 moments in the text, they feel almost like those pure rushes of adrenaline you get when you make a discovery in your own play. And so the lights go on again and again and again in a process like that because it's like you get to slip into Strenberg's shoes or Chekhov's shoes or it can be a remarkable exercise to learn the craft of writing and that particular play I was also going to direct and there was no better preparation directorially than to adapt to play. Not speaking Swedish, I did what a lot of writers in my situation do and I commissioned a literal translation from a Swedish speaker that was sort of blunt with little or no poetry but pure and I was able to then build on that. And that was a really useful exercise. And finally I guess the last, when I was thinking about my own relationship to adapting classics, what is a classic? I would sort of say with my tongue only slightly in my cheek that in the realm of film I've adapted two films into musicals and arguably in their genre you might call these movies classics. The Maisel's Brothers' Grey Gardens, a classic documentary and Disney's beloved animated The Little Mermaid, a classic animated film based on a classic story and those processes were markedly similar and seem to address this topic because they're as scary as adapting the Bible in that people are so territorial and devoted to those two artifacts in the culture and if you get them wrong you greet the wrath of a million fans and you could say arguably that they're very different demographics with The Little Mermaid the target audience tends to be eight to fourteen year old girls and with Grey Gardens it's probably gay men in their fifties but I would suggest that those two constituencies have a shocking amount in common and that if you get it wrong you hear about it. So any time you're adapting what we could argue is a canonical work you run the risk of inflaming its devoted and core audience. Have you ever confronted that Connie? Have you ever adapted something that was revered or beloved and carried the weight of oh my god I might screw this up? I have done two and they were both Russian. One of them is a play by I just spent last year working on this man's plays and I can't remember his name but maybe it will come to Schwarz. His name is Schwarz. I'm not kidding. I'm not being Mel Brooks. That is actually his name, Evgeny Schwarz. And the play is a wonderful day for miracles or a day for miracles and this man is worshiped in Russia so I did an adaptation. I called it something about a bear. It was done in Minneapolis. Lisa Channer and her partner Volodya complicated Russian last name man have this theater called Teatro Novi Most. Most means bridge. So I set it in Minneapolis. I actually set it in the upper part of the state and we got people with Minneapolis accents and it really was a labor of love. It was a play with music and at the very last moment a bear that is part of the story actually appears is one of the most wonderful moments in any play I've written. It was the bear they had used at the Guthrie for a production of a winter's tale. So this puppeteer, puppeteer does not describe him. I mean the Henson people actually do a lot of work in Minneapolis. He built this beautiful perfect bear costume that he inhabited with sound and movement. He looked exactly like a bear. And at the very end of the play there are all these birch trees in the background. You hear this sound and soon this bear appears and walks along the upstage through the birches comes up on his legs. It's actually a female bear. It's the mother of one of the characters and raises her arms and then looks at everybody in the lodge and the audience and makes this wonderful bear sound and then chuffs and then exits. And it's just a completely magical moment. I wept the first time I saw it. It's just amazing. But then we had the reception and this huge amount of huge number of Russians came and they worship Afghani Schwartz the way we worship like Tennessee Williams or somebody like that or August Wilson. And I thought, oh my God, I'm in for it. And they came up to me and they said, we think it is better than the original. And I thought, okay, you're Americans in Russian suits. This can't be true. But so I was very, very relieved. It doesn't always happen like that. The other one I did that is I'm just going to tell you the successful ones. Not the ones where a bunch of little eight year old girls come after me with, you know. And this was I worked on this play forever with the very relentless Olympia Dukakis. And the title of the play is Vasa Zelaznova. And it Gorky wrote two versions of it. The second version is after he got communism and it's very preachy. And I like the original version. Again, I commissioned, as I did with the Afghani Schwartz, a Russian speaker. So in other words, who is actually Russian who speaks Russian as opposed to a literary person to do what I would call the literal translation. I worked on it again and again and again. And by the time it was up, we were going into rehearsal, I was in the dressing room by myself looking at a picture of Gorky and saying, you know, Maxime or Ilya, I think I did a good job. And if you can look at the playwright and they're not, you know, then, and you know what, I still love that play. It's turned out to be one of my favorite things that I wrote. It's so filled with me and what I believe after complete immersion in this world of, well, just briefly, everybody in the play is one generation out of, up from being serfs. And the serf system in Russia has tremendous parallels to the slavery system in America. So I was able to write about both of those things. And so those turned out to be really good, good experiences. I've had some others that weren't as much fun, but I just don't want to talk about those. It's interesting, though. I want to ask you another question. And it's just your description of that bear crossing the stage was so haunting and so beautiful and so particular. Now, you could be the wrong person to ask because I know you to be an astonishingly audacious and stylistically bold writer, but would you like I never would have in my own volition written a bear for a long stage cross late in a play of mine. But do the adaptations that you work on make you braver in your own work or influence its course in some way? No, but you know what it does do is it takes a tremendous pressure out of trying to find the fucking plot or the forward motion or the story or whatever that wakes you up at 2 a.m. And you know, because it's that's already that's taken care of. So there's some deep relaxation. I when I came up with the bear idea, Lisa Channer said, no, no, we can do that and it'll be beautiful. I promise it's not going to look like, you know, a Sesame Street doggy or something that it won't be laughing. Well, people won't laugh. It'll be beautiful. And of course, and it was. Wow. I was thinking, actually, as we were talking, I just had to play at the Atlantic Theatre Company in New York, a play called Posterity, which was a play about Henrik Ibsen written in the style, if you will, of a classic sort of four act Ibsen play. And that was glorious because he, as Connie was saying, when you liberate yourself from having to locate the narrative, and I think narrative falls in and out of fashion, not because we lose interest in it as writers or audiences, but because it's so hard to do and to do well. And I think even in avant garde work that bravely kind of issues narrative and doesn't tell a conventional story. As audiences, it's so in our bones, we're always experiencing it with, well, what's going to happen next? Well, how does that element connect to this element? Well, what is the next stepping stone I need to get to the next moment and cognitively make sense of this dissonant piece? So I think narrative, and Ibsen was a master of it. And yet, a lot of the techniques that he uses to forward it on stage have grown woefully out of fashion, like the servants gossipping about who's in the next room or who's coming up the walk, and conventions like that, or letters that are exchanged and read aloud or corny deus ex machinas like diaries or a set of dueling pistols. And there was something exhilarating about getting to embrace all those horrible devices and do it in an unapologetic way and claim it as homage. That was really, really satisfying. And so, and again, that was part of a continuum because first I adapted the Strinberg play, and then I went on to write my own faux Ibsen play. And I think one was a kind of preparation for the other to kind of work in late 19th century Scandinavian drama. But it proved really, really worthwhile. And it was definitely a master class in formalism in how to set something up in Act I and have it pay off in Act IV and make sure that every actor from the lackey and the stable to the lady of the house had a compelling and complete journey that took them somewhere that wasn't arbitrary. And so it was an exhilarating exercise. And so I do find like Quills being based on the Grand Guignol, Posterity based on an actual Ibsen text. Connie mentioned my play I am my own wife, which is based on a sort of cinema verite documentary style of theatre making akin to what Emily Mann has pioneered in Execution of Justice and Moises Kaufman in the Laramie project. So I am fascinated when I alight on a historical figure that interests me. The first step for me is usually finding the genre or the frame or the formal structure that seems to best exemplify that life in some way. So form for me follows character to a certain degree, particularly when that is a historical character. I just want to insert this at the purple of nothing, but I have always wanted to do a head of gabbler and have replaced the pistols with slingshots and then just see what happens. I have taught that play. I have worked on two productions of it. When I first started teaching in Amherst College, I decided I was teaching modern drama and I needed to give a lecture. So my lecture was on Ibsen and head of gabbler and I fell asleep in my own lecture. So two things. Number one, never lectured again. Secondly, I tried to steer clear of Ibsen except Pergut, which I think is just brilliant. So that just was an embittered, mean comment, but I wanted to share it with you. Questions? Yes, Lee. Well, a production of a play is a translation, first of all. A play in English and you go into production, that's a translation. We can only try. So what I've done with my Molière that I've actually had quite a nice life with, paid for my condo. Molière has been very, very good to me. I commissioned a literal translation from a Molière scholar, in this case Virginia Scott. And so what I got was a document that not only had the literal translation, but it had footnotes and notes about what other translations had done and succeeded or failed with. And then, I mean, I remember one of her notes was, I think this is a reference to something. Oh, I don't know. And so I would use this document and then I would create the misanthrope and it was a recreation. And because of that I feel very close to Molière because I feel like it was, you know, it was definitely had to hear his voice to be able to do it. So I hear what you're saying, Lee, but without the French translation, the translation from the French of, for instance, Perubu, I would be in deep trouble because I don't read French and the Spanish I read is just pathetic. So, and the Russian, I really need the translations. I've paid attention to what different translators bring. And the only thing I can go back to, well, a production is a translation. And as I'm sure you know it, you go see one production of your play and then you go see another production and you go, well, that one was in English and this one was in Martian because the difference is just so, so tremendous. It's also partly, I think it becomes in a way an ethical question because, you know, I'm going to say this illustratively, I don't mean to speak for Connie, but she wants to do an adaptation of Molière. She doesn't want to do an adaptation of Richard Wilbur's adaptation of Molière. So if you find that you're reading a lot of translators' versions of a particular text, the risk of borrowing from them or undue influence can be very high. And you want to make sure that you're not in violation of their copyright on a particular translation so it's usually prudent to go back to the source and clear your mind as much as you can and work elementally from the original language. And one thing that's been extraordinarily helpful to me in this regard has actually been seeing my own plays in translation because I think any good translation is also an act of cultural adaptation and fidelity to your text isn't always the most important criteria. And by that I mean when I saw Grey Gardens, the musical, in Japan. Now Japanese as a language is structured very, very differently from our own and the whole language is made up of short staccato syllables but it can take many more syllables to say picnic in Japanese than it does the two it takes off in English. So picnic can be a nine syllable word. Now consider that a lot of the text of that show is lyric and there are a finite number of notes and beats in the score. So one 12 syllable line in English could be 36 syllables in Japanese and destroy the song. So the translator had to come up with highly evocative lyrics that read almost like abstract poetry but met the meter of the music and plot and character content that were unfolded into the song the way classic American musical writing requires was actually excised and placed in book scenes so that it would still forward the story we were trying to tell and there was no limit in terms of the number of syllables that the translator could use. So was that a fidelity translation of Grey Gardens emphatically not? Were the plays themes and its narrative arc and the journeys of its characters retained? Well yes. Then you also face other issues too like in America there's a whole cult of interest in Jackie Kennedy and of course these were her relatives and there were jokes about the Kennedys in the piece and in Japan there just isn't that cult of interest in them they know them in a incidental way but they're not the subject of endless tabloid fodder or countless biographies or TV movies and so jokes about the Kennedys required a very different treatment in Japan so on the one hand you could say oh they cut my great jokes but on the other hand they supplanted them with lines that made cultural sense in their own context and in doing so it might have been a different laugh but in the rhythm of the play it landed with a laugh when it needed to so so those are some of the issues that you face when your work is being translated and then you bring that body of knowledge when you're translating something a new and and I tend to think well like Connie was when we were talking about setting this Russian play in Minneapolis their choices you make so that it will play to the audience you expect to see it and in some sense as long as you're you know genuinely affecting to the playwright at night and genuinely trying to serve them you do them a greater favor by taking those liberties than if you were slavishly true to what's on the page this was a really public argument that Richard Nelson had with Ralph Fielde so uh you know Ralph Fielde who's no longer with us uh did a lot of translations of Ibsen and Richard Nelson was doing was one of the first of us to to work with the transliteration and then do a version and it was not only Ibsen but many many other playwrights and they had this argument that was about these were the two issues Ralph Fielde says I'm fluent in this in Norwegian I'm hello Norwegian Ralph Fielde and I've spent my lifetime working on these translations of Ibsen Richard Nelson says I'm a playwright I've seen Ibsen in various translations and I come to it as a playwright and those that's where the line of demarcation was drawn and then I I actually have read both of these translations and I'm so tired of Ibsen here I am talking about him again oh my god uh anyway uh the ultimately I think what Ibsen would have wanted was for his plays to be alive for the audience now my play tales of the loss for Micons was translated into finish so because they felt there was a lot of things about for Micons that was reflected in in you know Finland the in Finnish society families all living together in small little apartments or houses the loss of control of the younger generation medical issues the huge changes in society so I appreciated that very much it was done in Finland in at the Lila theater which is in Helsinki which is actually the Swedish theater but it was done in English but then I started getting notes from the translator try and I realized for Micons is filled with cultural references just filled with them so trying to explain things like what kind of truck is that Peter built dickhead you know which is not a joke I'm proud of however it is that moment and finding that there was it was untranslatable and there was just so there were so many mall they got the mall they understood the mall malls were actually invented first in Helsinki and secondly in Minneapolis and that's because well there's some similarities have to do with weather so you would enter in Minneapolis into Stockmans and you could basically go to all the stores by going through tunnels in hallways so that was I'm rambling anyway I do think it may be a failed not a failed but let's say a not ideal situation but you know I'm an American I'm uni-lingual so whatever I know about drama from other languages and I would even include Elizabethan English in that I know from study and from adaptations and translations yes thank you honey which is a work of genius by the way well without that we probably wouldn't have any theater because all theater has been adaptation if you think you start back if you don't you don't go to the Sanskrit plays but move a little forward into the more modern place of the Greeks so those are all you know adaptations of stories that everybody heard and then the versions of that continue to be done and with that I'm handing it off to my colleague Doug yeah it's a it's a great question and I guess I were I one of the writers who felt compelled to do it perhaps I could offer you a better answer I've never been emboldened enough to take a a fellow writers character and and hypothesize on their behalf and some writers have to absolutely dizzying and and great effect I'm not one of them but I think maybe one reason writers do and I'll I'll disagree with my esteemed colleague here only in as much as I'm afraid having just written a play about him I'm something of an Ibsen fan whoops but to me Heta for example is is a compelling character because she is so inscrutable and and with like like Connie is saying in any performance even is an act of translation and so many brilliant actresses have have plumbed that role and transformed it each time they do it so she remains I think a continual figure of fascination for us I'm not sure I'd ever take her on so I feel like I'm not giving you a satisfying answer but maybe it's because I let sleeping dogs lie yeah oh do that Kevin so this is Drew Lichtenberg he is the dramaturg at the Shakespeare theater working for Michael Kahn he's about to finish his DFA at Yale and yeah okay thank you I wasn't expecting to speak yeah we at Shakespeare theater and this is the question I was actually going to ask you guys so maybe I can turn it into a question Michael Kahn our artistic director passionately believes in what we call our rediscovery series which is commissioning new translations and adaptations of plays that for whatever reason have been lost to history so three years ago we were the first theater to commission an adaptation of Schiller's Valenstein a nine-act play from the Weimar classicism era by the former poet laureate Robert Pinsky this forthcoming season we've commissioned Yael Farber an adapter director divisor from South Africa to do a new version of Salome departing from Oscar Wilde because she feels like Oscar Wilde is yet another man giving a name to this nameless woman from biblical history we've also commissioned three rhymed verse French comedies from David Ives I called the David Ives trilogy and we're currently searching for a fourth comedy or maybe a different a Russian comedy maybe for him or something inverse for him so Michael and we actually asked Doug I don't I don't think this is public information but we have the money for a a one night version of the Orastaya by Escalus which is our next big passion project and we asked Doug and he passed a one night get what well it's gonna be it's gonna have a full run but we want to take it and condense it into one night oh into one night so instead of three successive nights because it's a it's a fairly long play there might be some other writers available well I yeah I know Michael had meetings with writers the week before I came out here and I was hoping that they went really badly so that I could recommend to you so my question for you guys was going to be what is your white whale what is the play that you feel is lost to history or the writer who you feel is for whatever reasons of the cultural divide the abyss of history has swallowed them and needs to be rediscovered I also want to say that I'm I'm an Ibsen partisan myself okay there's a really there's a really great essay called the mask behind the face on head of Gabler by Eleanor Fuchs which is on I like her yeah she's amazing and it's on the relationship between that play and Nietzsche's birth of tragedy and the sort of submerged romantic mythologies lying in the text so I've always been fascinated by by Ibsen the romantic and and I love the field day translations so I'm just putting that out there I do know my white whale and it's I actually don't know the play but it's a novel and it was adapted into a play that was one of the most oft-performed plays at the turn of the century worldwide and I think the adaptation is now lost to us but there's a wonderful novelist named Anne Radcliffe do you know Anne Radcliffe's fiction she was more or less the creator of what we think of as Gothic fiction and we wouldn't have Mary Shelley we wouldn't have Matthew Lewis is the monk we wouldn't have Bram Stoker's Dracula we wouldn't have the Bronte sisters had it not been for Anne Radcliffe and Anne Radcliffe wrote an absolutely stunning novel I think it's my favorite novel it's called The Italian and it's about a monk who's called to confess and the first scene of the novel he enters the confessional and spills his crimes and the attending priest is so overwhelmed he dies of a heart attack and falls out of the confessional and so the mystery is launched what did our hero do exactly and the story takes us on this wild journey through convents and finally even a face-to-face meeting with the devil himself and it's a giddy over-the-top fantastic novel that was adapted into a 19th century melodrama that played the world round and it's it actually becomes a sophisticated story about redemption and and the perils of our man-made theology but it's it's a brilliant searing book and I've long thought that it cried out for some kind of theatrical form yeah Josh well I I think playwrights have been doing the same thing for like you know 300 years and that's that we see something in the world that moves or shocks or confounds us and we feel something deeply so then in our clumsy way we try and commit it to the page and we hold it up in front of 500 people sitting in the dark and we say have you felt this does this ring any bells does this bother you does this upset you does this move you and if they laugh or applaud we go oh thank god I'm human too it's not just me and I think that's kind of essentially this the simple nature of our craft is just siding with with as much specificity as we can the very particular nature of one aspect of human experience and hoping to find in that universal truth and if the classics are classics and have persisted to this day it's because the writer did that with sufficient urgency and I think when we treat the classics or revisit them we can pay far too much attention to form or language or decorum or a polite way of reproducing them in Fidelis Museum fashion and that's what can kill them in our lifetime or disengage us but if we can see that sort of writer standing there holding their beating heart up for scrutiny and say that's why this play is still with us and put the production focus or the adaptation focus or the acting focus on that aspect of the text the plays will make their own case for survival thank you Doug and that looks like that's time but I just want to say thank you for the plug Josh and you know spring's awakening there's an example of something that is a canon play and then it was done into a musical and it really really worked but anyway we're all available to answer your questions we also did Connie's servant of two masters oh yeah yeah that was and it was that it was actually wonderful to do a show in completely old school straight comedia style and watch it work like a new play yeah and that was June Loon from Minneapolis Steven Epp and Chris Bayes and this fantastic cast from Yale that was pure joy pure joy okay thank you everybody