 So we're going to have a conversation here obviously about the subject, and towards the end we'll have a session for some questions, and at that time there's a microphone in the middle there if you want to have a question if you line up behind the microphone. We'll take those. So I want to introduce our renowned panel of writers. First we have Carol Hall, and I'm just going to point out some of their work that is relevant to what we're discussing today. I know Carol recently wrote the lyrics for an adaptation of a children's story called A Christmas Memory, which is based on, it's a Truman Capote short story. It's a classic story. It's not really for children. I mean it's not a children's story. Right, right. It's sort of based on his childhood a little bit. And also I know Bessito-Harris in Texas was actually an adaptation of a Larry... That's not a children's story. But it's an adaptation of a Larry King's book. And he actually wrote the libretto for it as well. Wendy Holesman wrote the book for Wicked, which is an adaptation of Gregory McGuire's The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Doug Wright, as many of you know, has written several adaptations of actually documentary films. And I don't know where some of these things have come from. Grey Gardens was a documentary film. Hands in a Hard Body Musical was a documentary film as well. He also did the adaptation of A Little Mermaid, the musical version for Broadway, which is adapted from the animated Disney film. And David Ives down there is, many of you might not know this for the last two decades. He has adapted 33 librettos for City Center's Encore series in New York, which includes the revival of Wonderful Town. He also co-wrote the book for the musical adaptation of the film White Christmas. And actually many of David's plays are adaptations of Venus and Furze based on a 19th century German novel. And School for Lies is based on Molière's Missing Throat. So a wide range of different styles of adaptations. And as many of us know, I think probably the most compelling thing about adaptation is the fact that a story exists in some form. And sort of the thrill of that is what we do with that story of how we get to play with that story. So the first question I want to throw out to our panel here is, for you, what excites you about adaptation? And what do you find as sort of the greatest challenge with approaching adaptation or working with adaptation? Any takers? No, I was just going to say Winnie and Stephen Schwartz just finished the most extraordinary hour of talking about wicked. I can't even imagine what else you could say. I'm going to find something. I know me. He's amazing. He was great. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That's ridiculous. I was just going to say that I don't really draw a line very much between playwriting and adaptation. They're sort of the same thing for me. I take my inspiration, as always, from Shakespeare who, if you asked him, probably would have said that his job was an adapter because 35 of his 37 plays were adaptations of somebody else's material. And he didn't do too badly on the other two. But it just seems to me, I love adaptation because it takes, I find story very hard. And I love to have somebody hand me a structure that I can then play with. For example, just to throw this out, when I did The School for Lies, which is a version of The Missing Thrope, I actually did what I call a translation, which is to say that I translated it and adapted it. Partly because I never thought that The Missing Thrope worked very well. And so I was interested in that play because I thought it never pleased me. And so I just thought I would fix it because Moliart wasn't around to tell me any differently. So I reworked it that way. But it's taking some of the load off of you, I would say, adaptation. I think just saying what you just said is really key, at least for me, is when you were talking about writing something that annoys you or upsets you or makes you angry in some way. And I don't mean that when I was reading the novel of Wicked that I was annoyed or angry, exactly. But the idea of the novel was so thrilling to me. And there were ways that he did the idea that I felt combative about. And I do think that there is something about writing where you sort of go, I'm going to show you what I think it should be. This is something very aggressive. And I do think that I can barely be on the panel, I think, because I've only done it once. I've only done one adaptation. I would like to do more. But I do think that there is, for me, it was almost a relief not to read the novel and go, oh my God, I wouldn't change a thing. Because how would then I proceed? Whereas what it was for me is I was flooded with ideas of things I would want to do a little bit differently. And that's, to me, a better place to begin. But I don't know. I have a footnote to what Winnie says, which is that I say this to my own shame and embarrassment. So turn off the cameras. But when Wicked came out, somebody came to me and said, you know, there's this book called Wicked, which might make a good musical. And I read and I said, it will never work. I said, it is absolutely impossible to turn that book into a musical. And so I went off to Molière or something. I don't know. But so bravo, bravo. Because I think it's a brilliant, brilliant adaptation in every way. And I think we were led greatly by, just what I'm saying, our likes and dislikes. It got very personal very quickly. We were in a conversation, obviously, the two of us, Stephen and I. But it was all about, well, what do you just love in the book that you have to keep? And what do you not like that we don't want to have? And I remember those as the very beginnings of the conversation. It was all very personal and a response. And I just don't want to see that. Or I do want to see that on stage. Just regarding when you're talking about the original authors and things like that, when you're doing adaptation, do you feel an ongoing obligation to either the author or the source material or whoever created that first version, whether it was a film or something? And does that affect, are you aware of it at all times while you're writing? Or is it something you have to let go? I curiously felt less of an obligation with two of my adaptations to the original authors and more the potential audiences because both pieces were beloved cultural artifacts. Working on Grey Gardens and working on The Little Mermaid. And Grey Gardens is a celebrated and revered and deeply subversive documentary that is held to almost biblical standard by a vociferous and enthusiastic group of gay gentlemen, usually of a certain generation. And Little Mermaid is a beloved animated film that is cherished by tween girls. And those two demographics have a lot in common. And I learned you fuck with their shit at your own peril. And so I felt enormously beholden to what were very concrete and loudly expressed audience expectations about both of those works. So the challenge was less honoring the Maisel's brothers or the brilliant Howard Ashman and Alan Menken and their screenwriters and more about trying to use the material that would reinvent it so that it felt fresh and satisfying and like a new journey but at the same time did not rob it of any of those elements that had earned it those ardent fan bases. And that was extraordinarily challenging and honest to God. We had birthday parties of little girls come to Mermaid in tiaras and tales and we had legions of men in snoods at Grey Gardens. So they were shockingly similar but it was playing against expectations already engendered by the pieces themselves. I myself love a dead author. First of all you don't have to share any royalties which is of course our main point as playwrights. Never share points. And you know I've been adapting not only Molière I've done actually four French comedies and I've loved it. I've loved working in that form. Partly because these plays are 350 or 400 years old and they need help for our culture so I feel that it's incumbent upon me to make them speak to today. I did have an experience of being asked to translate a French play by a living author who will remain nameless, Yasmina Reza. And I did not really enjoy the experience and I can't imagine that I'll ever do it again. But you know I should say I did it partly for the wrong reasons which is that I was asked to translate this play and a superb cast of actors including Zoe Caldwell had already been chosen to be in it. And John Turtur was directing and so I wanted to be in the room with those people I didn't want to be as much in the room with that play. And so I found that experience rather grueling because I did feel it incumbent upon myself to honor what she had written because she could sue the living hell out of me and probably would. And so I was in a bit of a straight jacket and I hate writing in a straight jacket. So it was quite instructive in many different ways. I think in my case, if I haven't spoken to it yet, in my case it's very, very simple. I had loved the Truman Capote story from the time I'd read it which is when I was a teenager. So it was quite old story and usually when you mention Truman Capote's Christmas memory people sort of gasp they go, I love that. And so I knew how many people loved it because every time you say the title people go, and I wanted to make them alive. I wanted it to be alive in a way I guess you're not sure who's going to be reading it but if you can see it and hear it then you've given them a new kind of life. And in the case of the best little whorehouse in Texas that actually was not a book. It was an article in Playboy Magazine and Larry L. King, he's now deceased, he was a fantastic journalist who kind of came to fame and glory in the 50s and 60s during the time of when magazines had really rich, wonderful, journalistic things happening. And the person who brought me Larry's article was my friend Pete Masterson who is an actor and director whom I've known all my life from Texas. Larry L. King was from Texas. We had all gone to see Vanities which is a Texas play by Jack Hefner. And dinner afterwards after Vanities I said I've always wanted to do something about Texas but not the kind of thing where people have their thumbs and their suspenders. Just really about the craziness of Texas. Doug and I shared not only Texas as a background but at different eras we shared the same high school so I know that Doug knows about craziness in Texas. And it seemed very political. So we set to do this event because it made us laugh at Texas but it also made us laugh affectionately. And it just feels like I wanted to have those two children somehow. The whorehouse and Christmas. Something, Winnie, you had mentioned this before just a little bit. This whole idea of what to keep, what to throw away. That process of taking something and editing it or in Christmas memory. It's a short story so I'm assuming you have to add. And things like Doug Grey Gardens, the documentary is the second act of the musical. And so you created this first act that didn't exist. It's those decisions of how to take this germ and what to do with that. What to take away, what to put in, how to shape it into something that is different from the form that's originally in. Any thoughts? Well actually, I never had a better education as a playwright than the 33 musicals I adapted for Encore's. At the time that I started adapting the musicals, I don't know if you know the program, they do concert versions of forgotten, neglected or underrepresented American musicals all the way back from the 20s to the 70s or 80s. But when I was asked to do my first Encore script, I had seen, I would say, six musicals in my entire life. Two of them were Sweeney Todd. And so I knew nothing whatsoever about what I was doing, which is usually a nice place for me to start. But the reason I say it was a great education was because in adapting these 33 musicals, basically what I had to do to make them concert versions was A, to strip out props because the actors were going to be carrying their scripts in their hands and reduce the scripts to about two-thirds or three-quarters of their size because the accent was on the music, because the band is on stage. And so every one of those 33 adaptations was an exercise in what I call literary ventriloquism because I had to take this book and make people feel that they had seen the whole musical when actually they had seen two-thirds of the musical, of the book of the musical and heard all of the music. And so what I had to do was sometimes collapse scenes or join scenes, cut characters, make scenes move more swiftly. And yet not ever let anybody notice that. And what that meant was that I had to think my way into the way this play was written, how it was written, who wrote it, what the style was, and to basically impersonate Herb Fields or Oscar Hammerstein or George Abbott. And so I learned an immense amount. And I would say that adapting French classic plays was a breeze after adapting, you know, Juno by Mark Blitzstein. And so I highly recommend taking something and trying to just take an old play that, you know, find an old play and take a pencil to it and see what it's made out of. It's a great exercise because actually what you find is that everything gets better. What happened at Encore's is that a lot of people would say, I can't believe that this musical is never done. And the fact is they hadn't seen the musical. They had seen it with the book stripped down. And it's almost always the book that's the problem in musicals. And so that's part of my adaptational and playwriting education, really. This is slightly different because David's talking about adapting plays in musicals. And I would say if you're adapting a documentary film or a novel, you're serving two masters. And those masters are sometimes at odds with one another. One, of course, is the underlying work itself, the novel or the film. And the other are the very particular demands of the theater and the three-dimensional space and what the theater does well and what it doesn't do well. And in the case of Grey Gardens, my dear friend, the composer, Scott Frankel, invited me to his home and said, I want to do a musical based on this film. And I said, it won't work. I said, what's most compelling about the movie is its cinema verite quality. The fact we know it to be true. And if these women become larger-than-life figures in a musical, it's all about artifice. It's not nearly so interesting. And I said it also is completely non-narrative. The film itself, which chronicles the Beale women, a mother and daughter, who lived in a 36-room mansion in Long Island that was overrun by cats and debris and happened to be related to Jacqueline Kennedy. The film, there's no story. It's just raw footage of these two women interacting in an increasingly destructive dance, but it's purely psychologically driven. There's absolutely no narrative and no story tension. And so I said to Scott that musicals kind of thrive on storytelling. You can't do an ambient musical or a character portrait musical. You just can. And I said, without the building blocks of narrative, you don't have anything. And so Scott was resolved to get me to do it. So he went out to dinner with the lyricist Michael Corey, and they were having dinner and they were saying, beginning, middle, end. Beginning, middle, end. How do we find that in this material? And on one dinner napkin, Scott scrawled 1943. And on the other napkin, he scrawled 1977. And they both looked at each other and called me the next day and brought me the napkins. And I said, I have to do this with you. I have to do this with you. And because I think that good adaptation is rarely about, as I think Winnie was suggesting, fidelity to the source. It's about reinventing the source to fit the new medium. And I would go so far as to say, I think a lot of us, all of us have probably had the experience of going to foreign countries and seeing our work adapted and translated. And even as the author of the underlying material, I'm always grateful when the translator or adapter has felt sufficient freedom to do not only translation but cultural adaptation as well, to take those things in my text that may or may not readily translate to the culture in which the play is playing and come up with correlatives that do. So sometimes as a writer when I'm applying license to someone else's work and feeling guilty about it, I remind myself that in my own experience, it's one of the things I'm most grateful for in the adapters and translators who do my work overseas. So a good adaptation isn't only serving the source, it's also serving the form. And that's the constant tension. Carol, do you have any thoughts on... You're one, like I said, that's taking a Christmas memory, which is the shorter story, and having to... How did you build upon that story? Well, it was begun by... It became a full-length musical. Yes. Yes. And the reason I haven't brought it up, frankly, is because it's taken a little respite while we have an amicable divorce from our producers. And now that's all done. But that's why I'm sort of speaking of it as if it's a child's been sent away for a while. But we're back on track. And Paul, what was the question? What did you say? In terms of that's a very... I read the book. It's a very short story. Yes. How do you make that a full-length musical? Well, Truman wrote that story after he was grown up. And that gave Dwayne Poole, the book writer, the feeling that if we see him as a child and a grown-up, that that can fill in a lot of the space. Dwayne had done it without songs for television and then wanted to get the rights to musicalize it. So we were lucky to get that. From that came Larry Grossman, the composer whom Dwayne knew and admired, and he called Larry and asked him to participate. And Larry called me and asked me to do lyrics. I love doing just lyrics because whorehouse was music and lyrics. And my pop songs have mostly been written music and lyrics by me. But it's less lonely and more fun to be in a room where you're writing with someone else. So I was delighted to start with lyrics. And I think that it was that, this view from his adulthood coming back to tell us the story. Because the story is all told, it's the child's life. Yes. It doesn't start with an adult and go back. No, it does. There's no adult. There's memory, but there's no adult. So that's how we did that. And banking off of musical theater, which we keep talking about quite a bit, is the relationship between you and either a lyricist or a composer. I think that one of the challenges is always ending continuity and storytelling when you have multiple people telling the story. You know, when you have, it's one thing to just be the playwright and write the play. But do you have any methods or specific ways of approaching that relationship or any stories in terms of how to have a good relationship and keeping the continuity of the story that you want to tell moving forward when working with more than one person on it? Well, with Stephen and I, it really was such a conversation and so much talking, literally just talking back and forth. And you know, there's that thing, this isn't just about adaptation, obviously. There's that thing where you just go, tell me the story again. What's the story? Because I get story amnesia. And most writers I know get story amnesia. They think they know the story. They've got a story. They can't remember what's the story. What are the elements of the story? I have this little list that I brought today to show Stephen, because I was looking at my old, old Wicked Notes. And I have something that says things we love. And then there's a little list of things we love, meaning like it obviously came out of a conversation of things we don't want to forget that we want to be in the musical that we love. And just in terms of what's the story, so we would just talk, talk back and forth so much about what we felt we had to have, what things we didn't quite even want. And then, of course, he was saying in the previous panel, I had been mentored by Arthur Lawrence at NYU and Arthur would always tell us as a book writer, your job is there to serve the songs and the songwriter or writers. And you provide book, you provide it like you would put wood in a fire. And so Stephen wanted to work that way, too. That was natural to me because Arthur had given us that as his credo. So I would just write a lot, quite a lot more than ever got into the musical. But it would provide a jumping off place for songs. So that's really more about musicals. Any other thoughts, gentlemen? Next, Doug, a question about Hands on a Hard Body. I think it's so much fun for me to think that both you and I wrote a musical about an event in Texas. That seems strange, but interesting to me. Your event became a documentary first and then a musical. My event, as it were, was an article in Playboy Magazine. It seems to me that you probably had more to work with story-wise since you came to the documentary. Did you take things from the true event that then could be added to the documentary part? Or did you musicalize the documentary itself? We took liberties. Essentially, we had eight central stories that were in the documentary that we wanted to tell in the musical and adapt to them accordingly. But we also only had the life rights to eight people. And there were originally 25 people in the competition. So we created two composite characters and used them. And again, we wanted to serve the spirit of the film, but we didn't feel an obligation to the letter of the film because, again, that was a documentary film, and we were creating an artificial theatrical event based on it. So we had to make all kinds of concessions and considerations in that regard. We also met the original contestants who had appeared in the doc and used a lot of raw material that they gave us to flesh out the story in a richer way. And as David was saying, one of the glories of adaptation is you're kind of given a story, and we were given the story in the documentary, but in addition, it's a documentary about a contest. So you have all the rules of a contest. You have people. You have why they're entering. You have what the challenge or the conflict is. You have their ostensible reasons for needing the truck. You have their human or poetic reasons for needing the truck. You have a winner. You have people that fall ill. You have people that betray other people in an effort to win. So not only do you have the raw material of the doc, but you've got all the logic and all the intrigue and all the natural narrative building blocks that constitute a contest. And so that was one thing that for us made it feel really ripe for adaptation in the first place. And I guess I was sitting here thinking about some of the questions we're raising about what do you include and what do you not include. And I kind of think it's the same thing with adaptation as it is with simply writing an original play. And that's that the first thing you have to do is sit down and write all the really good parts. Write the scenes you cannot wait to write that are the reason you wrote the play. And then, hope like hell you're finished. Because it's the connective tissue and it's the earning the next moment that is actually usually drudgery and at the end of the day you don't need. So it's like adaptation and playwriting. It's just just write the good parts. I would build on that by mentioning that when I worked on the misanthrope and as I say it's a play that's always vexed me because it's one of those great plays that never satisfied me. It always seemed to be a comedy that left out the comedy somehow. And never quite worked as a tragedy. And so when I sat down to work on it basically what I did was I kept reading it over and over again in French so that I didn't have any English voice of this play. And then what I did was I took just as you do with the movie I made index cards of all of the scenes in the play. And then what I did was I laid those out on my dining room table and then I wrote all of the scenes that I thought were missing which is sort of what you're saying. And the scenes that I wanted to write. For example, one of the things about the misanthrope I've never, you know, my attitude basically is how would Shakespeare tell this story? And Shakespeare would never begin with the two people in love. And with these two extremely odd, interesting characters in love I want to see how they managed to fall in love. And so I wrote out an index card, they fall in love. And so that was part of it. And so I just started laying out the scenes that I felt were missing and gradually I had my dining room table entirely filled and I actually could start writing. Not until that point because I was also writing in verse and so, you know, it's really a pain in the ass to have to scratch out verse scenes. You know, you really feel you've wasted your day when you've had people, when the rhyming dictionary's been out all day and you have to scratch out the whole scene. But that's basically how I did it was by constructing it like a movie and making sure that the story was absolutely airtight and also I could track how every... I could track that every character, which I didn't feel was true in Malia, how every character had a part in this. Because one of the things I firmly believe about a good play is that everybody is implicit in... is implicated in the story so that if one character pulls a strand somebody else twitches somewhere else. And so I wanted to make sure that even the smallest characters in the story were tracked through it so that everybody was affecting everybody else. And so that was the process of adapting. The misanthrope for me was really taking a story that had always fascinated me and just thinking, well, how can I tell this in a way that will satisfy me? I think I'd like to open it up for questions from all of you. We have such a variety of people up here and I'm sure you have different questions. So if anyone has a question, if you'd like to go up to the mic in the center and line up if you'd like or... And if it's to a specific person, please let us know or just to the panel in general and the way we go. Hi. This might be most appropriate for Doug, but when adapting somebody's life or actual events, how do you deal with that and then you talked about life rights. What's the sort of life right situation? What's the statute of limitations? Dealing with the states, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah, that's a great question and a complicated one. As far as life rights and what's required, consult a lawyer, don't ask me. But it's a general rule that a public figure or someone who's a pronounced part of the historical record, you can write about private individuals who don't have a public presence. You usually need to get their life rights and they're also above and beyond what the law requires. They're moral questions. Whose story are you telling? Why are you telling it? What is your obligation to them? Are they living? Will they have to deal with repercussions from the work that you've made and what do you owe to them? So those are all necessary questions. And I said this in my last session, so I'll be brief, but I have a kind of sliding scale when it comes to writing about real people. And when I wrote about the Marquis de Sade, I felt enormous freedom to invent aspects of my story because with Sade, there's a long tradition of writers appropriating them to their own purpose, from Yukio Mishima to Peter Weiss. And if you go to the library, there are 12 great biographies on Sade that'll set you straight about the historical record. I'm not a biographer. I'm a dramatist. So it's like you don't go see, you know, the new Disney movie Plains, and then pilot an aircraft. You know it's a story. And I think it's the same thing. It's like you go see a play about a historical subject or a historical figure. You haven't been reading biography. I think most of us are smart enough to know genre. And I'm not a biographer. So with Sade, I made enormous use of the raw facts of his life to spend my own crazy yarn. When I wrote about Charlotte von Malzdorf, she was a completely unknown figure. There are no biographies to correct errors in my play. Nobody knows who she is. There's no public dialogue about her. I knew that my play was introducing her to an American theater going audience. So in my sliding scale, I had a much higher standard of truth and to invent something about her, to create an event that never happened. That felt dubious to me because there was not any opposing force waiting in the wings to correct me. So with Sade, I took a million liberties and with Charlotte almost none. With hands on a hard body, because many of those people were living, it required an open dialogue with them. You said this racist remark in the movie, your issues with race are important to our storytelling. Can we use that aspect of your experience because it's crucial for the fabric of the play? Some hard questions, but some necessary questions, and when fully educated about our intent, almost all of them said yes. So those are some of the issues, I think, that arise. My question is addressed to Doug, too. It's a question about multiple adaptations. The game of the Drew Barrymore, Jessica Lange, HBO, Grey Gardens, and I don't know the timeline sequence of how your musical fits in with that piece and how successful you thought both of them were. We had a very warm relationship with Michael Sooksy who wrote the screenplay and directed the film. Initially, he went outside the house a lot and into the village of East Hampton and all that, and then after a few visits to the musical, it became a much more contained story. That said, it's a story about public figures and some of the things that happened are documentary facts, so we couldn't claim any infringement by him, and I think both, while the musical came first, I think both projects had a useful conversation while they were in evolution and then I have to confess, and this is perhaps an odd admission, but I had just spent about three years of my life dancing with those two, irrepressible, crazy, Herod and Reckless, wonderful women, and I wasn't quite ready to see them dancing with a new partner, so I didn't watch the movie on HBO and I have not seen it. It's my understanding that it's quite good and was a real triumph for the actresses involved, which gladdens me, but I felt a little territorial about my ladies and I just wasn't ready to give them up, so I'll watch it and appreciate it someday. Thanks. My question is actually for Mr. Ives. When you're doing translations, do you feel that you want your voice to stay out of the translation or do you feel like your voice is an essential part of the translation? I asked this because I recently read David Mamet's adaptation of Chekhov's Three Sisters, and it's very clear that it's Mamet translating as opposed to he uses his modern sort of dialogue. There were some moments where it was like okay here's the Mamet speak, back and forth, back and forth, like okay now it's Chekhov. Originally that was called the fucking cherry orchard bubble. They changed. So, yes, what you're asking is the great question about translation. I find it impossible to stand in a corner when writing a play and pretend I'm not there. And so I try to find projects where I can use my voice rather than hide it. It's partly why translating the Yasmina Reza play was not terribly satisfying was because I was just I was limited as to how much I could inject myself into it. It's why I love translating French classic plays, for example, because they happen in everywhere land and so I can make them into plays of mine basically. In fact, my translation of the misanthrope is called the printed copy says by David Ives adapted from Molière because it really there's more of me or 51% of me in there. But what I find, you know, the check off question I think about probably, you know, six times a week because what I really find hard is to contemplate translating check off and translating realistic dialogue today. You know, I'm very happy to create speeches of characters in 1635 in a structure that I have come up with but the challenge of the diction of an author check off, for example, in our time seems to me almost impossible. I've never frankly heard a good check off translation. I always just something always makes me sit up, you know, it's like I saw a translation of check off this year where somebody said cool and you just and you are suddenly taken out of you are taken out of 1895 and the challenge of check off is that check off is as we know we love him because his world is so real but one of the things that makes it real is that he understands in his time the social relations between everybody and that those relations are and marital love relations are written into the play in a way that language is going to bump up against and so I am very happy not to be David Manette facing check off because realistic you know, realism is so hard, you know, plays in English date within a week, you know, the shelf life of a good play is you know, three weeks basically and so it's very hard for example, you know I said this in an article in the dramatist but I think when you're translating the play you have to do the playwriting work first and then the translating work for example, you have to immerse yourself as you would in your own play in these characters and if in in Russian it says da if the character says da does that character say yes or sure or uh-huh or nod or say nothing or write what is the correct translation of da or what is the correct translation of we you know and so you have to understand what the diction of the character is and then you can translate and in realistic plays like check off that is immensely hard and so that's kind of my truncated answer to a wonderful question thank you this I think is towards Winnie Holtzman but it could be to anybody else about translation and adaptation with another person what are what did you think were the advantages and pitfalls because particularly Winnie it sounds as if you and Stephen were really from the very beginning adapting this together I mean even though he was writing the songs you were writing the book yes it was and then truly when Joe Mantello came in and also our producer Mark Platt who was extremely um influenced us very strongly story wise he worked with us on the story very strongly we did not for those who haven't read the novel the brilliant novel that Gregory McWire wrote with the amazing idea that the Wicked Witch of the West should be her own should be a heroine who has a back story that you don't know about and all of this a genius idea but that we did not we did not have a structure actually from that novel we needed to create our own structure stealing things from the novel and stealing most importantly that brilliant idea but um but yeah we you know this has to do with the nature of collaboration and I'm you know I've done a fair amount of that and I certainly collaborate when I'm working in TV which I've done a fair amount of and um I'm excited by it you know obviously if I'm if I'm in a room with Stephen Schwartz first of all who's forgotten more about musicals than any of us will ever learn um you know I'm just happy to be in I am just happy to be in that room I mean to sort of jump on it's like I just need to be in that room because I figure I'm going to learn something major I'm going to get I'm going to get better it's that old saw about if you play tennis with someone who's better than you well I did play tennis with someone who's better than me and I did get a lot better um so you know it's you know I'm not sure I'm answering your question but I was but then I'll be honest I mean there are always moments in any collaboration at least my experience is where you really wish you could just be alone and um uh I am I've definitely experienced that and and I recently wrote my first full-length play by myself and it was a really good feeling I really really needed to do it because I've been collaborating a lot in my life and you know it's nothing against collaboration I guess you just kind of need you were speaking to that earlier you kind of need that balance I think at least I do I feel like I didn't really answer your question but maybe I did well I mean it could have been for Doug Wright too for everybody I mean it's about the nature of translation and adaptation by yourself versus collaboration and what part does collaboration with living colleagues have versus the dead author if you're in a situation working with living colleagues and trying to it is best to work with living colleagues by the way in the room itself I was going to say the dead are less confrontational but in in what respect have they contributed toward the process and has that been a good thing and in what respect are there ways that you things that you need to to do to make sure everybody's vision is the same of what you want this translation adaptation to be this might sound perverse but I don't think it's that different working on say Grey Gardens with Scott Frankel and Michael Corey we were in constant dialogue about what the story required and ways that we could best serve it and I had the great pleasure of adapting not often produced Strinberg play for the La Jolla Playhouse about three years ago and I felt like Strinberg and I were engaged in the same kind of conversation and it was never just about me and my control I felt like there was always attention between me and him and trying to push through to the best idea between us so it felt amazingly similar whereas when I'm simply writing a fresh fictional play of my own design I feel that total godlike freedom you do alone in a room where you're inventing people to punish them in fabulous ways that hopefully leads to some kind of raw human truth and that's the power trip but every adaptation I've done whether it's been with living collaborators or a dead author has felt like a conversation among parties who are trying to serve a third thing I'm afraid we're just about out of time so let's take one more question I was very interested in the construction of Venus Infer and I wondered how you did that because it's not exactly an adaptation but in a sense it's sort of layered where you do it parallels and stuff and I just wonder how you constructed that In two seconds what I will tell you is what I basically did was I basically adapted the book Sakhar Masak's book first as a play for several actors in period just telling the story and I showed it to Walter Bobby who is a great friend and collaborator of mine we've worked on many projects and I said what do you think and he said I think two things first of all it doesn't feel like it has anything to do with the contemporary world although the relationship between these two people is fascinating and and and this kind of erotic relationship shown literally on stage can only be hallowingly hilarious and so he said I don't know what you do with this but I went away with that and I was so fascinated by these characters that I let the play sit for about five months and they just wouldn't let me go and so one day I took my play and I crossed out everything that was not drama and I had basically a bunch of scenes from these two people in 1870 and for some reason I just started writing a play looking for an actress to play this part and nine days later I finished writing it and so that was how that play came that's why it's sort of layered the way it is thank you very much everyone thank you our panel enjoy your evening oh me too