Adaptation

I should backtrack a little here to the process of adapting a literary work into a dramatic piece.

In early 2006, I thought it’d be good to get a head start on the adaptation. About a year prior, I’d take a TBA workshop with Bruce Pachtman about promoting a solo show. It was an OK 3-hour discussion with the group throwing out more tips than Bruce himself, but it was helpful in the sense of “psychologically establishing the possible,” which basically means that my idea for a show was not so unattainable…just a lot of hard work.

Bruce worked with Charlie Varon & David Ford at the Marsh in SF, a “breeding ground for new performance,” to develop his show and highly praised their work and guidance. I met a few other people that had taken Charlie’s workshop and were really enthusiastic about it. In discussions with my wife about it, she said “Just do it.” I procrastinated a bit and then she surprised me on my birthday with the gift of a workshop with Charlie.

The workshop was 10 weeks long and Charlie allowed us to work on whatever we wanted. I was a little nervous at first that the format was going to be rigid and the others (about 8 of us) there were primarily there to write and create their own (usually autobiographical) piece. I came in with a script all ready from day one and sort of had a headstart. Charlie was very helpful in defining a basic structure for how a single actor can play many parts at once. The main idea is to create “zones” on the stage and assign each character in a scene to a different area so that once the actor moves into that area, he becomes that character. This becomes more difficult when there’s a quicker dialogue between characters and you don’t want to look like a jackrabbit hopping around the stage so there are additional “tactics” to help. One of these is to develop a “trigger” for each character. This can be a mannerism, a line, a posture, or just about anything that you’ve already associated with a character. That way, when you change between them, you can bring the audience with you for each change and they psychologically “see” all the characters virtually at once. An interesting phenomenon…

The 10 weeks with Charlie culminated in a performance at The Marsh in August 2006. For this we chose the Scrooge & Marley scene to work on, which is a microcosm of the kinds of issues I’d have to grapple with throughout the play. Once these issues were resolved in this scene, it would be easier to resolve the rest. The result of was a 12-minute scene that the audience seemed to like. Most important of all, I “popped my cherry” with the piece and got the first audience out of the way.