Dracula and the Art of the Adaptation

Starting an adventure in Seattle Theatre! Yes!

First show that we saw in Seattle was at Taproot Theatre Company. In honor of the season, the show was Dracula! ::flash of lightning--bumbumbuuuuuum::

So the show was very fun and afterwards, luckily enough, there was a talkback with the director and cast of the show, which was thoroughly enjoyable. So I'll give you a quick recap of it:

• The show is beautifully costumed in period attire and rendered against a small three-quarter thrust castle interior. Downstage has a few levels with seats that went off and on and upstage was dominated by a large stone wall with a wrought iron fence in it.  The show's style maintains a tricky balance between earnestness and camp in which the actors manage to paint the characters in big bold strokes without leaning into stereotype or melodrama. This is especially true of the actor playing Dracula. While his Transylvanian accent is clearly distinguishable and he does hiss on occasion, he never quite tips into Bella Lugosi or Leslie Nielsen territory. Also true with the actress playing Renfield (yes, a lady, w00t!). She managed to make this one of the most really creepy elements of the show as she pursued flies, spiders, and birds for more power. 
• The director and the adapting playwright have deliberately crafted their adaptation to reflect themes like good vs evil, sacrificing life vs taking life, and the power of a small group of friends who want to change the world. So the scenes between the band of merry adventurers were heavy in act one to establish their care and their relationships. And in the final confrontation with Dracula, Mina has a lovely--goose-pimple inducing--monologue about the nature of loving sacrifice and it's power against Dracula as a parasitic anti-christ. With these themes, they worked very hard for verisimilitude of feeling with each character and scene. The darkest darks and the lightest lights were tempered and fueled by honesty rather than humor or real horror. 
• The style pulled together letters and newspaper clippings, journals and recaps with some direct address to the audience which proved fairly effective--both at translating the style of the epistolary novel and conveying the information between characters. There were some fun jumps scares and use of space--like the aisles, which made some audience members scream. And some fun feminist moments: Mina has a fiery retort when her male cohort tries to keep her out of harms way which provoke cheers from the audience [though what are you going to do when the plot demands that she does get nicked by Dracula?].

And there's my phd for the day. The questions I really want to ask are about the adaptation of an epistolary novel into a theatrical event and the about the nature of horror onstage (second one, probably in a second blog). 

When adapting a novel to the stage, one of the biggest problems I find is that the novel as a form is ill-suited to the stage as a medium. Case and point--Dracula is an epistolary novel which is scary in large part because you are reading documents of a "true account"--you can't see it. All you have is their word and your imagination. Theatre is a primarily audio-visual medium. This means that the primary horror creator--your imagination--is in someway being engaged through miss-en-scene.

Yes, yes, I hear, this is the problem with any adaptation from Novel to Stage and even Screen.

I think it's interesting though that this means we usually choose from creep factor or shock factor for horror in theatre:

Creep factor and Shock factor?

So then I am curious because in many adaptations of novels I find myself bored because there's so much exposition in order to get to the action, and action--really doing things--is, I think, the root of theatre. We go to see live people really do things in front of us. Others might say that this ignores the story portion of theatre, but there are MANY mediums for the sharing of story--theatre is unique from those methods because you have real people really doing it in front of you. It's why we see just about anything live--real people, real actions. You might also jump in and say: but if they really kill each other. Then we have to discuss the fact that we go knowing that there is an element of imagination because if they really killed each other it would be a whole other thing. But the actors are really doing the illusion of killing someone else or really doing the symbolic killing of the other character. 

So to the point: adaptations of novels are hard because novels tend to be a lot of exposition about the situations of characters, their inner lives, their feelings, their wants and needs communicated through text. Which is why, of course, if a Lizzie Bennet actress doesn't full convey all the feeling that we remember being explained in the text, we become cranky and say it was a bad performance. 

So I return... again. Adaptations: 

When adapting what kind of questions should you ask? Is it possible to do more than illustrate a novel onstage? 

I think yes and here are some questions that I think are really important to ask:

• What happens in the novel? What are the most important events and actions?
• This is huge I think, especially for me, because I so often come away from a novel not with a sense of what happened but of how it made me feel and what I understood about humanity. The desire to create that visually and share it with others has to do not with what happened but with the feeling. Literature uses words to make those kinds of feelings. Theatre uses action, space, time, etc to give you those feels. In order to make the transition. I think you have to ask what happens.
• Dracula did that pretty well. Their production was about the actions of a small group against a great evil and that was reflected in the way that they structured this production. They decided that that was the event and so built deliberately around that with their scene selection and organization--despite having Mina and Jonathan absent for most of the middle of the story (thank you, Mr. Stroker), this production kept them periodically involved through letters etc, as well as overlaying their wedding with the staking of vampire Lucy to make sure that there was a continued connection (and juxtaposition) between the separate parts of the group. Hence you see Mina and Jonathan fighting the evil with a marriage ceremony and the others fighting evil by saving Lucy's soul in ceremonial killing--actions against the dark. 

• What does the novel as form and it's style as function do to help tell the story?
• When switching mediums, it's imperative to ask what the original medium does for the story. If you don't ask, then you get mere copy and pasting from one medium to the other and that can go really poorly. Trying to think of a pithy metaphor to explain this here, like conducting something through one medium then switching to a way better or way worse medium and surprise! Not that the other medium couldn't conduct, but rather that you needed to take it's differences into consideration. What does the novel do for the story? What are it's strengths and weaknesses--and how do those affect what's included, how the characters behave, the information needed, etc? These questions are important because your are moving from only text to text/visual/audio/costumes/lighting/sound/props/actors/blocking/staging etc etc etc. You're going to have a helluva lot more ways to communicate and convey information and story than the author of the book had. You need to know what and how they were doing it without those things in order to figure out what the best ways to use your plethora of tools.

Cool as shit!

• Are you trying to illustrate or adapt the story? Are you willing to change the way the story functions?

• This is so important! Obviously I have a bias towards adaptation (did not used to be the case). That said, there's nothing wrong with illustration--there's actually a huge market for it: lots of audiences love to see illustrations of their favorite books and stories onstage. Adaptations have a HUGE spectrum and some can fall obsfucatingly avante garde while others are much closer to an illustration. You should be aware of what you're aiming for though. I get anxious when a play isn't sure which it is or claims to be what it isn't. You have different goals for each one. Illustration aims more to a faithful representation of the beloved story, and Adaptation aims to adapt/change (for medium, audience, concept, awesomeness, etc.) the telling of the story as a seed.
• In the case of Dracula, this was both an adaptation and an illustration. There was a very faithful, very earnest attempt to keep to the text and the style of the original novel without parody or overtelling. The attempt to keep the epistolary structure of the novel was one of the devices that struck me along this vein. It was really refreshing--specifically for me because I've seen some "serious" vampire plays that were laughable (as in I laughed)--this one had comedic relief but not laughable vampires. There was also a real effort on the part of scripting to adapt around what the director and playwright saw as the most important themes in the story. And so in that sense, there were changes that were intended to elevate the production to a thought-provoking level--which most Dracula adaptations don't attempt to do.

• What can the stage as a form do for/add to the story? How can you make use of the stage's unique features and capabilities to convey the story?

• This question takes more examples to explain, because the stage as a form has SO many different spacial/temporal/mise-en-scene etc that it can make use of. It follows on the heels of the last question deliberately, because if you want a faithful retelling you might ask: how can the stage accommodate epistolary style? If you're doing a departing adaptation you might ask: what is epistolary style and what physical stage style does the same thing? So rather than letters spoken to the audience, you might have the characters actually addressing the audience, trying to make sense of their experience, without necessarily showing the experience that they are writing about. Because in the novel, Dracula example, the characters write things down because that is the medium between story and audience. In theatre the medium between story and audience is actually just the actors and their mine-en-scene. So what does the talents, skills, and advantages of your stage and your design elements and your actors have to help tell the story?

These questions are important because language and story have different emphases in novels and on stage. At the risk phd-ing out again, James Thomas has a great quote that illuminates this difference: "literature uses words to illuminate actions and events, while drama uses actions and events to illuminate words" (Script Analysis xxviii). I feel like I uses this quote a lot. 

The point: when adapting, it's really important to acknowledge the switch between mediums.

I really appreciated Taproot's production for the way it made use of the space, it's style, and it's textual adaptation to tell a story about the adventures of a group of friends against the dark. I always like to get goose-bumps in the climax of a show. 

I'm currently working on an adaptation of Turn of the Screw for Christmas [Yep! Ghost stories for Christmas!] and the questions of adaptation are really poignant to me right now. Seeing this production helped a lot! So did getting to talk with the director and actors. 

Look for more blogs coming soon re: Turn of the Screw, Horror as a Stage Genre, and Bad Jews (which we saw at Seattle Public Theatre). 

w00t!