 to talk about things that are important to the theater, to talk with brilliant writers, theater makers, two of whom are some of my favorite people on the planet. And I'd like to introduce you to them. So today we're gonna talk with Octavio Solis. Hi, Octavio. Hi, how are you? And Kate Hamel. Hello, Kate. Hi. So we're talking today about adaptation. How to write it, how to conceive of it, how to go about like actually putting somebody else's words into your words, into a new form, all of that. We're very excited to chat with those of you watching online about questions. But I always like to kind of start these things with a sense of how do you become who you are? What is your brief but fabulous journey to being the playwright that you are? And Kate, I actually love to start with you because I think for a long time, the theater world knew you as an actor. And so I'm really interested when writing came into your self-definition. How did you come to that? It has always been there. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about how you got to be you. Yeah, first of all, I love the question, how did you get to be you is really like, I feel like I ask myself that every morning. Yeah, I started out as an actor. I got my degree in acting. And I was doing like, okay, I was working and I was sort of doing the normal actor gig thing. And I found myself in this frustrating situation. This was like circa 2010 where I was constantly in these rooms with 100 other women or 200 other women. And they would always be auditioning to play someone's the male character's wife or girlfriend or prostitute. Like they had no relationship to the female characters that I knew, female people I knew in life. And they weren't funny. They didn't have any complexities. They were always like their main appeal was the male gaze. So it was always like how likable they were, how sexy they were or how, whatever. And at the same time, a bunch of people from my... That I knew that many conservatory programs, I was in, there were more women than men and the women were just dropping out left and right, like designers, directors, even like, from all sorts of spectrum because there was just not enough work for them. And I'm like a feminist person. So I was frustrated that these stories were explicitly not, not only like not feminist, they were sexist often or upholding a sexist worldview and that there was no work for women in the way that I wanted to see. So I had always written some, I had a day job copywriting, which is not fun, but does teach you to meet deadlines, you know, like catalogs and websites and stuff. And I taught writing for a little bit to middle schoolers and high schoolers, which actually was good practice to learn like structural things. And so I had always written a little bit and I had written a couple of short plays and I bet my friend $100, my friend, Andrew Snickles who I think you know, that I could love Andrews, that I could write a new feminist classic, which was going to be Sense and Sensibility and that was my first full-length play and that was 2011. And since then, I've just been, you know it just became this whole hybrid career much to my surprise when I started off, I really was like, no one will ever want to see this. I just don't want to give Andrews $100. Because I was really poor at the time, so $100 to me was like, am I going to be eating? That is a worthy, that is a worthy pursuit. That's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. And we'll talk a little bit later about kind of why Austin, why that and all the house but thank you for that, amazing. Octavio, tell us how do you get to be you? Well, I also similarly started out as an actor. I was stage bid when I was cast in high school in the production of The Diary of Anne Frank. And from that moment on, I never looked back. I always wanted to be an actor. So I went to college training programs in San Antonio, Texas and in Dallas to train for that over seven years of undergrad and grad. When I hit the sidewalk, when I started pounding that sidewalk and my intention was to move to New York but my car was stolen and I suddenly just needed funds. So I stayed in Dallas longer than anticipated. But I started, I was offered a teaching job at the Booker T High School or rather Archmengen High School at Booker T Washington High School. And they wanted me to teach playwriting and I found it really strange because I said, I'm an actor, I'm not a playwright. But I had been taking some playwriting courses at the Dallas Theater Center and he had recommended me. So I said, well, I better, you know, blown up on this, read some more plays, get the manuals and really, really start working on this because I needed the job. But I started getting into it. It was part of my own reeducation into all this because I've been taking playwriting courses ever since I was there as a freshman but I never really paid that much attention to them because I was gonna be an actor. And then at some point it clicked. And also I was trying to maintain an acting career in Dallas and it was just really hard. I couldn't get anyone to take me seriously or see me. So I started devising my own, I started writing my own pieces, my own short plays that I could then showcase my acting in and performing them not in theaters but in punk clubs and new wave clubs that I worked in as a bartender. So I did it myself. I said, I'll do it myself. I said, the stage is in use on Wednesday nights. I started this program from the ground called Words on Wednesdays. It was a poetry reading program that got quite a bit of attention in the two years that I ran it because it was every week, I paid the poets out of my own pocket, you know, actually $20. Oh, that's like $100, $100? No, but what? And an open bar. A lot of them wanted to do it just for the open bar. Yeah, definitely. And then I was getting calls from like San Francisco, Lawrence, Kansas, Austin from poets saying, you know, I want to be coming through there. Can I read? And I said, sure. And it was, and they would get a huge crowd. It started small, but it got really, really huge. Like over 100, under 50. And then I had the idea of doing like every sixth Wednesday, a play of mine. But because it was poetry oriented, I said they have to be written in verse. So I wrote my own verse pieces. I cast myself in it. And the pieces got a lot of attention. And they were in the paper, in the newspapers locally. But they were all about the writing and I didn't get enough attention as an actor for these. And I kind of got the hint. I said, I'm not an actor. I think I'm a writer. I think I'm a playwright. And I took that seriously. I said, I'm not even gonna continue two careers because it's just like I have to focus. So I gave up my acting career. The chops never go away. They get rusty, but they never really go away. And I devoted myself to being a playwright. And once I did, then things started happening like that. And within a couple of weeks, Maria Rene Fornes called me, asked me to participate in her program at Intar. Had a play that was read in the Hispanic Playwrights Project HPP at South Coast River Tory back in the day, like 1989, that's a long time. But it worked. That sort of set me on my journey and I haven't looked back since. That's awesome. I too found theater through acting. I think a lot of people do because it's kind of most obvious entryway. And then learning kind of, oh, you don't make up what you say? Oh, I got it. Oh, wait, so wait, who writes what you say? Cause I want to be that person. Yeah. No, they write the ending too? Oh, okay. Now I know what I want to do. And then I realized also that as a playwright, I had more power. So much power. So much power. I don't like power. You know, I could have. And that was very satisfying as well. There's something that happened to me that I really collect is, I was working on one of my plays and I was really into it. And my agent called me and said, I have you an assignment to go for an audition. It's in half an hour. You've got to go now. And I went, ah, and it's for a commercial, beer commercial. And it's gonna, it's a national one. So you could get a lot of money. So I went, all right, I'll go. So I was annoyed, but I went. I walked in there. I saw 20 guys, 30 guys that looked like me except more handsome, more buff, younger too. Although I was a kid. And I got the side and it was a Spanish language course commercial. And it was two, three lines. It was just loud. And I looked at it and it memorized, I said, I got this. I'll probably get it. And if I don't, I don't care. But then I looked at these guys and they were all looking at it like it was, you know, hand the soliloquy. They were really just focused on it. They wanted this job that badly. And I said, you know, this is unfair. Why am I here? If I get the job, I don't really care. I want to go back to my play, but to them it means everything. And I said, you know, they can have it. I didn't go to the audition, didn't do it. And it wasn't because it disrespected the process because actually I had before, but I respected what they were doing a lot more after that because they were, to them it meant everything. So I said, they can have it. But I'm gonna write plays for all of these brown, young men to perform so that they have something else to do, you know, besides, you know, Spanish language commercials, which is fine. It's great. We all need that gig. But that's the power, right? That's the power of the writer is going, for me it was, I don't see any roles for me. I don't see any roles for any woman. I mean, it's the Gertrude Ophelia paradox. Like, that's it. That's it. We're done. Oh, God. The Virgin whore. Yeah. But sometimes a comical spinster. Sometimes a comical spinster. Virgin whore, usually both of them die in that, in this case, both of them kick it by the end. And you're like, really, nobody? Oh, okay. Where's her mom? Where's anyone's mom in Shakespeare, let's be honest. But, you know. So I thought that is kind of similar to my journey of going, like, well, if nobody else is going to write them, I guess I'll start writing them. And then you grow and you grow and you grow and realize, to your point, Octavio, just looking around at the people that you respect and the stories that you know are valuable and worthy and like put those on stage, like make way, new stories come through. So we're here to talk about adaptation, which is such an interesting corner case for playwriting, because it is your play, but it's also somebody else's story. And it can be both and happily mingle. So I'd love to maybe, if you could talk, I know, Kate, you have, I mean, a library of these adaptations at this point. But a lot are kind of European classics, American classics. And Octavio, if you could kind of tell us a little bit, let's start with Octavio, tell us kind of what one or some of your adaptations are, just so we kind of know what we're talking about. I'm thinking, of course, about Kihote for you, Octavio, but maybe tell us a little bit about it. Most recently, although it started, the journey started way back in 25, 20, 2006, but I started writing an adaptation of Don Kihote, which is about this masterwork considered the first modern novel. And so I've worked on that. But I've also did, even before that, I was asked by Cal Shakes and word for word to adapt an early novel of Steinbeck's called The Pastures of Heaven, which is really interesting. And I wasn't a big Steinbeck fan now then, but I am now. And so those are the two that I have. The Kihote journey was really, really interesting because it's long. I did it initially as a commission for the OSF. And before I launched into it, I asked them, what do you want? Do you want an Octavio Suisse play, or do you want a historical costume drama that is more or less close to the novel? And they said, the latter. We want something for our outdoor stage, for our huge audiences of kids. And they bring, you know, teachers bring their kids, and they're all studying the novel. So something like that. We don't want you to go too crazy with it. All right. So I attempted that. I read two different translations, one by Thomas Smollett, who's an acknowledged masterwork as well for its translation. It's, I think, published in 1778 or something like that. And then a more recent one by Edith Grossman, who is a master translator. She's done a lot of Gabriel Garcia Marcus's novels and did one that is highly explained that came out, I think maybe 1999, 2000, something like that. Both of those were really my touchstones. But adapting the novel and a novel of that epic scope and an epic size was a real challenge. I'll stop there so we can then hear from Kate, because I have so much more to say. So much more. I know. I want to know the next part of that story, because I know it's a good one. So Kate, tell us kind of where did you, what's the source material? When you're thinking about these translations, where do you, what's your? I mean, I come from sort of a radical adaptation place. I kind of think of them. I think of them as I come from a new play perspective. I mean, I still act. But when I was just an actor, excuse me, when I was an actor solely, I did a lot of new play work. And so that's just where I go. And I also am very interested in using the vehicle of old stories to sort of, I'm not interested in decorating the doors of the castle. I want to kind of kick them down and let all the people in, like make them highly theatrical, make them works that exist apart from the original. I kind of think of it as a collaboration between myself and the original author, whether or not that original author is currently dead. Specifically, feminists dealing with like class issues I'm very interested in and inclusive and very much trying to make them speak to the issues of the day. So yeah, I also come at it from a place of, this is me meets this material. And sometimes it's going to be way more me. And sometimes in a weird way, that's where my copywriting back. Sometimes I'm trying to sort of seamlessly, you can't tell who's me and who's stackery or whatever. And sometimes I'm like, this is very clearly me. When they say balls, balls, balls, I cannot get enough of them in Pride and Prejudice. I'm not trying to make you think that is Jane Austen. That is Pride and Prejudice. But I'm very interested, especially in the time when we are reexamining all our structures and who we make the heroes of our story and what we kind of believe in as canon and as a classic. I'm really interested in just like pushing that, pushing that, pushing that. So I started out with Jane Austen because Jane Austen is a woman. She writes women's stories. And at the time when I started my first one, the vast majority of stage adaptations of her work were by men. And that's like fine, men totally have the right to adapt Jane Austen. But I was like, even this famous proto-feminist novelist, everything is through the male gaze. It's solely through the male gaze. That's bananas. So I started with her and I've been doing her novels in order, but I've done a bunch of Homer and all this other stuff. And yeah, I just focus. I have less, I'm very interested in like epic stuff and sort of non-realistic worlds, language-based stuff. So I kind of let that guide me. And it's less about, there was a time when everyone was like, well, you're the 19th century girl. It was like, yeah, not really. I like sort of got in that I was interested. So I got like, I had done a lot of research. So I wrote like four plays in that time period. But I was like, you know, I have like a labor place that in the, you know, like I'm very interested in. That's more, when I'm doing adaptation, it's more like it has to mean something to me. And I feel like it has to say something through the world right now. And I have to feel like, do I have a unique way to do this? Because if I feel like I'm just kind of repeating the same, like Pride and Prejudice was an interesting one because I was like, there are a million excellent adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. So I better make something that's, that are very like, you know, like everyone, if you know the novel, you will know this play. And I was like, isn't it more interesting to make something surprising even if I get angry emails, which I do. So that's what I definitely do. Jane Austen's favorite. My favorite. Chance Vance. What's your favorite? My favorite one started out, dear Ms. Hamill, how could you? All in caps. That was about little women. I was like, all right. But I mean, this is what I love about adaptation, especially these kind of nostalgic plays or novels that the stories where we're like, I know what this is, great. Oh, great. I can't wait. This is what we did a real kind of switcheroo for the folks for when the only real adaptation I've ever done besides a kid's play, one of my very first was, is last year of Peter Pan at Shakespeare Theater in DC. Massive production, big spectacle. But you see Peter Pan, he's flying on the poster, looks great, twinkly stars. Oh, great. I know this totally. You come in and it is this anti-colonialist feminist, like big old, anti-male toxicity play. And it's a DC, right? So we're sitting there with like the Supreme Court justice. Well, we got RBG pretty cool, but then John Roberts came too. And I was like, John, do you want to talk about what you saw tonight? Yeah, I have a discussion about it anyway. But it's this thing of when you have a nostalgic property, a really well-known beloved characters. I think that's actually where you can change people's minds and hearts the most, because we're going to go like, here, Lizzie Bennet, but Lizzie Bennet with some like shit to do. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like we're going like Darcy, he's Darcy, he's Darcy. You have to explode the expectations by exploding the novel. That was something that I had with Pivote is that I was so reverential. I loved the novel so much, but I didn't even know how to get into it. I said, you know, so I tried to be faithful to it. And faithful just didn't work out at all. First of all, Pivote in the novel, it's called Pickarest for a Reason, because it's just a series of episodes and adventures that he goes through. Most of them interchangeable, because our lead character doesn't really grow. He doesn't really learn from anything. He imitates, he gets ideas from some encounters that he has, and he may have a certain sort of like, oh, wow, I didn't know that. That's interesting. And then he goes on and doesn't apply it anywhere else. So he's a character that sort of flatlines all the way through the novel. You can do that in a novel because really it's about showing what the society was going through at the time rather than him. And then the other thing is that the chief male character, female character, sorry, never appears. Goes in there, is constantly a vote. She's amused, she's this icon, whatever, but she's not real. She never really appears as a person. And I found that really, really difficult to actualize on stage. And also to write a character that doesn't grow, I tried to be true to that. And so the play worked on some level and then failed miserably in other levels because it just, there was no central female character that could exist as anything else than quote unquote, the virgin as we've been talking about earlier. And the male character never grew and that really bothered my chief actor in this. So I kind of put the play in Mothballs after that. And then a company, Shakespeare Dallas asked me to adapt that to Texas and update it and put more Spanish in it. And I thought, well, okay, I can do that, that's easy. And so I just did it in a couple of months work and, but it was still the same play with the same problems. But I was at least out of, you know, 16th century, 15th century Spain and those morays and that could deal more with contemporary issues. And I thought, well, this is okay. But then Eric Ting at Cowshakes asked me, bring that play in, but you're gonna have to do some work on this. And he pushed me, he and my director, KJ Sanchez, really pushed me to explode the work. And the thing that I realized I had to do, and this was actually Eric's suggestion is you have to take that novel from Cervantes. You now have to rewrite it and make it yours. I'm not interested in what Cervantes thought. I'm interested in what you're going to say. There we go. And so I did. And at the time that I started doing all this work, that's when all the news was coming out about the building of the wall, the caging of children, the separation of families, the mass deportations and raids that were going on with the board of patrol and the Department of Homeland Security. And I had to respond to that. I felt like Cervantes was responding to the issues of his day when he was writing the novel. I said, I have to make that novel a vehicle for the things that are happening today. So once I did that, then I felt like, oh, I can get excited about this work. Cause it's me. When I did the first one, I was in Spain. The second one was at least in Texas. But then this third one was home. I was writing about home, about my little town along the border that I was born and raised in. And it felt like, okay, now Cervantes is really, I'm really engaging with him. As Kate said, you have to make that playwright, even if he's dead, an active collaborator in your work. So right. That's so true. I mean, I do think that's exactly it. The entire point of adaptation is that it is now and it is you. If people wanted little women, go read Little Women. Like just don't really read it as the book that it is. Then your expectations will be perfectly met. But in the theater, what is vibrant about it? What is new about it? And I think Octavia, one thing that you said is exactly what I had when adapting Peter Pan. Peter doesn't change. That's the whole point. This hero, oh, he's so great. He can't feel anything, solves everything with violence, doesn't listen to anybody. And like, you know, just goes about his time, literally cannot touch another person or be touched. Cool, cool, cool. Great, great protagonist and doesn't learn anything. At the end, he's the same thing, starts all over with Wendy's daughter, right? So I was like, well, first thing, that's terrible playwriting. Like you have your main character or the top group of the cohort has to change, has to learn. So that was actually the most radical change. You know, besides making Wendy a scientist and giving Tiger Lily agency and like actual, like saving the day at the end and, you know, her Neverland being turned back over to her and her people. The actual biggest change is being like, Peter, you're gonna have to learn a lesson. You're gonna have to collaborate with the women around you and you're gonna have to get shipped together. So it's true. But that's a bad, that's me battling with Jay and Barry, kind of like you were like wrestling for the story with Cervantes. And I know Kate and your adaptations, it seems like you are kind of challenging Austin and then challenging Bakery and being like, is this what you meant? You know what I mean? One of the interesting things about doing adaptations specifically, besides the people do get really, I always, my favorite theater is when I go in and I'm surprised and I'm challenged. I don't particularly enjoy things when I'm like, you know, I went to go see Oklahoma and that was pretty much Oklahoma. And I'm like, you know, it's sort of the warm milk of theater does nothing for me. I just, it's not my taste. And I feel like you can only explore what interests you. So explore what interests me. But one of the things I like about adaptation is these classics, these stories like Don Quixote, all these stories, they teach us about ourselves, their cultural touchstones. Like when I say he's acting like a Hamlet, everyone can go to some basic characteristics of that. So we're creating mirrors of ourselves. So being able to distort that I feel like, and I'm being sort of idealistic, I guess can create change, especially since people will come to see classics that won't necessarily come if you, like if I wrote, this is my, you know, the title of my big fat social justice play, you're not necessarily going to come it. But if I do like little women, my little women's spoiler alert, Joe's not straight because Joe's a gay icon and I didn't want to write a little women where Joe like gives up her career for a man. So an Alcott wasn't straight. And I was like, I'm just doing it, whatever. And people were upset, whatever. But I was like, there are a million other little women. And for me, I just got a puppy. So this is my analogy. It's a little bit like, you know, when you're trying to get, give medicine to a dog and you put it in like a delicious little meatball or a piece of cheese or whatever, it's a little like you can get people in to see Peter Pan who are not, would not maybe come to see that thing and they get to like get their minds extended a little. You can come and you can get people in to see it who maybe can learn some new things or it's just, I just have, I'm so, whenever I go see someone else's work, I'm always like, when I see stuff that sort of transcends genres and surprises me and I couldn't quite classify what it is, that's my favorite stuff. So I think adaptation is a really fertile ground for that because people come in with rigid expectations and if they, if you can convince them to go along for the ride anyway, like that is really exciting. And that freaks down their barriers. Because like, what is the expectation we're giving to them that it wouldn't be little women without it, right? It wouldn't be little women without Amy and Marmy and like all of the people that you're like, great. I recognize all these, I can't wait. Christmas. Christmas. Cabiness, some like New England vibes. Lots about writing and storytelling. You know, it wouldn't be Quixote without some swords and some windmills and, you know, the conversation about hopes and dreams and Dulce and Aya, of course. And, you know, there's so much that we can say, see, this is, you're welcome. We give you what you want. But there's so much that a writer can do, just giving them what they want and then giving you what you want and doing what you, and frankly giving the audience what they don't know they want. Yeah, suddenly they see Joe and they're like, oh my God, of course she's gay. Well, duh, it's always been there. You know what I mean? She's Alcott and Alcott was, yeah. Exactly. I could go in that thing for a long time. In adapting Quixote, what I found as I started to update it is that there were corollaries to almost everything that happened in the novel. I could find some modern corollary to that. Cool. So, windmills, windmills, you know, you find contemporary windmills now, but I exploded that idea as well. I said, I don't want a real, I don't want, you know, we've seen that, it's such a cliche. And frankly, all most people know of Quixote is that he was tilting at windmills. They don't read the novel. In Spain, everybody loves Quixote, but they've never read the novel. It's like one of the most widely admired novels in forever, but hardly anybody really knows it. So I felt like I had permission to just, you know, dispense with the windmills. And instead I brought a huge, onstage a huge, like those large airships, groans that they used to move along the border, big, quiet, scary looking things. I said, what if he attacks that? What if he attacks and brings that down? Then I have something that is, that would have been technologically as significant for today's age that also has, what would have been an important then, a windmill was a very vital part of technology in the communities there. And when he just, it's attacking one and trying to destroy it and tearing at the sails. He's, it's quite a transgression. So I had to find a similar thing this way using, and I use the drones for that. That's so great. And see, this is what I would, I think is so sparkly and carbonated about adaptation is you know, there's such a great meat already there. And you get to, I think a meat metaphor is not going to go very far, but anyway, you get to like do all this new stuff. I'm a vegetarian anyway. I don't know why I want to eat that. But I also think, what was your, and I often give the advice to young writers trying to kind of make a name for themselves to try adaptation because of the exact same things Kate that you brought up, people want it. They will buy tickets to it. They will go see it. They will program it in their place. So it is in some ways a great way to say, here's what I can do with a story you already know and trust and your audience knows and trusts. And so having that as an entryway as a young writer can be a way to start in a relationship with self-coast rep or OSF or your local theater big and small in all sizes. So it's one of those things that as you are learning and honing your craft, you can take a plot that already exists and that one that you love and have some affinity for and think you can, as we have discussed, collaborate with your favorite perhaps dead writer. And it is a really great way to practice doing what you do, proving that you can do it and making a relationship that can be, turn into good work. I also really, I want to talk about because you're all actors and I'm like a failed, like I could act if it's like a part maybe just like me, then I can nail it, but I can't do anything else. But I too came from a place of wanting to be an actor and feeling that mysterious glowing thing that you can get in live performance. And I wonder how that manifests in your writing because for both of you, I know that your work is just so vibrant and it's funny and it's muscular and it's like active. And those are things that I think actors know that's what makes a great part. That's what makes you go like, I want to be in that play. I want that role. So I wonder if you find yourself thinking like an actor sometimes when you're writing or all the time or how does that work for you, Octavio? All the time. I think I'm acting all the roles all the time. I have to have a certain studio from the house where my wife would be very frightened with all my yelling that I do and all the crying and I just get caught up. I read the lines and act out the roles of all my characters. Having been an actor, I know that I want to be seen, that I want a director to know that what I'm doing is mattering because I've been in place early on where I didn't get a single note. We did a run for it. I didn't get a single note. And I get very frustrated with that. And I go, did you see me? Do you have any notes for me? And the director would often say, oh, you're fine, you're fine, you're doing okay. But it's like, it's what I could feel as a subject underneath that is that I didn't matter. It didn't matter what I was doing. I had no stakes in the story. So that's the first thing I realized as I write characters is that every character on there has to have stakes, high stakes. They have to matter in the story. If you take them out, the story is gonna wobble and collapse like Jenga, like a game with Jenga. And if you took the character out of the scene or the play, and the play was still structurally sound, you didn't need that character anyway. And thereby you're sitting, yeah, you have one less actor in there, but you're reserving them for a better role down the line. So they have to have an arc. They have to have a story arc. Even the most minor character has to have a beginning, middle and end to their journey that we can see. And because I write big plays and plays that have multiple characters, they often have to play various different parts. So that's a way in which they can sort of find the arc of their role in the whole piece. But generally, they have to have stakes. That's what I realized about the characters. What about you, Kate? How does the actor in you work with the writer in you? Well, it's interesting because I still act, and quite often I'm in my own plays, or at least some of them. And I kind of think that the writer part of my brain is Dana and the actor part of my brain is Zool. Like they're two different creatures. And at one point, at some point in a run, there is no Dana, there is only Zool. When I'm just in a run, for me, I think what shaped me a lot as a playwright was really wanting plays to be actor driven in terms of like text driven, that you can scale them up in terms of design, but they can be very simple, just like a couple of props in an actor because I love, in some ways, when I go see other people's work again, one of my favorite steps is just a reading, when it's just like a bunch of stands and it's just the actors and the words and what the director has told them to do, and they're creating it and the audience is filling in the gaps of their imagination. So because I wanna also move towards a more egalitarian and less hierarchical theater structure, I like to create ensemble-based plays in which because I've also been like a third spear carrier from the left at a play and it's very disheartening, I want everyone to feel like we have kind of the same amount of weight and all of us have to be with each other and there are no stars here. So that focuses me a lot and I think like, I think all playwrights, all artists have like their strengths and their weaknesses. I think one of my strengths is I do like love actors. I tend to, especially a world premiere when we cast an actor, I like to write towards their energy. I really am interested in actors and that is something that's really interesting for me. My weakness is like, I'm not good at like timelines, sometimes people or like sometimes specific settings because I do come from a place of like high theatricality once I was in a meeting with a set designer, lovely, lovely guy and he went, well, where does this scene take place? And I looked at him and I was like, on stage. He meant of course like in a drawing room. So that's like, I'm not, whenever I go into a design meeting, I'm like, I trust you, you guys are the experts. I'm not super, I tend to think everything looks great and like I'm less design oriented but I'm more actor based and that is just, I think that comes from being an actor and being excited by part of, being part of an ensemble is part of why, I mean, I love acting, that's why I still do it but part of why I like to do it is, it just makes me feel like I'm in the mix. I'm never asking my cast to do something that I'm not doing too. It's like, if we have at a bad house, if the play is like not hitting that night, I'm in the arena with you and going like, or if it's great, I'm there with you, we're doing it together, but yeah, I think that all comes out of being an actor and having the normal, one of the interesting things about being an actor as we've all experienced is you do feel powerless. So I do like to make actors feel powerful and everyone in a process feel like, this is our play, our play, our play. Yeah, that's great. So when we think about taking your, the novel that let's say I wanna adapt this, how do you choose which parts? I mean, it's like for Kyoto, it's so long. I mean, how do you choose? First, how do you choose a novel? I mean, some seem to be better, maybe infinite jest, maybe not, or maybe, I don't know. Ulysses, go for it, sure, all right. But how do you choose? And how do you decide what ends up in the play? What is, what's actable? What's theatrical? What's dramatizable? You know, I always get that question about internal, external, and all that stuff. Well, I didn't have, in both my instances, there were assignments. I was asked to come on board for these. And I resisted the first one greatly because I just thought Steinbeck, me, I don't see it. But John Moscone was heading Cal Shakespeare time. And he said, just read it, just read it. We'll get the novel to you right away. Okay, and he was there that afternoon because he had a courier brought it to me. So I said, oh, okay, I have to read this. And I said, I'll read it tomorrow. My wife picked it up and read it first and read it in a single sitting. And it's a novel of first stories, kind of like, in fact, it was influenced by Winesburg, Ohio. Is this sure with Anderson? I don't remember the author, Anderson, someone. Anyway, and so it's a series of short stories, all kind of interconnected that tell a larger story. And still it's a slim novel. And she said, you have to do this. You have to do this. It's just so Californian, you gotta do it. And I listened to her. She's the wisest person in the room. So I read it and I likewise also was in transit with it. I said, sure, I'll do it. But I was also working with word for word on this and word for words, whose entire canon is made up of short fiction or excerpt from novels that they perform word for word. They don't work with playwrights. They developed an unusual performance style that actually feels kind of breathtaking with the characters speaking of themselves in the third person. And so I was conscious of that. And so I said, I have to employ some of that in this because I actually, we had permission by the Steinbeck estate to use his text in the book. But then I wanted to create my own text as well and kind of make it almost invisible. In fact, I was getting credit for lines that he'd written and he was being commended when the show opened for lines that were my lines. So I said, okay, now we're actually quite seamless in that way. But then there were discoveries that we made about certain stories that just didn't quite fit in there. And that was made through really workshopping. We did so many workshops and the company, the actors had a great deal of say in this. And so we lost two of the bookended scenes that were one taking place during conquistador times. During the mission era. And then once they were far more contemporary and we decided to focus only on the people in the town. And so that went, that went into the decision for this. Quixote was a different matter because it's just, there's an entire episode and adventure almost every other page, they last that long. And the tilting at window scenes happens like on page 50. So it's over right away. And I said, well, I can't get it over with right away. It's everybody's looking forward to that. So I had to move things around, but I read it and I wrote all those, just a list of all those episodes that happened in the book and said, now I have to choose the ones that are going to be most theatrical. That I can connect one to the other and tell a story. Also, something else with Quixote is there are at least four novellas in there that don't take place with Quixote at all. There are other characters with their own stories. And they're amazing. One of them is the story of Cardenio which ended up being a Shakespeare play. Shakespeare apparently has this lost Cardenio play that is based on one of the stories from Sarantz's novel. And I opted to try to include one of them in there. And so then I could have like a story of young lovers and the machinations and the tricks they play on each other and the tragedies. Just the story of four young lovers. Well, we presented that, but it felt like it made the play unwieldy in the end by the time I got to Calshakes. And it was one of those scenes, one of those large sort of limbs of the play that felt like, oh my God, I can't believe it, but I'm being asked to cut it. And I looked at it and I says, well, you know what? I think I just have to trust this process. So I lost it. And I never missed it. It was so wonderful that I just didn't miss it. Helen, you're cutting. That's like how to be a playwright, learn to love cutting. I know. It took out 35 minutes of cutting. 35 minutes, an entire subplot. Wow. Because I just wanted to, I got so into that story, that's a novella. And it just felt like, you know, in the novel it works, but it's so superfluous in the play. It's like, in the end, I had to listen to the rules of the theater and drama, dramaturgy, rather than the rules of writing the novel. That's exactly it, right? How do you deal with that, Kate? Um, you know, first of all, I have this joke that like, I think one day we should do like a night that's just all the deleted scenes from a bunch of plays, that like the stuff that you're like, that was awesome and nobody will ever see it. What a beautiful monologue I wrote that no one will ever see. But when I cut things, I'm very like, well, if I hate that, I can bring it back. I lie to myself every time. So that's very, very helpful. Lying, self-discipline. Uh, uh, yeah. You know, I took this workshop once with Paula Vogel, one of the great superheroes of the American theater at the Vineyard Theater. And she, it was with a bunch of playwrights in a room, one of her bake-offs. And she asked, if you were going to write a play about Barack Obama, what would your inciting incident be? Like what, where would you start it? And she went around the room and we all had different moments from his life, the moment of his, uh, 2004 speech, the like when his, you know, um, graduating from college, like, and it was probably 15 playwrights and everyone had a different thing. It's just like what speaks to you. And so for me, when I'm looking at a novel, I'm, or a pre-existing work, I'm just like, well, what speaks to me? What sort of speaks to the question I'm asking or theme? I mean, I just did a Dracula for Classic Stage Company and I was like, I had worked, and it was a very fast commission. It went from first meeting about it to first rehearsal in six months. And I was like, I mean, it was a great, I was really, so like, it was, I was really happy and pleased and thank you, Classic Stage, for trusting me. But I was like, oh my God, what am I gonna do? They're bats and it's about vampires and they're wolves. Like, I definitely had a moment of like, I may have been too ambitious, but then, and it's because I kept battering against the beginning of the novel. Like the beginning of the novel is, you know, basically like Jonathan Harker rides off to Dracula's Castle and it's, and I was like, I'm not interested in that at all. But what I am interested in is the moment when Jonathan says goodbye to his wife, Mina and Mina stuck it, fucking home in England, doing nothing, cause she's a lady and she's like, bye, have fun on your homoerotic adventures with a vampire honey. So it started that. And it was very, it was very strange because it was very, I have a dramaturg, Schickel partner, a dramaturg I work with a lot, Kristen Leahy was like a dear friend of mine. And Kristen, it was really lovely to like, I bounce off ideas and she was dramaturg on Dracula and I bounced ideas off of her a lot and we just kept coming back to, and since it was such a fast process, I was like having to cut, it was again, like I was like, I have to cut 40 minutes from this. And we kept on, I kept on thinking about deleting that scene and then being like, otherwise there's no, they're there for me. So we didn't cut it. And I think that's the, when you have a preexisting story and like, you know, Barack Obama's life is a preexisting story, anything, it's all about like what inciting incident works for you and then anything else you're just losing cause that doesn't go along with your sort of theme. And sometimes you have to lose like amazing stuff and it sucks. I resented it furiously. Bring back the eight hour play. But Kate, just a really important lesson there. And that's that, is that the playwright also has to stay invested in the work. You take out the stuff that really you really care about that is a part of you in the story and that you lose that, then you care a little less about anything else. That's in the why of it. Why this adaptation now? Why you writing this adaptation now? All of those questions have to be answered with an affirmative like because of this. And if you don't have it, then it's just a regurgitation. It's just, well, let's have them walk around saying the line instead of reading them on a book, you know? And finding, I think part of what you said, Octavio, is great to highlight too for those attempting to write an adaptation right now, which you should do is what is the most dramatic moments? What are the choices? What are the moments of choice for the character? It's like in any play. I mean, as you have watched enough of these classes certainly with me, it's all about what is the character defining choice? Who pushes them to make that choice? What circumstance is undeniable where the character goes, I have to make a choice now. And that's all great novels have these and it's your job to sneak around them, find those, put them in the order that makes sense and figure out what is the novel about? What is it actually, what is the culmination? What is the point of this story? And, you know, for Jane Austen, a lot of them are, love story, love story, love story, love story, love story. How did they know for real? They both know they love, but now he doesn't know anymore. Now she's told him a thing and I just go fix the thing and then the thing and then finally they're like, okay, you like me and I like you? Great. Like that's kind of the end of almost everything. But how do we get there and finding all those choice making moments which in a novel can feel not necessarily passive but the idea of going, how do we explode those choices to a space of such physicalized drama that we wanna see it? And, you know, I always love the British novels of love because the explosion can be absolutely silent tension between two people and often is. I have a question for you then. I have a question for you, Lauren. What novel are you reading or have you read that you would like to adapt? Aha. Oh my gosh. Okay. There's this novel call that is by one of my favorite writers. She's a Turkish writer named Alif Shafak and it's called 10 minutes and 38 seconds in this strange world. And it is the most breathtaking piece of fiction I've maybe ever read. Really? It is. What's it called? It's called 10 minutes and 38 seconds in this, what are three minutes? I have to actually, it's a bunch of numbers and so I'm like blah, blah, blah seconds in this strange world. And it's basically this incredible novel about a prostitute who has found murdered. And in the 10 minutes and 38 seconds that her consciousness is still with her, she goes through the circumstances and loves and friends and all of the things that made her to this moment. But that's halfway through the novel. The first novel is called The Mind and then the second is called The Body. And so when her mind goes out, the second half of the novel is about her body. And it is, to me, the reason why I think of it as I'm reading it right now and I'm just, everything Aleve Chavoc writes is absolutely incredible. She has a great TED talk too. But the leaps of imagine, I mean, it is, it's like Marquez, it's just this wild, magical way of thinking and just barreling through memories and jumping timelines and going back and forth. And it's like, it doesn't matter, but it makes complete sense. You know what I mean? It's just the flow of it is stunning. But the reason why I think about how cool an adaptation would be is it feels impossible to put it on stage. How the hell could you possibly put it on stage? But since we've evoked the wonder that is Paula Vogel, Paula Vogel is one of her greatest contributions to American theater is challenging every writer to put something impossible in their plays. And so to me, that is the basis of so much of my playwriting theology is, there's very little that is actually impossible because theater is a magical place where we could, you could have a woman stand up and say, I just died. And these people just found me in a dumpster and I have 10 minutes and 38 seconds, fine, go. So I'm going to tell it, I hope. That sounds amazing, it sounds amazing. That sounds amazing, you should do it. Yeah, you should. I'll tell you, I'm actually talking, I'm on like the Zoom screen, you're below me. So I feel like I'm shouting down at you. What's a novel you've always wanted to adapt? Well, I'm reading it now. And it's an amazing novel. It's called Year of Wonders by Gwendolyn. Oh gosh. Year of Wonders, I think you've read this book. Is it a blue cover? I think Gwendolyn wrote. And Year of Wonders. Year of Wonders, and it's about a woman in a village in England in 1666 that has been ravaged by plague. So it's a plague story. And about how the village has opted to sequester themselves from the world. No one can leave and no one can come in and people have to deliver goods by leaving them at the gate. And then there's exchange of money with a lot of social distancing because they just don't know how the plague is spreading. Plague air, they call it plague seeds. And it's about how this village, particularly this woman Ann, how they cope with like death all around them. It's powerful. And it's so beautifully told. Marvelous writer who also wrote a novel called March, which is about the father of the March women in. Oh yeah. And that one won the people's prize. So it just feels so theatrical to me. And it feels like a story we need to hear about now because of the pandemic that we're living through. You should write that one. I'm not sure I'm the one for it, but I know that someone should. Someone should. Kate, what about you? What's in your mind, Hopper? My adaptation bucket list. I've always wanted to do the grips of wrath. If anybody from the Steinbeck estate is listening, to be honest, I can't get the rights, but I would really like to do it because I come from an area of like extreme rural poverty. And yeah, I'm just very, very interested in all that would be the grips of wrath and trying to do it in a feminist way. I also, I mean, I love Steinbeck, I think, like what an interesting writer. East of Eden, favorite novel. There is one question that we've had before we go. Fred asks, do you approach an adaptation of a well-known story differently from a lesser known story? I don't know if I do, I don't think so, do you? I mean, maybe if it's a super well-known story, the list of things that define it as that nostalgic, beloved story is maybe longer because people know more characters or they know the setting or they expect top hats or they expect whatever. But in some ways it's knowing it's imprint in the world, but I treat the literature for dramatic moments the same. I think there's a kind of awkwardness or tenderness around the work that is already so familiar that you feel like, oh, here I go, I'm going to adapt this work and everybody, it's the beloved work and I'm gonna get vilified for attacking it, whereas a lesser known work by maybe Dickens did many Christmas stories, not just the one that gets stayed there all the time. If somebody tried to adapt that one and mess with it in however way they wanted to, there probably would be less, I'll cry than trying to mess with his- No one cares. They're like, do what you want. Like I was asked by Playon, the company within a company of the OSF to adapt the Shakespeare play and I was dreading the idea of doing Hamlet or Macbeth, those because I would be afraid that the scholars would be sitting there watching the play with their book open going, let's see how we fucked up this line, excuse my language. But instead, I was assigned Edward III or I picked it because it was on the list of remaining plays. I said, I didn't know Shakespeare wrote Edward III. What is this play? I don't know it and I picked it with the intention of addressing a play that I was almost positive no one else would know. So nobody would know how this particular line or that couplet had been deliberately changed or altered by me in my quote unquote translation of that work. I think that gives me a sense of like, well, I can breathe a little easier. I can have more elbow room to work with than the masterpieces, the masterworks. Yeah. I feel like, I mean, yeah, it's so funny because I feel like a lot of people think they know these things better than they do. Like they have like, they more like are remembering the nostalgia about it or maybe I'm being a little bit of a pain, but like the movie, like I don't know, so many people have said to me, well, in sense and sensibility, why didn't you include that famous line, my heart is and always will be yours. I was like, because Emma Thompson wrote that line. Like, I was like, you know, it's not in the novel and people have argued with me and I was like, I will give you, where's the $100 back if it's in the book, because it's not. But you're remembering the movie and you're mad at me because, but yeah, I'm sort of like a brat. So when I was in school, I was always getting in trouble. So the more well-known something is, the more like my bratty-ness comes up and I just want to like mess with it. I just want to mess with it. Like, what does the deal like? I mean, especially for those, those, those works that are in the public domain, like go for it, mess with it and it'll make it more exciting. It'll make it more surprising. You know, you can, there's something about what is the heart of the novel, like what's the spirit, the intention of the work. And I think if that, if you are meeting that and having a conversation with the intention of the work, then you can like set it on Mars if you want. I don't know. Well, that's why I wish, oh, I was gonna say, I wish I had seen your Peter Pan, Lauren, because I feel like, I love especially the ones that are like sort of like, who's read Peter Pan? But everyone's seen that like, you know, the sort of like Mary, Martin or whatever. I, what an exciting challenge to make something new. And my friend Isabella Lebanque was in it. But like, how, she's so amazing. But like, I love that and I love, I like deeply respect you for taking on that challenge and would have loved to see it because like, I want people, it's so exciting that people went in like, gonna see tights and they go in and see something else. And they thought it, definitely thought it was the musical. Like half the people were like, oh, so no singing. Oh, okay. But it was interesting. I will say one big piece of me even agreeing to, to adapt it was working with two incredible indigenous cultural consultants who every single thing in the script had conversation around it. And what does this mean to tell the story of an indigenous character, even though Jane Barry never met anyone indigenous, never even been to America. So it was a total white gaze fiction of who Tiger Lily is. But finding the way to balance that to Octavius point to speak to now, to speak to right now, like Dakota access pipeline, like a missing women and girls and reservations. Like let's talk about it now. And so Isabella was one of the really critical pieces of making that character something that we could all be really proud of. And, you know, literally we're in DC in a Trump administration with Chief Justice John Roberts in the audience. And at the end, Tiger Lily is Peter gives Neverland back to Tiger Lily. And she's standing there being like, this is here we go. Like it's a new day is dawning. I just want to be like, zoom in on Chief Justice. What is in your mind, sir? And you know, also the thing that people need to remind themselves is that whatever you did in your adaptation, the original is still there. Yeah. It's still there. 50 years from now. You don't burn it. Do something else with Peter Pan. That would be as exciting. I will speak to the people then as well. I don't respond to like the angry emails about it that I occasionally get, but like I'm always like, but if you don't like it, and I really mean this in a non-defensive way, you can write your own. Like you can write, that's the great thing about adaptation is you literally can write your own and make your own. And that's cool. There's room in the world for everyone. Yeah, exactly. Your Don Quixote is not going to be anyone else's. It's yours. It's and so... And we need a lot of them. We need them. On that fabulous note, the hour is complete. I could talk to you for many, many more hours. What a joy. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your time today. And thanks everybody for watching. And if you have any questions about adaptation or specific things we didn't get to through them in the comments and we'll answer them at our leisure. Thank you so much. Of course. What a pleasure. I could do this for hours. So fun. Well, we'll find another time to do that over. All right. It's funny that the pandemic is the thing that activates these conversations now across the country. We could have done it before. We could have. And now we are. It's true. And now we are. Many more conversations in the future. Thanks, everybody. See ya. Bye. Thank you.