I haven't found a ton of information about adapting a book into a play, so I figured I'd post this. At some point- not now, but maybe in the near future- I'm considering adapting my historical novel for the stage. The plot is a bit slow-moving and takes a bit of time to get off the ground, and there's not a ton of action in the first half either. I understand that not every single scene will make it into the script, and I'm fine with that. It's the important ones that count. If anyone has any advice or suggestions I'd love to hear them.
Adapting novel to stage
- Thread starter Some Lonely Scorpio
- Start date
My very simple (perhaps overly simple) advice: know your medium. There are many mediums for telling a story. You just need to know the strengths and limitations each medium has. A story is still a story. If the story has merit, it will work in (almost) any medium. With rare exceptions, there are some stories that simply can't ever make the leap from one medium to another. But I will assume your story is NOT one of those rare and un-leapable stories, and that your story is perfectly ambidextrous and can make that leap just fine. Concentrate on the strengths of the stageplay medium, and be very cautious with its weaknesses.
The three most basic mediums are Novels, and then Stage Plays, and then Screen Plays. Here are the super-simplified rundowns of those three:
NOVELS: A form of storytelling accomplished mostly via the internal thoughts and observations and reflections of the characters. Even those novels told via the limited omniscient third person narrator will sometimes get right into the head of a given character. There can be a lot of silence and stillness in a novel with lots of paragraphs dedicated to the meandering backstory regarding such things as the 10,000 year history of the geologic formation of a mountain range, or the dark legacy of a silver medallion handed down for five generations. These very silent pauses in a novel which take the time to explain stuff in excruciating detail don't always translate well to the screen or the stage (but can in rare instances). Internal thoughts of characters likewise don't always translate well to screen or stage. And as a general rule, voice-over narration in a film or a play is usually (but not always) looked down upon by critics as lazy cinema/stagecraft by a clueless writer and director. But you can work with these more difficult elements and get the gist in via other story-telling techniques.
STAGE PLAYS: A form of storytelling accomplished mostly via grand speeches and intense verbal exchanges between characters. And a three-act structure is preferable. Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, and toss in a few monologues from time to time. Stage plays are VERY dialogue-heavy creatures. Action can certainly be done on the live stage, but flying through the air like Peter Pan or even like Superman (or even like Spider-Man, which caused a terrible injury to one Broadway actor a year or so ago when "Spider-Man" debuted on stage in New York) can get problematic. Aside from having to suspend actors on cables to help them fly, sword fights can certainly be done, but huge Lord of the Rings battle scenes are not so easy. Extremes of weather can also be super difficult (tornadoes and hurricanes) if the weather itself has to perform a specific action (like hurtling the Kansas farmhouse of Dorothy Gale up into the sky and transporting her to the Land of Oz). Fire can also be very problematic on stage, including and especially forest fires and volcanoes. Live animals can be almost impossible and will always be super expensive because you will have ASPCA representatives there to make sure the animal is being treated right, so employing mechanical puppet animals or else humans costumed as the animals is always preferable. (The stage play "War Horse" which Steven Spielberg adapted into a film had mechanical puppet animals in the stage play version, as well as people dressed as animals.) And learn the three-act structure! Some plays are told in five acts, but those are rare and very complicated to pull off. And one-act plays are so concise that you haven't a lot of room for either a huge cast of characters, nor very much in-depth stuff. If you do not know how to recognize and analyze the proper three acts, you MUST learn about it.
SCREENPLAYS: A form of storytelling told mostly through actions and movement. And a three-act structure is preferable. Movies must move. Go from Point A to Point B. Travel down the road to get to the goal. Take the MacGuffin to its intended destination. Move, move, move. The really difficult part of adapting a story to the screen is that the two key hallmarks of novels (internal thoughts), and stage plays (grand speeches and dialogue-heavy scenes), are considered anathema to cinema. Voice-overs for internal thoughts are deemed super lazy in cinema. And grand speeches are disregarded as amateurish and too on-the-nose. Now you can sometimes get away with those storytelling conventions in a movie, but unless you somehow pull it off in a way that's unique, it's hard to avoid the criticism from the army of film snobs out there. They want to see characters in action, not engaged in lengthy discussions about the desire to somehow eventually get around to the action. They want to see the wordless look of pain and anguish on an actor's face, not hear the actor talk about how pained and anguished he is. And learn the three-act structure! Films MUST have structure and can't wander around free-form the way a novel can.
The three most basic mediums are Novels, and then Stage Plays, and then Screen Plays. Here are the super-simplified rundowns of those three:
NOVELS: A form of storytelling accomplished mostly via the internal thoughts and observations and reflections of the characters. Even those novels told via the limited omniscient third person narrator will sometimes get right into the head of a given character. There can be a lot of silence and stillness in a novel with lots of paragraphs dedicated to the meandering backstory regarding such things as the 10,000 year history of the geologic formation of a mountain range, or the dark legacy of a silver medallion handed down for five generations. These very silent pauses in a novel which take the time to explain stuff in excruciating detail don't always translate well to the screen or the stage (but can in rare instances). Internal thoughts of characters likewise don't always translate well to screen or stage. And as a general rule, voice-over narration in a film or a play is usually (but not always) looked down upon by critics as lazy cinema/stagecraft by a clueless writer and director. But you can work with these more difficult elements and get the gist in via other story-telling techniques.
STAGE PLAYS: A form of storytelling accomplished mostly via grand speeches and intense verbal exchanges between characters. And a three-act structure is preferable. Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, and toss in a few monologues from time to time. Stage plays are VERY dialogue-heavy creatures. Action can certainly be done on the live stage, but flying through the air like Peter Pan or even like Superman (or even like Spider-Man, which caused a terrible injury to one Broadway actor a year or so ago when "Spider-Man" debuted on stage in New York) can get problematic. Aside from having to suspend actors on cables to help them fly, sword fights can certainly be done, but huge Lord of the Rings battle scenes are not so easy. Extremes of weather can also be super difficult (tornadoes and hurricanes) if the weather itself has to perform a specific action (like hurtling the Kansas farmhouse of Dorothy Gale up into the sky and transporting her to the Land of Oz). Fire can also be very problematic on stage, including and especially forest fires and volcanoes. Live animals can be almost impossible and will always be super expensive because you will have ASPCA representatives there to make sure the animal is being treated right, so employing mechanical puppet animals or else humans costumed as the animals is always preferable. (The stage play "War Horse" which Steven Spielberg adapted into a film had mechanical puppet animals in the stage play version, as well as people dressed as animals.) And learn the three-act structure! Some plays are told in five acts, but those are rare and very complicated to pull off. And one-act plays are so concise that you haven't a lot of room for either a huge cast of characters, nor very much in-depth stuff. If you do not know how to recognize and analyze the proper three acts, you MUST learn about it.
SCREENPLAYS: A form of storytelling told mostly through actions and movement. And a three-act structure is preferable. Movies must move. Go from Point A to Point B. Travel down the road to get to the goal. Take the MacGuffin to its intended destination. Move, move, move. The really difficult part of adapting a story to the screen is that the two key hallmarks of novels (internal thoughts), and stage plays (grand speeches and dialogue-heavy scenes), are considered anathema to cinema. Voice-overs for internal thoughts are deemed super lazy in cinema. And grand speeches are disregarded as amateurish and too on-the-nose. Now you can sometimes get away with those storytelling conventions in a movie, but unless you somehow pull it off in a way that's unique, it's hard to avoid the criticism from the army of film snobs out there. They want to see characters in action, not engaged in lengthy discussions about the desire to somehow eventually get around to the action. They want to see the wordless look of pain and anguish on an actor's face, not hear the actor talk about how pained and anguished he is. And learn the three-act structure! Films MUST have structure and can't wander around free-form the way a novel can.
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Meanwhile, I am re-reading your OP. You might want to tell your story with a key character narrating everything. You also might want to jumble your story's timeline just slightly. By that I mean, instead of a straight linear timeline that starts at the beginning, you might want the opening scene to be a key scene of action and urgency, borrowed from somewhere much deeper into the story. And then have the narrator begin telling how he got to that point of urgency.
One of the most amazing timelines I ever saw was the historical telling of how modern humans cracked the secret of longitude --from the BBC movie called "Longitude." I don't recommend you embark on something as ambitious as that timeline, but if you watch it, you will see what I mean. (It's free on YouTube if you want to find it.) That film had a dual timeline of two separate stories running side-by-side. One was the tale of the 18th century commoner responsible for inventing the clock needed to crack the puzzle of longitude, and the other story was about the 20th century man who (for the sake of historical preservation) meticulously restored the four clocks built by that 18th century inventor. The opening scene took place on a royal British naval ship where a crewman was sentenced to death for the crime of keeping a private log book with his own opinions about the correct longitudinal coordinates of their ship. (Back then, sea captains could only guess their correct longitude, and hope for the best.) When the captain found out that crewman was spreading rumors that the ship was not where the navigator claimed it was, that crewman was court martialed and hanged for disrupting the ship and insubordination to the authority of the navigator and the captain. But the true urgency was that every single seaman aboard every single ship was positively terrified that "the best guess" of the navigator and the captain was in fact wrong. And the result of guessing wrong was almost always that the ship would run aground because of the captain's miscalculation. The urgency of the NEED to know longitude was spelled out in that one scene. The rest of the story became the hunt for the one sure and reliable way to always know longitude. (Latitude was somewhat easy. Longitude was a total mystery while at sea.) Cracking the code of longitude has been deemed one of the single most important discoveries of modern history. And that one BBC production was an awe-inspiring demonstration of just how important it was. It was the kind of cinema that takes your breath away. THAT production is a model of outstanding history told via cinema.
History can be kind of boring. But if you show the URGENCY of this one historical event, that can hook your audience right away. So tinkering with the timeline of how you lay out the story can be a way to zero in upon the urgency hidden deep within that piece of history and slide the urgency right up front and center at the opening scene of your stage play.
One of the most amazing timelines I ever saw was the historical telling of how modern humans cracked the secret of longitude --from the BBC movie called "Longitude." I don't recommend you embark on something as ambitious as that timeline, but if you watch it, you will see what I mean. (It's free on YouTube if you want to find it.) That film had a dual timeline of two separate stories running side-by-side. One was the tale of the 18th century commoner responsible for inventing the clock needed to crack the puzzle of longitude, and the other story was about the 20th century man who (for the sake of historical preservation) meticulously restored the four clocks built by that 18th century inventor. The opening scene took place on a royal British naval ship where a crewman was sentenced to death for the crime of keeping a private log book with his own opinions about the correct longitudinal coordinates of their ship. (Back then, sea captains could only guess their correct longitude, and hope for the best.) When the captain found out that crewman was spreading rumors that the ship was not where the navigator claimed it was, that crewman was court martialed and hanged for disrupting the ship and insubordination to the authority of the navigator and the captain. But the true urgency was that every single seaman aboard every single ship was positively terrified that "the best guess" of the navigator and the captain was in fact wrong. And the result of guessing wrong was almost always that the ship would run aground because of the captain's miscalculation. The urgency of the NEED to know longitude was spelled out in that one scene. The rest of the story became the hunt for the one sure and reliable way to always know longitude. (Latitude was somewhat easy. Longitude was a total mystery while at sea.) Cracking the code of longitude has been deemed one of the single most important discoveries of modern history. And that one BBC production was an awe-inspiring demonstration of just how important it was. It was the kind of cinema that takes your breath away. THAT production is a model of outstanding history told via cinema.
History can be kind of boring. But if you show the URGENCY of this one historical event, that can hook your audience right away. So tinkering with the timeline of how you lay out the story can be a way to zero in upon the urgency hidden deep within that piece of history and slide the urgency right up front and center at the opening scene of your stage play.
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Hi again! 
Today's "Google Doodle" on the Google homepage is a tribute to John Harrison, the English clock maker who dedicated his life to solving the riddle of Longitude.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/3/1...-clock-sea-watch-longitude-marine-chronometer
Today's "Google Doodle" on the Google homepage is a tribute to John Harrison, the English clock maker who dedicated his life to solving the riddle of Longitude.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/3/1...-clock-sea-watch-longitude-marine-chronometer