Online Performing Arts Education on Adapting Material
“I was a great admirer of the novel Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime,” says Elizabeth Bradley. “And at one point, I thought it would be a great idea to teach a course on adaptation. And if I had ever done such a thing, and have not done so yet, I would probably have used that novel as an example of how impossible it actually is to translate the core ethos of a beautifully constructed novel to the stage.”
Well, how wrong could I possibly have been? Because watching Marianne Elliott’s adaptation of Curious Incident in the Nighttime, I sat there and thought, I mean, I’m ready to fall in love with the theater all over again. Because this kind of enlivened theatrical imagination, if you can do this, the theater can do anything. So just when you think, “no,” somebody comes along and says, “yes,” and brilliantly.
It was a different kind of challenge. Of course, that is written in letter form. I think it’s called an epistolary novel. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a letter to his son about the reality of living his life as a Black male in America and as a young Black male in America—an important concept in performing arts education.
And the way the adaptation was handled was through a rotating cast of readers, both men and women who tackled sections of the scored book. By scored, I mean the original music composition that was created to accompany the read prose text created another whole piece of emotional access leverage if you will. You felt like you were falling into the words via the music, in a way that you couldn’t really have done sitting at home reading it, no matter how profound that experience was. And I would argue that both have value in the performing arts.
