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But is it Original?
What is an adaptation
anyway? Is it merely translating from one medium to
another, the way one might translate from one language
 to
another? Or is it creating something entirely new, something
original?
These were the kinds of questions I had when I took
on the task of adapting Willa Cather's "A Wagner Matinee,"
a project I initiated primarily as an exercise in form.
Here was a piece of work I could do to distract myself
from the novel I was struggling to write. I had long
admired this story and thought it would be fun to try
my hand at radio drama. I was excited by the prospect
of incorporating layered sounds and silences, in the
possibilities of exploring dramatic structure without
having to consider the visual aspect. I knew that there
was a long tradition of writers in Britain, writers
I admired like Angela Carter, who had cut their teeth
on radio drama. And so I commenced.
The first drafts, however,
were disappointing. They were lifeless, inert. What
was the problem? The problem, I began to dimly understand,
was that I was being too faithful to the story. The
last bit didn't work at all, it was in fact anticlimactic,
until I gave myself license to create something that
wasn't there, to add scenes and characters which had
not been developed in the story. The story itself was
too interior to work as a play-the play had to be created.
I had to go beyond the story to my imagination of the
story-this felt like a huge risk because I so admire
Cather and I didn't want to stray too far from her words
or the architecture
of the story. And yet it was only when I began to play
with the possibilities inherent in the story that the
radio play began to move in and take on life.
A radio play by definition
is drama, not narration. So I had to decide which pieces
of narration to keep, which to dramatize. I realized
in the process that there could be no official or right
adaptation, only my own adaptation, my take on the story.
A writer has to have a point of view in order to select
and emphasize; one simply can't stay on the fence. So
I tried to stay true to the characters' voices, but
to amplify them. I gave Clark's landlady more lines.
I created Howard, and tried to make him more three dimensional
than he may seem in the story. I created the slip-in
scene in the middle of the concert in order to contrast
Georgiana's two lives. And I created a scene at the
end of the play so that Clarke's feelings for his aunt
could be played out, rather than recounted.
This kind of creative work is, I think, ideally suited
to student writers. Students can learn to make artistic
decisions about character development, foregrounding,
scene development, dramatic tension, counterpoint and
tonality without having to face the sheer terror of
a blank page, the fear of having to be novel, or "original."
The beauty of the process is that students will be original,
they won't be able to help it. Any filtering, observing,
creating self has his/her own unique understanding of
a story. There are wonderful possibilities awaiting
student writers in the dynamic between the story and
their adaptation of it.
Sara Baker is a novelist, short story writer and
dramatist. Her dramatization of Willa Cather's "A
Wagner Matinee" can be heard on Windows Media on
this web site.
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