//“I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.”
― Flannery O’Connor
//In this final draft of The Lame Shall Enter first most of the problem areas in the script have been ironed out. The main alteration between this draft and others is that I tried to make it clear that this was being set in the mid 60’s and not in present time. I did this by making sure certain words were omitted that would not have been used in America in 1965, example, “movie theatre” was changed to going to “the movies”, and the Policeman says “sorry for the mess up” instead of “sorry for the cock up”. These simple changes helped to date the play in the past, which after much thought, worked better for the over all theme and story line, as well as for the characters. Rufus’s language and colloquialisms in the source text were written so beautifully (“minding my own bidness”) that it seemed ruthless to modernize him. Likewise the images of going to the moon and space travel were much stronger from this decade apposed to 2012. The wonderful thing about The Lame Shall Enter First is that there is no need to modernize or make the story “relevant” to the audience; these characters transpose time, and the struggle between faith versus reason is one that is universal to all audiences.
//What is O’Connor saying in her tragic story The Lame Shall Enter First? What am I saying through this adaptation?
It is easy to look at the surface level of this story and say that we are in a struggle between faith versus reason. Yes, these two characters, Rufus and Sheppard, are in conflict, but there is something greater going on here than whether or not one should believe in Christianity. A messure of a good story is that several people can read it and come out with different interpretations. Specifically in The Lame Shall Enter First, it is easy to be swayed in favour of one of these characters over the other, due to your own relgious background. But neither Sheppard or Rufus are good examples of their own world view. Sheppard is obsessed with “saving” Rufus from his troubled background. He makes him his pet project, and in doing so completley ignores his own son’s needs and emotional distress over the death of his mother. Sheppard’s mission in saving Rufus has blinded him from what is truley important, and it takes his mission to fail, and his own son to die, until he realizes what he’s done. Rufus believes in God and the Bible but would not call himself a Christian, for Rufus interprets the Bible to mean that he will go to hell beacuse of his bad behaviour. Rufus impresses his own faith onto Sheppard’s son Norton, whom he believes will go to heaven because he isn’t as bad as Rufus. Rufus is in clear conflict with Sheppard’s mission of salvation, because Rufus believes that only Jesus will save him, and this will only happen once Rufus repents. Both of these characters have got it wrong in the end. Their mission’s will fail, because neither of them have pure motives or hearts. Sheppard believes that Rufus can only be saved through reason, and in trying to prove this abandones his own son, while Rufus believes no one can be saved except through Jesus, but instead of asking for that salvation he continues to steal. The only character here who has a pure heart is Norton, and sadly he is caught in the middle of this feud. So yes, we have a story about faith versus reason, but it is not the answer to that timeless struggle that is the point, it is the motivation one has behind those two world views.
//After having a staged reading of our adapted plays, I am able to see the problem areas in my script more clearly. Having the words brought to life gives new insight into the script, and shows areas where there might be flaws in the dialogue and flow of the story. One issue brought to light through these readings was the development of the Policeman character. This character shows up randomly through out the source text, but his presence is not on the page long enough to get a clear idea of who this man is. In my adaptation of The Lame Shall Enter First, the Policeman holds a more prominent role, and thus needed to be a more fleshed out and honest character. What are the motives behind this Policeman? Is he a man who has been on the job too long and sees his work as simply one more case, or, one more annoyance into his day? Or is he a man striving for justice and truth, and focused on finding the culprit no matter what the cost? I am swayed to write a character more like the latter, because a man with a strong intention is always more interesting on stage than a man with none. This also corresponds with the Policeman’s scenes, where he is continually bringing Rufus into the Police station for questioning, never giving up pursuit of this 14 year old boy. The Policeman believes without a shadow of a doubt that Rufus is not innocent, and is to blame for all break-ins in the town. The challenge here is to a write a character who is not just the face of “justice”, or a stereotypical American cop, but a man who also has a motivation, no matter how few his lines are.
The other challenge I’ve found through the staged reading of my play is that of the ending. In the last scene of the play we see Rufus and Sheppard in the Police station. Rufus tells Sheppard that he got caught on purpose just so he could show Sheppard that he was unable to “save” him. At the same time we have a split in the action on the stage. Norton is on the other side, looking through the telescope in the attic. He see’s his mother in the moon, which he perceives as Heaven, and calls for his father to come take a look. The audience knows however that Sheppard is not in the house, he’s with Rufus, yet again dealing with issues that do not concern his own son. Norton is so convinced that he has seen his mother in the moon that he wants to join her there. In the source text Norton takes a rope, ties it to a beam in the attic, and hangs him self, so him and his mother can finally be together. In my first draft of the play, I had written it this way. This does produce some issues. One: Norton must leave the stage to get a rope, which slows the action of the play. And two: because theatre is a visual medium, and everything happens on stage with the audience in participation, pretending to hang a child would likely cause some audience members to become less than pleased, even though I had plans to quickly fade to black before Norton went through with the deed. But I do not want people walking away from my play focusing on the way that Norton died, and that it was too “gruesome” or “gritty” for normal theatre goers. Norton dying is important to the plot of the play, but the way that he dies is not the point. In literature, having a child hang themselves is more acceptable to the reader, because it happens in their own imagination, not right in front of them. To fix this I changed the way Norton ends his life. Now he is looking out the window waving at his mother in the moon, but instead of hanging himself, Norton leaps out the window to be with her. This is a much less graphic way of showing Norton’s demise, but it also gets across the same meaning, that Norton was focussed on joining his mother in the sky.
//“It is probably true, in general terms, that adaptation forms a substantial part of what is encompassed in dramaturgy, and has always done so, as it is also true that any active Script-maker is also a Dramaturge.” -Graham Ley.
Anyone who choses to adapt something from one medium to the other, will encounter problems that need dramaturgical skills to help solve it. Adapters use forms of dramaturgy in their work constantly, from researching the source text thoroughly, to exploring the world of the play in new settings that they are being adapted for. I will be studying the connections between Adapter and Dramaturge in reference to two plays, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and Emil Sher’s Mourning Dove. Though on first glance, these plays seem not to have much in common, (different themes, stories, eras, countries) they are linked through the fact that both Miller and Sher are adapting famous historical court cases for the stage, and in doing this, they are using their dramaturgical skills to accomplish it.
Key points to focus on:
Research of historical documents
Troubleshooting issues, putting the impossible on the stage
choosing things to adapt due to relevancy in our current time