How to Adapt Anything Into Anything

The absolute best movie adaptation of one of Shakespeare's works is, bar none, no doubt, gainsay-me-and-I'll-smack-you-in-the-mouth certain, Akira Kurosawa's Ran.

I'm certain there will be some Branagh-sniffers out there who will whine about his Henry V or (god forbid) his Hamlet, but there are always mouth-breathing philistines in any debate, no matter how obvious the outcome. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Branagh, but everyone knows the list of Best Shakespeare Movies goes like this:

1) Ran
2) Throne of Blood
3) Olivier's Henry V
4) MacKellan's Richard III
5) Olivier's Richard III
6) Scotland, PA
7) West Side Story
8) 10 Things I Hate About You
9) Strange Brew (It's an adaptation of Hamlet -- look it up.)
10) Anything by Kenneth Branagh. Except Hamlet. Because that sucked.

Well, everybody knows that, of course. But what a lot of people don't get is why Ran is so freaking fantastic, so incredibly successful in capturing the essence of King Lear on film. Well, here's why:

Because the whole damn thing is in Japanese. And therefore doesn't contain a lick of Shakespeare's dialogue.

(This is known in some circles as the "Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet would have been an awesome silent movie" rule.)

The mistake most people make when adapting something from one medium to another is that they base the adaptation on the surface elements of the original work; the shiny-pretties that strike a casual reader/viewer/audience member as "cool". The problem is, what works in one medium seldom works in another.

Shakespeare is a prime example. As I noted in First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the English Majors, blank verse works like gangbusters on stage. Don't know why, but it does. It soars, it flies, it takes off like a giant goddamn bird if you deliver it right. On screen? On the page? Blechy-blechitty-blech-blech. Utter crap.

Similarly, giant explosions (preferably with the hero and his sidekick jumping to safety in slow motion in front of them) work wonderfully on screen. On stage? On the page? Yeah, not so much.

Which is why Kurosawa's decision to jettison all the dialogue in King Lear was key to making his film so damn brilliant. He turns the daughters into sons! Regan and Goneril are one guy! There's a freaky buddhist nun that you're all, like, "What the fuck?" about, but by god, it's LEAR. It's more LEAR than any other LEAR has ever been. The essence of the play is there, in spades.

"That's right, bitches! Hundreds of color coded samurai! Giant burning castle! It's all in the first folio -- look it up!"

Watching Ran won't tell you a thing about how to stage Lear, or how to read a particular line in the play, but you will get what that play is about. You will get King Lear. And it's just a flat-out amazing movie.

So, for all those movie execs eying Green Lantern and World of Warcraft and salivating, I present the Three Steps To Adapting Anything to Anything:

1) Determine the Essential Thing That Makes the Original Awesome

In other words, figure out What it does. What sets this work of art apart from every other... why this work was worth creating in the first place. It very seldom has much to do with the surface things that most people would notice about the work at first glance. What makes it fun? What makes it compelling? What makes it moving? Star Wars isn't about lightsabers and exploding Death Stars. MacBeth isn't about witches and swordfights. Moby Dick isn't about a goddamn whale.

As we all know, the Essential Thing That Made The Golden Compass Awesome was the nuanced allegorical examination of religion from a humanist standpoint, standing in opposition to C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narn--BEARS! BEARSBEARSBEARS!!! BEARS IN ARMOR! DURRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!

2) Determine how the effect was originally created.

In other words, figure out How it does it. Star Wars isn't about lightsabers and exploding Death Stars, but those were important means to an end. To adapt a movie, you have to understand cinematic structure and how camera angles can build tension. To adapt a play, you have to understand how language works in a live space. You don't have to be able to do what the creator did in their original medium, but you have to be able to see the wires that made Peter Pan fly.

3) Use the tools of your own medium to achieve the same effect.

In other words, Do what it did, but not in the same way. Use your mastery of your own chosen medium to create the same artistic effect with the things that work in your medium. Don't try and re-create the old work in the new medium... you're not going to make a movie of Huckleberry Finn that's a better novel than the original one was. But you can make a great movie out of it.

Every bad adaptation that's ever been made can be traced to a failure in one of these three areas, and every great adaptation has hit on all three. Bear this in mind as you go forth to create.

Remember: Only you can prevent... whatever the hell this was.

Oh, and if you meet Uwe Boll on a road? Kill him. Please.

-- The Prolix Wag
This is why I only read The Smurfs in the original French.

How to Have the Perfect Wedding

Okay, first off, watch this. If you don't find yourself more than a little bit giddy afterwards, email me and I'll send you a quarter so you can buy yourself a soul:



There's an entire subgenre of human interest stories that involve Weird Weddings. You know, when you tune in on your local news, and they play some footage of the happy couple saying their vows in a hot air balloon/while bungie jumping/naked while the anchors cluck their tongues and laugh at just how weird people can be. Because, you know, they're not doing the normal thing and dressing in big pouffy dresses and tuxedoes and doing that same little high school graduation step down the aisle that no one can ever get quite right.

You know what? Fuck them.

Let us consider, for a moment, what a wedding is for. A wedding doesn't make two people married; that gets done down at the county courthouse. No, a wedding defines a marriage for the community. It says who the couple is, and who they will be as a married couple, to their family and friends.

And my advice is, if you're defining what your marriage is going to be, be honest.

You may mock, but the divorce rate among couples who get married wearing forehead prostheses is shockingly low.

Some things to think about if you're planning your wedding:

1) A marriage ceremony is theatre, and you are not the audience.

The wedding ceremony is not for you. It's for the people you invite, so they can see you getting married. The reception is not for you. It's for the people you invite, to thank them for coming.

The honeymoon? That's for you. Get the hell out of the reception as soon as possible and get going.

Trust me: approach the ceremony as theatre, and things will go well. If you can involve someone who does theatre for a living in the planning (clergy are good; actors and directors are best), things will go even better.

If you can do what I did and marry a stage manager? Best of all possible worlds.

2) Theatre isn't about sets or costumes or the biggest venue. It's about creating a truthful, expressive moment.

More is not better. Our wedding was stupid simple and stupid inexpensive, and people have consistently said it was one of the most (if not the most) affecting and beautiful ceremonies they'd ever been to. Of course, we're both theatre folks, so we knew what we were doing, but intention counts for a lot. If you make your wedding about showing how much stuff you've got, well, that's how you're choosing to define your marriage. Good luck with that.

3) Don't spend money. Spend forethought and effort.

See the video above. As another example, my wife and I fought for two days running about our vows. I mean fought. Tearful, wrenching, things-being-thrown arguments. But the vows were important to us, and by god, we got some pretty great ones.

By putting thought and effort into the wedding ceremony, you're putting thought and effort into what you want your marriage to be.

Oh, but ladies? I'm not talking about picking out the flower arrangements. If your guy is into that, more power to him, but if he isn't, don't torture him. You know what you want; don't pretend you want to have an actual discussion about it.

4) Require audience participation.

Before we said our vows, we made everyone except us raise their right hand and promise to support our marriage; to treat us like a married couple from that moment on. It was a wonderful moment... and although I haven't had to remind anyone of that promise yet, I'm glad it's there.

Plus, people love that shit. Especially grandmothers.

By god, if you're going to get married in the rubber Admiral Akbar mask by a Slave Leia...

...then you'd better damn well make grandma wear the stupid plastic Amidala hair.

5) Get somebody else to do the grunt work.

A lot of rehearsing for a play is drumming your lines and blocking into your body so that you don't have to think about any of it during performance; so that you're free to play the thing. Part of your planning and forethought should be centered around making sure that you have as little to think about as possible on the day of the ceremony. So that when you say your vows, you can say them with all your being.

That means probably means rehearsing some. But it mostly means getting your hands on someone else to run the ceremony, and then letting them do it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch that video again. That wasn't my wedding, but it sure as hell was theirs, and it gives me joy that they found each other, and that I found mine.

-- The Prolix Wag
I'm never wrong. She's just more right.

Me and My Mood Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Part 4

Wherein we try to discuss depression in a way that isn't depressing.

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

A couple years ago, I saw a truly stellar production of Sarah Kane's play Crave at Signature Theater in Arlington. It was acted with tremendous skill and passion by all involved, and the design and direction were impeccable.

For those of you not familiar with the play, it involves four nameless characters talking to themselves, the audience and each other in a largely plotless exploration of the human psyche. It's written with no small measure of poetic and lyrical skill. Kane, who struggled with severe depression for many years before killing herself at the age of 28, makes depression manifest theatrically through the play. For the hour-or-so running time, you really get what it is to be depressed, to deal with a depressed person, to be in the presence of depression. Speaking as someone who's dealt with depression, I've never seen a more accurate portrayal.

Which is why it's the worst play ever written.

Here's the thing: depression is stupid. Depression is boring. Depression is incredibly annoying.

Depression is incredibly difficult to depict artistically because, if you really get it right, your audience is going to want to punch your depressed character in the face after about five minutes. And not in the good, gee-I'm-really-mad-at-Willy-Loman-for-being-such-a-schmuck kind of way. No, I mean they'll really, truly want to punch the characters in the face. They'll have difficulty staying in their seats and not doing just that. Just like, if you're ever around a depressed person for more than five minutes in real life, you'll start looking around for heavy objects to bludgeon them with.

Crave does for depression what Irréversible did for rape -- which is to say, it gives you way too goddamn much of it. If Kane had managed to give you maybe two minutes of that pure, mainline shot of what it is to be depressed, and then written an actual play around it, she would have had something pretty brilliant. Instead, she barfs it out onstage and makes the audience wallow in it. Because, like all depressives (myself included), she was addicted to the deliciousness of her own misery.

Actor John Lescault fondles the pulverized hopes and dreams of the Signature Theater audience.

The funny thing is, a lot of the time when you're depressed, you can see how annoying you are; you can see how little sense your own emotional state makes, how out of step it is with the reality of your life.

But you can't help it.

For me, the thing that's horrifying about depression isn't just that it feels like you're in the grip of some evil, alien force that distorts the entire world... it's that the evil, alien force is you. It's your own brain. Your own personality.

And on some level, it feels... well, not good, but... yours. It's addictive, in the way that teenagers find their own overblown emotional drama way more interesting than anyone else ever could.

That's it, actually -- you want to know what it's like to be depressed? Imagine all the emo parts of your teen years, then multiply them by ten. Oh, and you can't get out of bed.

WHYYYYYYYYYYY?!?

Note that I said can't get out of bed, not won't. There were mornings, back before I got treatment, when I wanted nothing more than to be able to roll over enough so that I would fall out of bed on to the floor, never mind actually being able to get up to do anything. And while getting up would have been about as hard as bench pressing three or four tons, I felt incredibly guilty, because all that was keeping me in bed were feelings. Like, the feelings that make it hard to get up on a Monday morning... but turned up to 1000.

I could go on, but... well, I don't want to be Sarah Kane. It's bad enough they keep rewarding her for killing herself by producing her plays. Suffice to say that depression sucks, in the way that having your collarbone broken "hurts". You really can't describe it much better than that, but the word doesn't quite do it justice. Thank god for Wellbutrin.

I'd just like to state once more for the record that the folks I saw do Crave at Signature did an incredible job with it. It's just that the play itself is a theatrical abortion.

Girls, girls... you're both... incredibly depressing.

Next time, the politics of mental illness, or "Why I'm Telling You All This Crap".

-- The Prolix Wag
I have an obligation to share my brilliance. It's like noblesse oblige, only a little less noblesse.

Me and My Mood Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Part 2

Part 1 is here.

Let us begin Part 2 with Aristotle.

And what a huge dick he was.

Father of philosophy, great uncle of rhetoric, second cousin of math, huge dick. Huuuuuuuuge.

Why was Aristotle such a huge dick? Well, first and foremost, he was pretty much the inventor of dramatic criticism. Which subsequently led to the invention of drama critics. So, q.e.d.

It also led to the invention of the Neoclassical Unities, which is directly responsible for me having to read Racine's Phaedra in college. Which, as we all know, is The Worst Play Ever Written, Except For Sara Kane's Crave.

"Oh girl, hold on! Are those shoes on sale?"
"I have no idea, but thank god we're not doing Crave."

He also thought women were a lower form of life who could never be fully human, but some of our finest Supreme Court Justices believe the same thing, so let's just chalk that up as "controversial". No, the thing that made him a truly huge dick is the only thing I remember from my dabblings with philosophy in undergrad, which is drawing a big line from his name to "Mind/Body Dichotomy in Western Thought" in my notes.

See, we're stuck with this deep-seated belief that the mind, the Self, that-which-you-think-of-as-"me", is fundamentally separate from the body. Which, as anyone who's ever had to deal with any kind of neurochemical imbalance knows, is complete and utter bullshit.

The usual argument for their separation goes something like this: "You are yourself. Would you still be yourself if I cut off your arm? What about your leg? What about all your arms and legs? So, wouldn't you still be yourself without your body?"

Problem is, a brain is not a leg. Heck, a pancreas is not a leg. We cannot have a direct experience of what it is to be without a body, which is why the concept of life after death is exceedingly hard to debate... but we can have an experience of what it is to be without a self.

Let me turn that argument around: "You are yourself. Would you still be yourself if I cut out that part of you that feels happiness? What about the part of you that thinks? What about everything that you think of as consciousness? Would you still be yourself without a mind?"

And if you don't think we can do any of that, you've never met anyone that's had major depression. Much less a lobotomy.

"Oh, McMurphy! If your pneuma and your soma were not indissoluble, this would totally be a depressing ending!"

We don't like to think about this idea too much, because it has certain disturbing metaphysical implications (if "Self" is an expression of "Body", and "Body" can end... well, let's not go there), but it bears talking about because it has direct bearing on how we think about mental illness. Because "mental illness" is a panoply of diseases and injuries that attack the parts of our body (mainly the brain, but also the endocrine system) that create "self", and therefore are diseases and injuries that attack the "self".

Which is a bitch and a half, believe me.

One of the hardest things to wrap your head around as someone who has a mental illness is that there are thoughts and behaviors "you" are not responsible for... even though "you" are the one feeling and doing them. But it's vital that you do, because otherwise you spend all your time blaming yourself and feeling guilty for things you can't possibly control. I mean, if I break my leg, do I feel guilty about the fact that I suddenly can't walk without crutches? Heck, no. But I've had mornings when I could not -- and I mean could not -- get out of bed because of what was happening chemically in my brain. And blaming myself or feeling guilty about that wasn't just wrong-headed, it was incredibly counterproductive. It kept me from getting treatment for a long while.

The brain is an organ, like any other, and like all the other organs, it can break. When it breaks, it stops working... and that lack of function can make you sick, or even kill you. It's a very counterintuitive idea, but one that makes mental illness something you can treat just like any other injury or disease, instead of a fundamental fault in someone's being. And if you want to see the consequences of treating it one way instead of another, just look at the US Army. Treat PTSD like a brain injury? You get treatment for your soldiers. Treat it like a personality flaw? You get suicides, murders, and a generation of veterans that hate the service that betrayed them.

And if you've ever known anyone who's committed suicide due to a mental illness, it's a lot more comforting to think that they died of a disease, than that they chose to do it.

Next up, what "manic" means to me, or: "It's like there's a party in my pants... in my head!"

-- The Prolix Wag
The Gold Standard of Deviation.

First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All The English Majors

I am writing today to speak out against a grave injustice that has been done to the memory and works of the greatest English dramatist who ever lived, William Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare: Masturbating? Quite possibly. Angry? Definitely.

Why is Shakespeare so pissed off? What has he got to complain about? His plays are performed more often than anybody else's, his (admittedly genius-level) skills as a playwright are constantly being exaggerated, and kids are forced to read his plays in school pretty much constantly from the seventh grade on. What's the problem?

The problem is that kids are forced to read his plays, at all. We teach Shakespeare, at least in this country, primarily as "dramatic literature". His plays are things to be read in book form, perhaps out loud if you're lucky, in an English class (or, god love 'em, a "Language Arts" class), taught by an English teacher, as fine examples of English literature.

At this point, I'd like to warn any English Teachers, Performance Studies Majors, and/or weak-constitutioned Dramaturgs that I'm going to officially let the cat out of the bag:

Shakespeare isn't literature.

"What can you mean?" they gasp. "His words are written! In English! In such a way as they can be read! That makes it literature! And thus part of our departmental budget!"

Here's the thing: his plays are most emphatically NOT written in English, or in any other language. His scripts are. And his scripts are but a means to an end. Scripts are technical tools used to make theatre. They are blueprints, not the buildings themselves.

Walking in to an English class and being handed a script to analyze (any script, really) is a lot like walking in to a class about how to sit in a chair and being handed a sheet of Ikea instructions.

The famous "Lost Page" from the First Folio. Note that the first four illustrations all picture men having sex with furniture, showing that Shakespeare's use of bawdy humor was not limited to puns. Or living things.

Some of Handel's finer works are written down on paper, with English words on them. Do we study those in English classes? Hell, no. If you tried, the music department would riot in the halls. Crack teams of Madrigal Singers would rappel into the English Teachers' Lounge, chucking antipersonnel grenades and diminished sevenths as they went. Or perhaps not... although it would be totally awesome if they did. In any case, you'd have an uproar on your hands, because guess what? Music is not meant to be read from the page. Music doesn't exist on the page.

So why do we let English teachers teach Shakespeare? Don't get me wrong, I love English teachers. I've known some damn good ones in my time, many of whom made herculean efforts to make Shakespeare "come alive" for their students. But they have a fundamentally different worldview and skill set from Drama teachers. Give Shakespeare to those Drama teachers, and they wouldn't have to make herculean efforts to make it "come alive", because it would already be alive.

Artist's rendering of what an English Teacher would look like if liberated from having to teach Drama.

Look, I'm a professional classical actor and playwright. The play I'm writing right now is in blank verse. I love verse on stage. But I hate reading verse plays, including Shakespeare's, unless it's in the course of putting one of those plays on stage. Because blank verse is on the page. It works on stage... I don't quite know why, but it does. But on the page? zzzzzzzZZZ...

Quick side note to those of you who are frothing at your keyboard, ready to chime in about how you "LOVE to read Shakespeare". One of the following applies:

a) You're lying.
b) You're a pretentious twit.
c) You're actually enjoying the performance you're making up in your head.
d) You're only reading the dirty parts.
e) All of the above.

Replies from Performance Studies majors will be deleted as a matter of course, as is proper in the eyes of the Lord. Unclean! Uncleeeeeen!!!

-- The Prolix Wag
Because I'm RIGHT. What's your excuse?