Friday, September 16, 2011
The fight over retrofitting classics for modern tastes
The Washington Post: For some time, Michael Kahn has wrestled with the script of a rarely performed drama by a playwright so revered that, over his career, he was rewarded with four Pulitzer Prizes. But it’s not an interpretive issue with which Kahn is struggling as much as a practical one. At a length of more than five hours and filled with rambling soliloquies, Eugene O’Neill’s 1928 psychological study, “Strange Interlude,” is considered by many to be virtually unplayable.
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This is a good article to compare with another one this week that talks about the unknown top-ten list of the longest running straight plays. I wonder if any of those plays could be successfully revived if they were to be adapted for today's audiences. I understand the concern that playwright's may have with allowing somebody else to change or cut the wording of their plays, because if they end up doing a terrible job, that play will have been ruined for most of the audience. However, I think the same holds true for any other aspect of a play as well. If the directing is poor, or any aspect of the design, that particular audience could still walk away with a bad opinion of the play, but they would still have future chances of seeing the play again, done by a different company. I feel, to a certain extent at least, that adapting the wording of a play is something that goes hand in hand with making the show your own, and hope that most of today's playwrights agree and are willing to work with theatre companies to accomplish this.
Every time a show is produced, the director, designers, and actors choose an interpretation and a message they want to convey to the audience. They try their best to decipher what the playwright’s original intent was, but by making different artistic choices they may come up with a product with an entirely different message. Reworking the script of a show may indeed change its meaning, but this is what the artistic team does every time a show is produced. In addition, theatre must be produced for an audience. No matter how brilliant and insightful a script is, if it can not successfully be produced for an audience then it’s impact will never be felt outside of the small circle that reads obscure scripts for fun. If a show needs to be edited and reworked in order for it to be accessible to an audience, then I believe it should be.
Working in DC for so long, Peter Marks was renown as the Reviewer Who Could Ruin Your Show with only a few well-chosen words. If he praised your work, you were almost guaranteed to go into extension; if he didn't, you might as well close your show then & there. But these days, I think he was simply a tough master to satisfy. Coming to DC from NYC, he had high standards for live theatre which stemmed from a deep love of it. That DC had a hard time living up to his expectations was an unfortunate side effect.
But he was always a strong writer and that's reflected in this strong article. How much is too far? The very vague rule of thumb has always pretty much been if you're never caught doing it OR if everyone agrees with you then you're alright doing whatever you want [people cut entire subplots of Shakespeare and still call it, "Taming of the Shrew" regardless; mostly because there's no one owning the rights to say, "Don't do that!"].
I've worked on new plays [and musicals] before and watched firsthand arguments between directors/actors and playwrights who claim one or the other doesn't know what they're doing. I've seen directors screaming at playwrights that they don't even realize what they'd wrote [the best is when the playwrights suddenly AGREE with a new perspective]. So the idea that original scores or books or scripts won't [and can't] connect with a new audience doesn't seem that far flung. It just seems the devil's in the details about figuring out HOW to update something...
This article raises several interesting questions that the theater industry will have to grapple with for some time. The first is, how much manipulation can a script stand before it just falls apart. Often at CMU and at other theaters around the contry we see directors, dramaturgs, and designers attempt to force a concept on a play that does not support it. They do this with the best of intentions of creating a fresh interpretation of a classic and bring it into the modern lexicon. But often, the script cannot withstand it and the story falls apart.
On the flip side, adaptation and the retelling of old stories is one of the most interesting things a playwright can do. How do you take a classic story and reinvent it for a modern audience? Or, can you take a story told in one form and transpose it to another? It is through these reinterpretations of old stories that we can track how our society's values have morphed over time.
Finally, all of this adaptation and retelling makes it a lot more difficult for new stories and new concepts to break through. If someone has already laid the ground work for a story, why do all of that work yourself? How does this importance that we have been placing on creating wild new concepts for classic plays affect the creation of new plays for future generations to adapt?
It is always interesting to see how someone can read a classic and then manage to create their own interpretation. I guess that is what plays end up being, main ideas. There is a reason why a playwright has created another world or shown an audience something from a different perspective. The overall message seems to be important and if someone is interested enough to think about that message, then that playwright's job is done. In addition, there is also the matter of how an interpretation is used. Sometimes, the revival of a show is deeper than the first show was to begin with.
I also think that reproducing an older performance is necessary. Times are changing and developing in new ways. We aren't going to be using a 5ft computer to email someone in the next room. It can be important to relate to a contemporary time and to various groups of people. Relating in this manner makes for an even stronger connection and that would make an excellent show.
The idea of retrofitting works is something debated in all commercial mediums in the last century. For plays i feel the issue comes up a lot less often than in cinema where the colorization and alterations debates have reached all the way to congress. this is a interesting subject as it is one of the most varied arguments of our time. there is no larger margin, no select group of supporters. it is a topic which people with even the closest of ideals may argue over. either way i find that the rights eventually rely on the status of the creator and the work's status in the public domain category.
I fully support reinterpreting classic work for a modern audience--provided that whoever is adapting or reinterpreting has a solid understanding of the original script and that all choices are made for a good reason and not simply to do something different. There are some classic works that work really well in their original form, but the truth is that society changes, in terms of tastes, attitudes, and expectations. For example, I think it's a wonderful idea not to do Strange Interlude in its original, five hour form. Nobody wants to watch something that long in one sitting, even with intermissions. People today like their entertainment to be ninety minutes long, two hours tops. It just doesn't make sense to do five hour productions anymore.
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