More Script Reports VI: Adaptations

 

[In the 1980s and ’90s, I did some freelance script-evaluating for several theater companies in New York City and one in Washington, D.C.  I was one of many script-readers at each theater, and our job was to be the first step in the evaluation process before the theater’s literary manager and artistic director stepped in.

[Of the companies represented below, the StageArts Theater Company was an Off-Off-Broadway showcase house for whom I was asked to set up a play-soliciting, -reading, and -evaluating system to help the co-artistic directors find suitable properties to advance their production goals.  (I define ‘showcase’ in “More Script Reports V: Classics (Continued),” 18 January 2022, Rick On Theater: More Script Reports V: Classics (Continued).)

[The last two evals in this collection are from Theatre Junction, an incipient theater company in the earliest stages of being formed at the time by my NYU production dramaturgy teacher, Cynthia (C. Lee) Jenner.  

[I’ve posted other script reports on Rick On Theater in the past.  “Two Script Reports” appeared on 20 February 2020, three evaluations were part of my post on Soviet playwright Evgenii Svarts (9 March 2020), and I included my script report for Don DeLillo’s The Day Room with my performance report in “Three Plays from Distinguished Companies from the Archives,” 16 April 2020.

[Other posted script evals are in “More Script Reports” (I-V: 24 & 29 November and 9 & 14 December 2021, and 13 January 2022.]

[In the first of those posts, “Two Script Reports” (Rick On Theater: Two Script Reports), I describe the process for most script reading programs.]

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[Brooks McNamara wasn’t principally a playwright.  He was a theater historian and a professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.  (Full disclosure; Brooks was one of my principal instructors when I was a grad student in DPS in the early 1980s.  See “Remembering Brooks McNamara (1937-2009),” 3 June 2009.) 

[Brooks’s specialty was American popular entertainment (such as vaudeville, minstrel shows, burlesque, medicine shows, and so on).  This was obviously what drew him to adapt Henry Mayhew’s 1851 report, London Labour and the London Poor.  (The original title of McNamara and Senelick’s script was The London Poor.)  As you’ll read below, Mayhew’s London is a performance assembled from English entertainments that parallel the American ones Brooks had spent a lifetime studying.

[I didn’t know Laurence Senelick (b. 1942) well, but he was a member—a founding member I believe—of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), an organization of which I was also a member and of which I served as a vice president in the mid-’80s.

[Senelick is a scholar, educator, actor, director, author, editor, and translator.  His scholarship, like that of his co-author on Mayhew’s London, has focused on popular entertainment, with research into music hall, vaudeville, circus, and pantomime.  One of his many books is British Music-Hall, 1840-1923 (1981).

[Henry Mayhew (1812-87) was an English journalist, playwright, and reformer.  He was one of the co-founders of the satirical magazine Punch in 1841 and was one of the magazine’s editors in its early days.  As a social researcher, he published a series of articles in a London newspaper on the city’s poor that was compiled into the book series London Labour and the London Poor. 

[Mayhew was a keen observer and provided detailed description of what he saw of the dress, work, habits, religion, entertainments, homes, and domestic arrangements of the people working the streets of London.  He interviewed everyone: beggars, street-entertainers, prostitutes, laborers, sweatshop-workers, and more. 

[Mayhew’s London isn’t a true adaptation in the sense that McNamara’s Diary of a Provincial Lady is (see next eval).  McNamara and Senelick used Mayhew’s study (which ultimately filled four volumes) as a guide to topics to illustrate theatrically, and the two authors then used their own extensive knowledge of popular entertainment to locate appropriate pieces to assemble into a performative portrait of the street life in London in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign.  The material has been arranged in thematic blocks.

[One of a literary manager/dramaturg’s many jobs may be the creation of this kind of adaptation of non-dramatic material.  Cynthia Jenner was apparently very strong on this piece as it came together at the American Place Theatre between 1981 and 1984.  It doesn’t appear that the script was ever staged.]

StageArts SCRIPT EVALUATION

Date:  8/23/84
Evaluator:  [Rick]

Mayhew’s London (formerly The London Poor) by Brooks McNamara and Laurence Senelick 

Description:  This is a pastiche of testimonies of inhabitants of the London demi-monde in the mid-19th C., and has no actual plot.  Cynthia Jenner described it as a “cut-rate Nicholas Nickleby” and likened it to Working by Studs Terkel [1912-2008].  That is a good description of the piece.  It has monologous testimony, several enacted scenes, and many period songs which tie it all together.

[Working is a 1977 musical with a book by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso; music by Schwartz, Craig Carnelia, Micki Grant, Mary Rodgers, and James Taylor; and lyrics by Schwartz, Carnelia, Grant, Taylor, and Susan Birkenhead.  It’s based on the Studs Terkel book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974), which consists of interviews with people from different regions and occupations.  Working premièred at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in December 1977 and then opened on Broadway in May 1978.]

Among the various elements are a “Punch-and-Judy Show” and a gaff-theater melodrama performance along with testimony from pickpockets, prostitutes, street hawkers (costermongers), beggars, and the like.  Much of it is very theatrical and spectacular (e.g.: a hanging, the “P and J” show), and the monologues and songs give a palpable texture of the period and locations.

[Gaff, also called penny gaff (for its entrance fee), was a form of popular entertainment for the lower classes in 19th-century England.  It consisted of short, theatrical entertainments, comprising clowning, dancing, singing, and short plays, which could be staged wherever space permitted, such as the back room of a public house or small hall.

[Unsophisticated, the props and scenery rarely consisted of more than a stage and a piano.  Easy to perform, well-known to the audience, and with simple, exciting stories, the deeds of famous highwaymen, robbers, and murderers were popular subjects for the plays.  Gaff performances were popular from about 1830 to around 1870.]

Setting:  Open stage with props, including a “P and J” booth and a magician’s collapsible table, and a “cyc” for projecting scenes of early Victorian London onto.  The cast will rearrange the boxes, barrels, etc., to create each environment.

Language:  Monologues and scenes, period low London dialect—the world of Liza Doolittle and Sweeney Todd.  Wonderful and captivating; will require a cast extremely adept at various lower-class English dialects and vocal variety for character differentiation.

Cast:  Can be done with an ensemble of 6 (either 2 w, 4 m, or 3 w, 3 m).  As I said above, they will have to be adept at accents and voices, and they will have to be varied enough to cover many different “types.”  Several must sing and play street instruments.

Recommendation:  Produce!  (Already workshopped at American Place Theatre.  This could make StageArts’ season unique.

Source: APT files.

[Cynthia Jenner determined that McNamara and Senelick’s theme for Mayhew’s London is “survival in general and survival of the homeless poor in particular.”  In her comments after a reading of the play, she observed that “the sum of the play’s parts should not be depressing, [even though] an individual part may be.  The sum,” continued Cynthia, “should be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit.”

[“A lot of the appeal of this show,” she added, “is in the theatricality that would inform its presentation: the actors changing characters in an instant on stage, the homemade music done with found objects formerly used as props, the transformation of the vendors’ carts in an instant to the Punch[-and-Judy] stage, etc.”  She asserted that this was integral to the “magic and spectacle on which the show turns” and was “crucial . . . to this play.”

[Cynthia had been a literary advisor at the American Place Theatre, an Off-Broadway troupe, from 1981 to 1984 and often used its files of script reports as a resource for both my work at StageArts (I was even given access to APT’s files and spent several hours looking through the reports on reposit there) and for Theatre Junction.

[Mayhew’s London was one of the APT report files I pulled and copies of the previous evals, including Cynthia’s, were attached.  APT had also workshopped Mayhew’s London in 1984 and it had gone through the company’s development process in the three years before that.]

*  *  *  *

[Theatre Junction was just forming in the spring of 1985.  Cynthia wanted to launch a company run by dramaturgs and focus on both new plays and new performance forms.  This encompassed new adaptations of non-dramatic material (including older sources), such as Mayhew’s London (above) and translations (see “More Script Reports III: Translations,” 9 December 2021).

[TJ, as it came to be called, was ultimately never realized, but in the months while Cynthia was starting the process, she was already looking for striking material and creative artists the new theater could present and I was among those doing some of the looking, research, digging, and reading.

[Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930) by Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood (aka: E. M. Delafield, 1890-1943) was a largely-autobiographical novel which took the form of a journal of the life of an upper-middle class Englishwoman.  It was immensely popular and spawned several sequels.  The work has never been out of print.

[E. M. Delafield, Dashwood’s pen name, was a prolific author.  (Her birth name was de la Pasture; Delafield was a lightly veiled substitute.)  She published her first novel, Zella Sees Herself, in 1917 and published one or two more every year until her death.

[The Way Things Are, Delafield’s 1927 novel, was labeled a “perfect novel” and was the basis for Noel Coward’s one-act play Still Life, part of Tonight at 8.30, and the film Brief Encounter, both from 1936.  The Provincial Lady series led to three sequels (a fifth title, The Provincial Lady in Russia (1986) is not part of the Provincial Lady series; it’s a rerelease of 1937’s Straw Without Bricks: I Visit Soviet Russia, published in the U.S. as I Visit the Soviets, Delafield’s account of her six months in the Soviet Union).

[Like Mayhew’s London, the stage adaptation of Diary of a Provincial Lady was never mounted, though it, too, was developed at APT and caught Cynthia’s eye.] 

THEATRE JUNCTION SCRIPT EVALUATION

Date:  6/10/85
Reader:  [Rick]

AUTHOR/(TRANSLATOR):  Brooks McNamara; adapted from a book by E. M. Delafield

TITLE:  Diary of a Provincial Lady

GENRE/STYLE:  Narrative; presentational

STRUCTURE:  One act divided into “scenes” by the dates of “The Lady’s” diary entries which have minimal continuity over nearly a year.

SETTING:  Corner of the sitting room in “The Lady’s” country house near Plymouth, England.

LANGUAGE:  Literate, not-quite-conversational, upper middle-class British.  The entries are not supposed to be read, but spoken to the audience as if they were in the room with “The Lady.”  The material, however, seems written more to be read on the page than spoken from a stage.

MUSIC/LYRICS:  “The Lady” plays a number of specific popular songs and silent-movie music on the piano.

NO. CHARACTERS/SPEC. NEEDS:  One actress, probably 30-45 (she has two small children).  Must play piano (which should not be faked), and will have to carry entire show of narrated events and observations of rather dull country life.

CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT:  “The Lady” is somewhat detached observer of simple life in the English country, making comments and remarks on little events and local characters.  Supposed to relate conversationally to audience.

CONCEPTION:  Demonstrates the emptiness of country life, where the most minor events and people take on local significance.

CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST:  This will be disappointing—I don’t really see anything theatrical about this script at all.  I think there will be serious problems theatricalizing it.

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:  “The Lady,” who lives in a small English country village, relates in her diary the events surrounding her life over nearly a year from Nov. 1931 to Oct. 1932.  As she narrates, she makes remarks and parenthetical comments.  She isn’t particularly involved in the life, and seems vaguely dissatisfied with her existence (though she never says or does anything specific).

DISCUSSION/EVALUATION:  I know CJ [Cynthia Jenner] is very interested in this script, but I just don’t see how it can play.  The events are of minimal interest, and the narrative isn’t at all lively or theatrical.  I even see a real problem transferring the language from the page to the stage—it’s nearly impossible to “speak” parentheses, and the diary entries are loaded with them.  The only physical activity on the stage is the movement of “The Lady” from chair to piano to desk.  I found very little of interest when I read the script, and I can’t imagine it having any interest if I had to sit and watch someone tell it to me.  This isn’t a play, but storytelling—and the story isn’t very engaging.

It’s probably not really my place to make this suggestion, but I do it anyway.  The only way I can see to theatricalize this material is to remove it from its present form as diary entries to be told, and introduce the characters on stage and let us see them acting and behaving the way “The Lady” perceives them.  Of all the characters in her story, she is the least interesting.  I think this can be done with an ensemble of two men and three women (plus “The Lady”) playing all the characters, including the two children.  This will, of course, mean truly adapting the book, rather than just transposing it to the stage.  It may even be necessary to invent some material, delete some, and rearrange still more to create a continuity.

RECOMMENDATION:  Second reading, with particular attention to the stageworthiness of the script.  I hate to suggest this, but you may end up rejecting it or suggesting radical revision.

*  *  *  *

[Dan (Daniel C.) Gerould (1928-2012) was a scholar, teacher, translator, editor, and playwright who specialized in American melodrama, Central and Eastern European theater of the 20th century, and turn-of-the-20th-century European avant-garde performance.  He was a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York from 1970 and served as executive director of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at CUNY from 2004 to 2008.

[Among Gerould’s many books was 1983’s Gallant and Libertine: Divertissements & Parades of 18th-Century France, a collection of translations of French farces with commentary and discussion.  I don’t know when Gerould edited the book onto a script, certainly around the time of its publication, but Cynthia Jenner circulated the proposed stage version among her collaborators for consideration for TJ.  (Cynthia had been a grad student at CUNY and considered Gerould a colleague.)]

THEATRE JUNCTION SCRIPT EVALUATION

Date:  6/19/85
Reader:  [Rick] 

AUTHOR/(TRANSLATOR):  Dan Gerould (ed. & trans.)

TITLE:  Gallant and Libertine

GENRE/STYLE:  18th-C. French parades & fêtes galantes; elements of farce, satire, slapstick, and commedia dell’arte.

[A fête galante is an outdoor entertainment organized by French aristocrats in the 18th century which featured people in ball dress or masquerade costumes cavorting amorously in parkland settings. 

[A parade during the Renaissance was a type of French street entertainment consisting of a group of actors, singers, dancers, jugglers, and other types of performers, taking part in processions and entertaining the spectators when the parade stopped. 

[In the 18th century, the term was applied to short, improvisational buffooneries, typically incorporating vulgarities, which were performed either on an outdoor platform or a balcony in order to entice passersby into show-booths and cheap theaters at fairs and similar venues.   The characters were often drawn from the commedia dell’arte and the humor was crude, relying on sexual innuendos, obscene gestures, and references to bodily functions.]

STRUCTURE:  2 fêtes galantes (by Pierre de Marivaux, 1688-1763) are one-act playlets; parades (Thomas-Simon Gueullette, 1683-1766; Pierre Baumarchais, 1732-99; Count Jan Potocki, Polish – 1761-1815) are very short single scenes.

SETTING:  Fêtes are pastoral (one w/immense château); parades are town streets (stock set—could be same for all); none need be realistic; some can be transposed to another time (e.g.: modern, rural America).

LANGUAGE:  Fêtes are literary; parades are “comic strip” colloquial—a literary pseudo-vulgar.

MUSIC/LYRICS:  The Baumarchais (The Seven League Boots) has snippets of songs which are unremarkable.

NO. CHARACTERS/SPEC. NEEDS:  Various; ensemble will depend on how the pieces are mounted.  Parades have stock characters: Cassander (Pantalone-type), Harlequin, Giles (Pierrot-type), Leander (young lover), Isabelle (young woman), plus incidentals; black couple required for one Marivaux.

CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT:  Characters are types, usually with standard characteristics; parade characters are recognizable derivatives of commedia, fête characters are also stock types, but not so derivative.

CONCEPTION:  Fêtes make social comments of a relatively serious nature; parades are farcical and make fun of societal types.  Some are very topical and may not be relevant to a modern audience.

CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST:  Curiosity and ribald fun (though some are duds).

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:  Each piece has its own little story; synopsizing each would be long-winded.  The 2 fêtes are more distinct: The Dispute tells of an elaborate experiment to test which sex is more faithful; The Colony is a feminist story of a social experiment on a primitive island (it bears some resemblance to Lysistrata).  As for the parades, suffice it to say that most of them deal with Leander's attempts to get into Cassander’s house and marry his daughter, Isabelle.  He is usually aided by his valet, Harlequin, and has to outwit Cassander’s stupid servant, Giles.  There are a few deviations from this basic plot.

DISCUSSION/EVALUATION:  I have one big question: Why do you really want to do these?  Granted, some are amusing, and the fêtes are curious, but the parades get very repetitive and predictable.  The work that would be necessary to make them entertaining enough to sustain a whole evening would be very great.  Would it really be worth it for a mere curiosity?  It would take very special style to make the parades work, and modern actors aren’t trained for the kind of material they present.  That would mean a lot of very special rehearsing, and very careful casting—a whole company of Jim Dales, for instance—all to produce a few theatrical oddities.

If you want to go ahead anyway, I think the two fêtes would play together well, and probably make a whole (albeit, short) evening.  Of the parades, several seem unplayable or uninteresting to me.  The Shit Merchant deals with a particularly topical circumstance, and the scatology struck me as unfunny; Giles in Love wasn’t very interesting; Cassander Supports the Revolution seems too topical to play to a modern audience, and I can’t think of a viable way of up-dating it.  Of the remainder, the majority are about Leander’s attempts to marry Isabelle: how many of those can you mount together without getting boring?  My suggestion is to disassemble all the parades (possibly including others, or using parts of commedia scenarios) and construct a cannibalized script using appropriate parts.  This would take some work, but I think the product will be more producible than an evening of bits and pieces. 

Another suggestion: Collect examples of various kinds of short, popular pieces from other cultures (either Euro-American, or international) and mount an evening, or a series of such short pieces.  I have some one-act Molières, and there must be some German, Spanish, and English pieces of a similar nature—people aren’t all that different.  A couple of commedia sketches, a kyogen comedy, even early American sketches (from Brooks McN’s collection) together would make an interesting, varied entertainment.  This, too, would take a little work, but might be worthwhile. 

These kinds of pieces are all so short—5 to 10 mins—that a few of them together would work nicely for a lunchtime entertainment as an alternative/supplement to the soap opera. 

[One of Cynthia Jenner’s ideas for TJ once it got going was to present short entertainments at lunchtime.  Among these was to be a continuing live “soap opera” like the daytime TV serials, but shorter to allow viewers to drop in, catch an episode over their lunch hour, and return to work.  Each episode would be offered for, say, a week before it would be replaced with a new one.]

RECOMMENDATION:  Depending on the “envelope,” scheduling and placement in the season.  Pick-and-choose the pieces very carefully, and consider alternative ways to use the material other than as published.  A whole evening of parades will not work, I’m convinced.