they’re hopping on the train you’ve built and taking the little trip to the destination you chose. When you’re working on a piece that has a reputation, like a Carson McCullers novel or even an animated Disney movie, you’re writing for a multiplicity of audiences: to people that adore the original material, people who disdain it, people who are coming with an agenda about it… And so you ultimately find you’re writing for about five different groups and waiting for that magical moment in viewing the work where they all sort of give up their various agendas and become one because hopefully what you’re doing is working on some level. But it is a particular challenge. WILL: Yeah my, Seven Against Thebes the original is one of the lesser known Greek tragedies so its not like, heck people were like ‘How could you leave this out!’ you know my whole thing was more I got some heat from some circles about you know that you should not bring in hip hop or those kind of sensibilities into Greek Tragedy like ‘that’s wrong!’ you know ‘you’re bastardizing it’ I got some of that. And I got some from my own circles at the time some of like my spoken word hip hop colleagues I mean one guy in particular who I won’t name I mean he just like ‘why you doin this white stuff?’ and he was white! You what I mean, but you know, he laid into me! You know, ‘Why’s Bill T. Jones…you need to have a hip hop dude…’ but I was like his story, its his story, you know. And I feel like [in] every generation that’s what we do, we look at these old stories and we flip it as what we say, we modernize it to express it in our way. You know and that’s kinda what it was. And so for me it was a kind of natural outgrowth of who I was as an artist. And there’s obviously a lot of that you know supported it so it wasn’t like that but I definitely got a little bit of heat from both sides. My man, um what’s his name, Finegold, in Village Voice, he ended the review he’s like “It’s brilliant and wrong-headed.? (general laughter) That’s what he said. But I didn’t think so! You know what I mean, so I mean sometimes if you feel there’s something there that’s vital for you, its like what everyone’s saying, you just have to do it. ANNE: I wanna add one more thought to this discussion which is what happened with Antigone, which was really an adaptation by Jocelyn Clarke who is not a woman it’s a guy—Jocelyn Clarke—and he’s from Dublin and he did the adaptation. And he looked at not only the Sophocles, but he looked at the Anouilh and the Brecht and the many many different versions of Antigone and really entered inside of it and he came up with something new in the play, a new plot point which is—if you know the story—these two brothers they kill each other and one of them is left out to be desecrated and not be buried and the other one is being buried. And Creon, who wants to leave the unburied unburied, confronts Antigone and says you really need to leave him alone, let him be unburied. And at one point in the conversation—and this is entirely new!—Creon says to Antigone, well actually when they killed each other their bodies were so desecrated that we couldn’t tell which one is which so you might be actually burying the wrong body. And then Antigone says—and this is new—well I don’t care, I want to do what’s right. And he says well actually it maybe even isn’t Eteocles or Polynices it actually might be an Argive soldier and not even a Theban and she pauses and she says I still will bury him because I think its right. That— I am so moved that he found that because it’s like adding a trinket to an ancient story. And now when that story goes forward it has that potential, and that’s extraordinary to feel part of a lineage of a story. And that I don’t know how Jocelyn came to that point, but I’m very moved by the fact that it’s now got its own little added history. And I think every time we adopt something, adapt or adopt, we adopt it, maybe we adopt it—yeah, that’s what we do! We don’t adapt, we adopt! (panelists chuckle) Also, I just wanna say that I haven’t seen, I’m gonna see this show tonight, I feel like we should really discuss it cause I know theres a number of people in this room who saw it and are probably curious, so… DEBRA: If you don’t mind I can start opening up to questions from the audience about the play. Does anyone have any questions? Sir-- AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just have a question. Did you think about watching the movie, or did you watch the movie, or did you avoid the movie? REBECCA: That’s a good question. I had seen the movie when I was a kid and I didn’t remember it very well and then I decided not to watch it again because I didn’t want to be influenced by it. But I just spoke to the artistic director here, Jim Nicola, and he said he watched it recently and he wasn’t able to get through it. But he said, he said the thing they did in the adaptation of the film which was curious, is that they did the film in 1962, or ‘64 or something, and they set it in 1962. So they took it out of its depression era setting, which seems to me to defeat the purpose of the entire enterprise in a lot of ways. So the only thing I remembered was Sandra Lock played Mick and I remember there… you know it musta come out when I was really small cause I remember there had been this like search for a girl to play Mick and you know in Alabama I think every little girl probably thought she was gonna play Mick and went out for some giant cattle call and had her heart broken, so that’s what I remember from it. But I did avoid it cause I didn’t really want to inadvertently steal from it or be influenced by it, so, yeah. DEBRA: Oh I have a question about the film because I never saw the film. Did they have any of those conversations about Marxism… REBECCA: …I don’t remember anything, I don’t remember it at all to be able to answer that… DEBRA: …its just all those conversations in the play really really struck home and I, it just, I had, I don’t think I read the book. I thought for sure I had. And so when I started hearing all these conversations I thought, ‘oh my gosh this really has resonance.’ So, you know, I think it’s really timely. Is there anything that you wish you could have included? REBECCA: You know I go back and forth. I do wish that, you know if I were going to do a film version of it I would include those two incidents that I referred to. I would do the, the party is this great scene in which Mick wants to have this prom, she’s going into what, you know junior high she’s, you know, cause through the entire piece she’s just between being a girl and being a woman and so she has all her friends over and they all get dressed up in fancy clothes and they sort of stand around awkwardly. And then all the kids from the neighborhood come and sort of infect the party and they end up running outside in their fancy clothes and running around like crazy animals and falling down and acting like kids when they were trying to be so adult. And I think that’s so, you know visually and dramatically, that’s really lovely. And I like the other incident too where I don’t know if you remember, there’s this little girl, Baby, who wants to be like Shirley Temple she’s always dressed up and she dances around the neighborhood. And Mick’s little brother is standing on the porch and he’s got a gun he’s been playing with and Baby comes out and he just shoots her in the head you know sort of unprovoked. He just looks at her and thinks you know he doesn’t kill her but he you know shoots her in the head. And then Mick tells him that he’s gonna, go to the electric chair and he runs away. And its this terrible but very funny too, obviously to me, obviously not to anybody else… (general laughter) But, I would love to include those two incidents. I think, you know I didn’t wanna leave those out, but I felt like you know at some point you just have to make the tough decisions. And you know the other than that though, I feel like you know I know that from talking to people who saw the film that the character of Biff is not in the film and that the character of Jake just disappears you know an hour into it, which, I love Biff so much, he’s such a weird puzzle of a person and I just adore that character so I think that other than those two incidents I tried to be true to the rest of the story, so, and include everything that I could. DEBRA: How has it changed over the years? Cause you’ve been working on it for about six years, this play. REBECCA: I guess like I said I got rid of some sort of stylistic elements and direct address that probably were not moving the story forward effectively and felt you know, I don’t know how you guys feel, but you’re always like, ‘I’m gonna adapt something should I have a narrator?’ You know, ‘Should I…’ it seems like those traps you fall into when you’re adapting prose and I didn’t want a narrator and so I tried to have various people do this that and the other and you know it never worked for me. And I kept thinking…back when I was in Chicago I saw this play called Night of the Mime that was a parody of an adaptation of like The Yearling, or you know like a coming of age story, and it was about this little girl and she found a mime, injured mime in a ditch and she took him home and nursed him back to health and took him to the state fair and he won a ribbon in the mime competition. It was very funny but it had a narrator, it had this woman who came out and narrated and then she’d go and half way through the show she went offstage and she came back and she was wearing a tshirt that said “I’m acting too.” And I always thought that was the trap of a narrator. Not only is it dumb, but you have some poor actor who you’re asking to come out on stage and just narrate and do nothing else, you know, so I try to avoid that trap cause I didn’t want that to happen. DEBRA: (taking a question) Ok, this lady. AUDIENCE MEMBER: So you talked quite a bit about what you added or took out… Was there, were there, how much did you add? You know like when you talked about connecting some of the scenes, was that all invented or you know, I’m just curious. REBECCA: A lot of the scenes in the conversation are conversations that I created that were just you know either prose or narration in the book. And a lot of the things that I have, especially when I have the various characters come and talk to Singer, a lot of the things they tell Singer are not things they tell anyone in the book they’re just things that we learn about them. But I really felt like it was crucial to see that they had chosen him as their confidant and that they were revealing some, making attempts to communicate and reveal things about themselves. So every, even the scenes that I completely invented usually have some detail from the book in them. The one scene that’s sort of a complete invention is the scene between Biff and Mick, the final scene between the two of them when he tries to engage her about gender norms and sexual orientation. Because there’s nothing in the book that sort of completed that arc between them even though the details are from the book that he played with the little bone hair pin and the fabric those are Biff’s details and I thought they were lovely details. AUDIENCE MEMBER: What about the sundae and the beer? REBECCA: You mean the picnic? AUDIENCE MEMBER: (muffled question) … when she orders the sundae… REBECCA: That’s, that’s all Carson McCullers. Its really an intimidating book to adapt because she was probably nineteen when she started it, you know, she was 19, 20 when she wrote it so she was sort of a genius basically. DEBRA: Any other questions? (calls on someone in the audience) Right here… AUDIENCE MEMBER: Oh, I get the microphone! I’m just, I’m curious from any of you who have adapted something where there is a living writer or an estate, how did that go? DOUG: It’s expensive. And quite often, and I’ve also received the word “No” quite often. But mostly its expensive, I find it. Yeah, it’s expensive. ANNE: Yeah, I’m not sure ‘optioning’ would be the word, just getting the rights for the material. AUDIENCE MEMBER: If you get the word “No” do you stop, or is there another way to interpret the, can there be another approach to the story that doesn’t require rights lets say? ANNE: Sometimes you can get down on your knees and beg and talk them into it. WILL: Or maybe you can, maybe, I mean I don’t know if you’re talking personally, but maybe there’s something in it that can inspire you to write an original piece, you know what I mean? Like, it doesn’t have, you know it depends, it depends. There might be something in there that, you know you’re influenced by and you don’t have pay, like I said. DOUG: I’ve had surprisingly positive experiences I have to say that have defied my expectation. But like working on Grey Gardens we had a huge advocate in Albert Maysles, who we did procure the rights from, and in addition… ANNE: He’s an artist, that’s why! DOUG: In part yeah that’s generally true although I will say we had a lot of Bouviers and a lot of Beales and a lot Kennedys come out of the woodwork. Perhaps less artistic in their souls but no less supportive which was gratifying and a little daunting. But I’ve also—in film more often than in theater—I’ve adapted novels by contemporary living authors and in most instances their attitude, non un-realistically, was ‘I sold it to the movies and the check cleared, whatever happens is no longer my fault or my responsibility.’ And so as a writer working on those pieces you, again that’s a kind of liberation. But a lot of the best—this speaks to what Anne said I think—a lot of the best authors whose work I’ve been entrusted to adapt are artists and understand the innate difference in form and that a good novel doesn’t necessarily make a good play that a good play doesn’t necessarily make a good novel because the demands of each of those mediums are markedly different and that adaptations sometimes quite literally means reinvention for a new medium. And you’re actually serving the author better by taking greater liberties than they might initially imagine. And I think the really good authors know that and hand their work over to you trusting some measure of your expertise. DEBRA: I have a question about, because you’re the person on the panel that has adapted your own work, because you adapted the play Quills into the film. So what was that? Was that a frightening thing? Was that a freeing thing? How did that work for you? DOUG: That’s a great question! It was like, this will sound really flip but I really mean it, it was like getting paid to go to grad school. Cause I didn’t know a lot about film going in to it and I sort of said to myself I’m gonna use this as an opportunity to learn a new medium and if the play survives it, fantastic, and if the play doesn’t I’ll at least emerge as a kind of educated screen writer. And I actually had a very positive experience and the two, the two pieces are remarkably different I would say in terms of narrative, certain plot elements, certain twists and turns the story takes. And yet I would argue that thematically they’re identical. They log all the same ideological points and I think that’s what I’m saying when you’re transferring one medium into another sometimes to log those thematic points in a way that’s honest and true to the source you have to absolutely reinvent the narrative or tear characters upside down. But its about serving, I think at the end of the day, the kind of thematic intent or those vareties that Anne cited that calls a work to endure basic truths about our experience that subsist. If you can take some truth that some author illuminated in prose and render it in drama, fantastic. You’ll have to change a lot of what’s technical, but if you keep the truth in tact you’re doing a good job of adaptation. DEBRA: Any more questions? This lady back here with the scarf… AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. I just wanted to—perhaps not really a question—I just wanted to thank you Rebecca Gilman for doing what you did in that last scene with Biff. Because the mind is led by Mick’s responses to that point, or one might be led to that point, to feel that he is a sexual predator when in fact I ended up feeling very much like he saw a kindred spirit in her, in someone who was also a misfit in her way, possibly sexually as well. And I just want to say that’s so much more interesting and so much more complicated than he was leering after her, and I never did feel that he was, but because of her response and her discomfort, without that last scene you might end up feeling that that was the case and I just wanted to congratulate you and thank you for the work that you’ve continued to do on it. I had the great pleasure and privilege of seeing it the other night and like a good book, which I’ve said to many people since, at some moment and I can’t tell you when, and I think that it’s a good sign that I cant tell you when, I was completely sucked under and into the story and I was no longer an observer and I really was pulled into the world so thank you very much. REBECCA: Thank you, thanks for your comments. And I think that so much is due to Randall Newsome and Cristin Milioti, who play those, well the entire case is brilliant, I think, but Randall has really been very patient with me while I’ve tried to figure Biff out. He’s been great. DEBRA: (answering a question) Sir. AUDIENCE MEMBER: So you’ve been working on it for five years, I don’t know if the cast has been the same the entire time, or if the cast has been changing has the different performance, has that changed how you edited the work? REBECCA: Everyone has been with the show with the exception of Cristin and James McDaniel who plays Dr. Copeland and Michael Cullen who plays Mr. Kelly and Bob Braswell who plays Harry. And our original Mick and Harry were terrific but unfortunately they sort of aged out of the roles as we’ve waited to come back. But everybody else has been with the show the entire time and has been so committed to it its been great. And I don’t, you know when different actors take over roles you find different facets and nuances to the characters and I love to work collaboratively with everyone so even in this rehearsal process there have been some re-writes prompted by questions or things that we could clarify or things like that. Nothing major or drastic, but definitely some tweaks and stuff. DEBRA: (calling on audience member) Ma’am. AUDIENCE MEMBER: How old is the actress who played Mick? REBECCA: I don’t know how old she is. She looks fourteen though I think, doesn’t she? Yeah, yeah, she’s not fourteen, she’s, yeah yeah… She’s in her twenties but I don’t know how old she is. You’re not supposed to ask the actors how old they are. ANNE: I got in trouble as a young director, one of my first equity shows the actors came in for auditions and I said ‘Oh! So how old are you!’ and everybody froze in the room, ‘You can’t ask that question!’ (general laughter) It’s actually against the rules to ask that question, but of course we always wonder, don’t we. DEBRA: Well Anne didn’t you cast a play, La Dispute, where the characters were eighteen years old and you used much older actors on purpose? ANNE: Yeah and I just heard about a new production in Bristol, I think, in England, where, I’ve always wanted to do this but someone’s doing it now where Romeo and Juliet are cast with really old people and the parents are their kids. And the only character that’s the right age is the nurse. Doesn’t that sound amazing? (audience laughs) Now that’s adaptation, wouldn’t you say? (general yesses and ‘that’s interestings’ from panelists) DEBRA: Any more questions? ANNE: …Because the role of youth, I’m sorry, the role of youth its not the character of youth so any actor of any age can say youth, what is that? Right? Us old people we feel youth in us and we can channel youth. Sorry… DEBRA: No no exactly. And also I feel like, especially in your work that the adaptation goes, continues through the process of putting something on the stage. ANNE: Yeah and I think adaptation is not only literary, as I said in the beginning this space is an adaptation, you know casting is an adaptation the language of the theater is constantly transforming. Are you using real blood or are you using a red silk scarf that’s a form of adaptation as well. You create a language that is believable, one hopes that, as Doug says, the truth is at the center and from that you make a language that is expressive. And the wonderful thing about the theater is that it’s a very free art form and I think, I think the best theater would look really stupid on film or television. That it would, you’d say ‘that’s dumb!’ but in the theater its glorious. DEBRA:
Do we have any more questions? Then ok I think we’ll finish here
but thank you so much for staying and listening to our conversation.
(applause) And I want to thank Doug Wright, Rebecca Gilman for her beautiful
work, Will Power, and Anne Bogart. Thank you so much.
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