So if you thought you haven’t heard from me in a while, you’re right: I just spent a week in the Catskill Mountains of New York State — and what a gorgeous place that is! — at what was billed as a playwriting “retreat” so that I could come to grips with a stage adaptation of a novel that I’ve been commissioned to do. Didn’t do any geocaching — no time for it — but there’s a good chance I’ll be back again to check out Slider Mountain.
I placed the word retreat in quotation marks, because it was, in fact, more like a playwriting boot camp. Up early, workshopping all morning, individual meetings with the instructor and writing time in the afternoon, discussions and performances in the evenings, with new material to be written and presented daily. Didn’t see much of the beautiful Catskills, but did get a handle on the play I’m writing. So that’s all good.
This play has stretched my skills and has been the focus of a lot of reflection. It’s an adaptation of a novel called The Pact, written (and wonderfully written, at that) by Jodi Picoult and concerning adolescent despair and suicide. I loved the book and welcomed the opportunity to work with it. I deliberately haven’t watched the made-for-Hallmark-TV movie (though the DVD is sitting on my writing table as we speak) so that I’m not influenced by it as I wrestle the characters off the page and onto the stage.
To quote my stepdaughter Anastasia at a younger and more helpless stage of her development, “it’s hard!”
Capturing an author’s intent in a completely different medium, with different constraints and a different timeframe, has proven more difficult than I’d anticipated. My instructor on the retreat, noted playwright and author Jeffrey Sweet, remarked upon hearing about my task, “You’re really wrestling with a bear here,” and indeed that is what it feels like. But the pages are appearing, so perhaps the bear is ready to take a snooze soon.
It’s taught me something about creativity, this task. About how to find one’s own voice within someone else’s voice. About how to create one’s own “take” on a story that was born in someone else’s mind and heart. And about what, exactly, constitutes a personal take on what is in essence a collaborative work.
None of it was easy. But as I finish the first draft and turn my mind to my next task, I realize that everything we do informs the next project, and the one after that, and the one after that, building up a library of richness of technique, vacabulary, and sensitivity.
The play is, indeed, the thing.
Jeannette Cézanne
Open Your Heart with Reading, Open Your Heart with Geocaching
Posted by: Something completely different, Opening the heart, growth — jcezanne
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