This past weekend, another director asked me how I approach adapting “a text like that” for the stage. This was a great question. The text she was asking about is Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, and without her having to specify I knew exactly what “like that” qualities she had in mind: Non-theatrical text, fairly dense, written by a philosopher, 300 pages long and probably a bunch of other “like that” qualities I’m not even thinking of.
How do I adapt a text “like that” for the stage?
Regarding the non-theatricality of the book.
Despite not being a play, Eichmann in Jerusalem is actually a very theatrical book. Arendt is a storyteller. Her philosophy is about storytelling and the process of creating meaning through crafting narrative. Additionally, theater is a central metaphor of the book, which is about a show trial, with an audience and was conducted in a theater and on a stage. Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial highlights the courtroom drama of the historic event. The judges, the prosecution, the defense and the accused are characters. While most dense philosophical texts are not exactly low hanging fruit for theatrical adaptation, some already have seeds germinating.
Dealing with the books’ density of language and ideas is actually the easiest quality of a text to deal with for Meta-Phys Ed. You have to figure out “how it moves”. We basically have a formula: Read the text, make a dance and layer the text on top of it. Sometimes the dance will come from a carefully chosen piece of adjacent source material that has gravity with the text, but it can also be inspired more generally by a genre that moves. In this case, we are looking at detective stories and court room drama’s.
How it moves can also be a choreographic idea such as: “the battle for the center”. For Arendt, the conflict of the trial is what should be at the center? She believes that justice demand that Eichmann, the accused, the one who acts should be at the center of the trial. The collapse of the trial was a result of the other forces forcing there way into the center. History, witnesses etc…. “The battle for the center” is a simple choreographic idea that captures an enormous theme of the book in a way that is very tangible.
The length of the book, 300 pages, presents the most challenges to adaptation, and causes me the most anxiety. In the past I have deliberately avoided the problem on editing by choosing texts short enough to be performed in their entirety. The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction is an essay by Walter Benjamin which we presented without edit. This project is deliberately about learning to adapt long texts, so I don’t really have a good answer, but I will try to elaborate on what I’m learning in a separate post.