ADAPTATION

Of our assignments, I think I am most apprehensive about writing an adaptation, primarily for fear of being unoriginal. As with any form of art, being original is a challenge because it often seems that everything has been done before.

Reading Eurydice calmed some of my apprehensions, though, because of the beauty, craft, and originality with which Ruhl makes the story of Eurydice her own. An idea may not be original, but the execution of an idea and the added personal style/vision/artifice of the author have the power to make the finished piece original.

All I could think as I read through Eurydice was what a phenomenal job Ruhl did in taking a Greek myth and making it timeless, making it comprehensible to any time and any place. I think she did this best through both the use of somewhat fanatical, fantastical setting and the nonsense words/speech exchanges between characters that somehow made the uttermost sense.

I didn’t get into the play/characters/story at first and wasn’t sure what to think of the interactions between Eurydice and Orpheus—I didn’t know whether they were believable enough. But the farther I read along, I came to love the slightly off-kilter feel of the characters and what they said. In fact, it is this very nature of the play, the strange words, that made the play make so much sense to me.

It all became more powerful to me once Eurydice was in the underworld, which perhaps Ruhl did on purpose. Ruhl constructed her story in such a way that it seems like everything before the underworld is the dream-world, the unreal, while the underworld and all the interactions therein are actually reality.

What I learned about adaptations is that art is about collaboration. The individual artist does her part by putting stories into words, paint, lead, song, etc. but without all of the people around her, the environment she is surrounded by, she wouldn’t have anything to write about, nothing for which to use her words.

What I learned about Dialogues

Dialogues, like monologues, and full plays, and short stories, and long stories, and any creative work, for that matter, come in many shapes and styles. They are between coworkers, lovers, cheaters, family members, friends—they are between any two people that could feasibly by talking to one another. Now, these parameters, having two people talking to each other, sound simple enough; however, they are not enough. Dialogues need to advance character development, help the storyline progress, and also be interesting enough to keep an audience engaged. These are no small tasks.

The dialogues we read for today varied from being very raw and clipped, to clever, to heartbreaking, to ironic. Orphans and Death of a Salesman also presented the reader with speech, values, and beliefs from another time, an additional challenge in making the interactions sound authentic and convincing. Though I have no idea what these two plays are about and no context to set the given dialogues in, I think it speaks to the success of the authors that they characters are clearly speaking in a time other than the present.

Contrarily, the dialogue in Henry IV, which I know was written centuries ago, depicts rivalry and competition, aspects of human nature that are timeless. This is a good example of yet another challenge: creating something that can withstand the test of time. This challenge goes back to my comments about truth and honesty from the monologue readings; there are some aspects of human nature that have been and continue to be universally understandable. Such universals seem to be very useful fodder for storytelling, since the ideas are more likely to reach a broader audience. Ideas like the need to sustain oneself, as in Death of a Salesman, or the challenges of relationship, as in Closer and Angels in America.

Something that I noticed when reading the dialogue in Closer is that dialogue in plays comes off differently than in films. When I saw the movie Closer, there was something about the dialogue that was almost strange to me, almost a little off. When reading it in play form, something about it just works a little better. Maybe that is not always the case with plays verses movies, but it intrigued me in regards to my experience of Closer.

Also in Closer, I really like the parallel scenes that overlap; it adds in immense poignancy to the events as they occur simultaneously, as the lovers leave their current lovers.

Overall, reading these dialogues brought to mind the need for the people to sound believable and the discourse between them to sound natural.