BY LUCIA MAURO
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"One
incident–sometimes big, sometimes
small–can change your life in a moment. . . The struggle to persevere in spite of what fate brings you makes this work particularly relevant today. These ideas informed the way the adaptation was created." –Christina Calvit, Adapter/Lifeline ensemble member |
While an adapter is a writer at heart, Christina Calvit sees herself as a translator. It is her responsibility to mine the main story of a classic text, then extract its core and translate it theatrically. She also compares adapting to "a puzzle," piecing together a concise and effective larger picture.
"You have to have a sensitivity about what’s enough to include on stage and what’s too much," she says–all the while not losing sight of the central story and characters.
Calvit, resident adapter at Lifeline Theatre, has been fortunate to adapt classic works from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. These are the books she admired as a youth. Her most recent adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, runs through April 20 at Lifeline. Her choice of material has given her an artistic advantage.
"I never have to worry if my stories are significant," says Calvit, 43. "I’ve adapted the works of Hardy, Thackeray, Bronte. This is pretty solid territory."
But the epic scale and beloved quality of these books also pose challenges. For one, condensing them for live performance requires some degree of sacrificing intriguing subplots and characters; and, because most readers have a personal connection to these novels, there’s always the chance that audience’s imaginative expectations will not be met.
Calvit understands this well. And it’s one of the reasons why–since 1985 when she adapted Pride and Prejudice–she’s closely affiliated with Lifeline’s less linear approach to classic literature. The theatre fosters a more abstracted style of storytelling (in which actors often play multiple roles, including objects) that references the contrivances of theatre at the same time it immerses audiences in a solid story. Calvit explains the genesis of that creative philosophy.
"Early on," she says, "Lifeline was always trying to do the hot British play. It did more realistic productions then. But Lifeline was founded by Northwestern University graduates, and Northwestern has a strong tradition of adaptations (novels, short stories, poetry). In the mid-1980s, [former artistic director] Meryl Friedman began to move away from kitchen-sink stuff and was interested in less literal stagings.
"We decided to do Pride and Prejudice. Because we were supported critically and by our audiences, adaptations started to inform the aesthetic of everything we were doing."
Calvit, who is originally from Maryland, graduated with a BA in theatre from Northwestern University in 1981. Her focus originally had been acting. She spent several years as an actor, working with Attack Theatre and the Practical Theatre Company, where she received a Jeff Citation nomination for her performance as Simantia in Song of the Snells. But she preferred writing for the stage rather than being on stage.
"I always wanted to be an actor," Calvit acknowledges with a soft laugh, "but I was not meant to be an actor. I had the technique, and I enjoyed acting in school. But, once I started performing in professional productions for eight week runs, I discovered that I didn’t love it.
"You have to be aware of the power that makes it real every night. You have to love being alive on stage. That wasn’t happening for me. Northwestern inspired my writing. We constantly performed texts that we adapted. I loved the idea of creating something new."
Calvit has been a Lifeline Theatre ensemble member since 1988, and works full-time as an advertising copy writer. She has written over a dozen theatrical adaptations, which have been performed throughout North America. Her award-winning work includes: Jane Eyre, Pistols for Two (Joseph Jefferson Citation, 2001), The Talisman Ring (Joseph Jefferson Award, 1996), Vanity Fair, The Jungle Book, Lizard Music, The Rescuers, Purloined Poe, and Pride and Prejudice (Joseph Jefferson Citation, 1986). Pride and Prejudice was re-staged for a cast of 30 actors at Stratford, Ontario in 1999.
When we spoke, Calvit was in the harried midst of tech week for Far from the Madding Crowd–Hardy’s "Wessex"-set 1874 novel centered on the vain and ill-fated Bathsheba Everdene and the many men, including the sensitive and flawed Gabriel, who pursue her. Calvit was still making major cuts to the script.
"The artists who come to Lifeline are put through the wringer," she says with a pained smile. "I’m always revising and cutting the actors’ speeches, and it hurts me to do that. But we work very collaboratively at Lifeline, and I get ongoing feedback from the ensemble.
"We want to present the work in a way that does not confuse the audience or tell too many stories and lose focus. We’re constantly paring down the text."
The adapter, who is working closely with director Dorothy Milne (Lifeline’s artistic director), says that beginnings are the hardest part of adaptations: "There’s this burden of having to establish people. With Hardy, for example, you get introduced to Bathsheba and Gabriel through a series of incidents that happen in a short amount of time. She puts out a fire in his house; he spies on her milking a cow.
"Instead of a scene, a scene, a scene, we’ve made the introduction a non-linear progression of one movement. But it isn’t as quick as a montage. I hope it will feel like a big swoon–like the rise and swell of Hardy’s rhythms."
Reconstructing the writer’s rhythms is what Calvit believes is key to creating an effective adaptation: "You want to capture the poetry of the moment."
Calvit took a non-conventional approach to Far from the Madding Crowd, a work she sarcastically refers to as "the happy Hardy –a lot of people die, but there’s a wedding at the end!"
She didn’t want it to be a big, sprawling piece and envisioned a minimalist interpretation. After re-reading the book several times, Calvit was struck by two elements: the notion of watching and judging people–that sometimes you look at people with love or with judgment; and the characters’ inextricable connection to the earth ("they belong to the earth, and it belongs to them"). Tension arises from these two ideas (a concern for what other people think versus the non-judgmental laws of nature). And fate quietly weaves its way through the story.
"One incident–sometimes big, sometimes small–can change your life in a moment," shares Calvit. "The struggle to persevere in spite of what fate brings you makes this work particularly relevant today. These ideas informed the way the adaptation was created."
In terms of the less linear nature of the piece, Calvit points to the unique advantages of theatre: "Theatre allows you to be in this interesting state of balance between reality and un-reality. You see the brick wall; you see the lights–you’re aware of the contrivance. But at the same time you see the bones of theatre, you see the living flesh of the play.
"We’re not film. We can’t do Hardy’s world and show you the moors and beautiful skyline. You can’t do it realistically–with one scene rigidly following the next–or it starts to become melodrama. So you have to find other aspects that awaken feelings. There are no black-and-white characters; there are lots of grays. The actors play animals and the forces of nature. But as the sheep, they’re not on all fours. It’s not that they’re trying to be animals. The animals have taken on human characteristics."
Over the years, Calvit has striven to accentuate characters’ multiple dimensions. She credits Milne with bringing to Lifeline stories "full of rich emotional content — full of gray." And, as an adapter, Calvit is drawn to works that appeal to the intellect and the emotions. She aims to elicit the heart of a story and take the audience on a journey with the characters.
"I need to have characters and dialogue to hang my hat on," she notes. "I like that progression."
But Calvit warns aspiring adapters against the pitfall of relying solely on dialogue provided in the original text or the temptation to just create pretty stage pictures: "When I first started adapting, I had a tendency to pull narrative and splotch it on the page. And I would have a narrator simply tell the story. But the narrator must have a strong point of view; the narrator must change and be multidimensional. Any adaptation must have a really strong narrative presence."
When Calvit re-adapted Pride and Prejudice at Stratford, she says she learned to hone the framework of the piece through invaluable suggestions by director Jeannette Lambermont: "She made me very conscious of whose story is this–a strong beginning and end–and consistent images running throughout."
Besides being a great fan of classic literature, Calvit (and Lifeline) chooses to adapt these more familiar works because they have built-in audiences and do not require a massive struggle for rights, one of the main difficulties of adapting modern writers’ books. She does believe that "an inventive adapter could work with any material."
But has Calvit felt the pull of writing original plays?
"If I did an original work," she responds, "I would do it for Lifeline. That’s my home and where I feel safe. But I really like the idea of working with an existing text as opposed to writing from scratch."
In the future, Calvit would like to adapt the works of one of her favorite authors, E.M. Forster, and remount Vanity Fair.
The adapter expresses, more than once, her respect and admiration for playwrights and original writers in other genres. For Calvit, adapting has its own special rewards: "It’s a pleasure and a privilege to work with great material, to delve into it, to ask why is it relevant for this day and age, and to bring audiences into that world."
She considers classic writers "geniuses" with a vast understanding of the human condition. "Imagine being able to revel in those great texts," asks Calvit with visible excitement, "then transfer them to the stage–and allow audiences to experience what theatre can uniquely reveal about them?"