Adapting Flannery O’Connor’s “The Lame Shall Enter First” is a challenge that I take on heartily. But there are issues arising left and right that force me to step back, take a look at the project, and decide how to proceed. These issues have to deal with staging, scene sequences, and time.
“The Lame Shall Enter First” is written in a rather familiar story arch. One that works perfectly for a short story, but for a play, it can seem tiresome and rather boring. The scenes are long, and descriptive, and because it is meant to be read and not acted, the characters are easily transported from location to location. Writing it for the stage we do not have this luxury. All ready we have a problem of too many scenes; cuts need to happen. Solution? I created one setting for many of the scenes to take place at. This setting did not appear in the original text, but for the overall function of this play, it works best to have the audience guided back there, to watch the story unfold. This setting I created was an interrogation room, all ready this brings up a lot of imagery and atmosphere to work from. Another setting I created for the shape of the play was the kitchen, a sort of central communal meeting area for a family. Lastly, I kept the original setting of an attic. These three rooms will set the drama for our play. Now we have the bare bones.
Because this “short story” is relatively long, some scenes needed to be cut. This required reading the text and deciphering what plots lines could be dropped with still maintaining the overall theme of the play. There are several scenes in the original that I felt acted as “background information”, things to happen before the actual action of the play. And because of this, I cut them, hoping that the audience will understand the characters through their dialogue as apposed to adding a scene merely for exposition. There is also a story line about one of the character’s physical deformities, which I did not entirely take out, but modified, so that a little bit of this scene is separated into all the scenes. Thus, still getting a glimpse into this character’s struggle.
Lastly I have the issue with time; what decade to set this play in. In the original it is set in the early 60’s, and this is clear from the language of all characters. Do I keep it in the 60’s, or try to modernize it for our time? I have tried the latter. This has especially been difficult for the character “Rufus”, who is a 14 year old boy grown up living on the streets. O’Connor’s language is so fitting for him it seems a shame to change all of his dialogue, or to modernize him for 2012. I have done my best to keep him genuine. How would Rufus sound if he had grown up in small town America, without much money, or education? He wouldn’t sound as hard as those same kids growing up in a metropolises, his language would definitely be altered by the culture of his times. Hopefully I have made his character as honest sounding as he can be.
The first draft of “The Lame Shall Enter First” is finished. But I’m sure its revision and edits will bring about more challenges to overcome. “Plays are not written, but rewritten.”