Most of the time, we are adapting popular works which have already been adapted in a very direct way. Therefore, we can add to the lineage of the work by creating a unique adaptation that connects with the questions and concerns of readers and viewers today.
Here is an example of how playwrights Christopher Sergel and Aaron Sorkin used their adaptations of Harper Lee’s classic American novel To Kill a Mockingbird to embrace the NOW of their specific moment in history.
The first major adaptation by Christopher Sergel premiered in 1990 and was almost entirely faithful to the story, characters, and plot of the original novel. The stage adaptation mirrored the book, and even used most of the original language in the stage text.
The adaptation was very popular, toured internationally, and was touted as a major achievement. What was happening in the late 1980s to the early 1990s? The AIDS crisis was in full swing, and the country was ignoring it. The Central Park Five were wrongly convicted, and the conviction became a national flashpoint in the discussion of racism. In other news, all of the innovation and potential of the 1970–1980s post-Vietnam America seemed to be exploding or evaporating; there was the Chernobyl disaster, the Challenger explosion, the Iran Contra affair, and the Exxon Valdez spill, among others. The cracks in the idea of the modern American dream were beginning to show.
Therefore, Sergel’s choice to adapt Mockingbird – a play about the crumbling of the faux idea of perfect 1950s small-town America with a rotten underside which is finally revealed – very strictly, following the majority of the details, plotting, and characters in the story, makes sense. The resonances with 1990s America are very clear, without much editing or reimagining.
In contrast, the second major adaptation by Aaron Sorkin premiered in 2018, almost 30 years later. Post-Obama. The “post-racial” Controversy. Dreamers and the Wall with Mexico. The Tea Party and Birther Movement electing Trump. The Black Lives Matter movement. LGBTQIA+ and Allyhood. The failure of progressive “White Feminists,” “TERFs,” and others. A deeper public understanding of bias, unconscious bias, and evolving ideas of consent. While Mockingbird is still considered a classic, the idea of what constitutes the American dream, and the perfect American community, has splintered and reformed. To adapt the play strictly, as-is, would create a museum piece, not a vital piece of living work.
So, Sorkin took our contemporary understanding of these issues and infused them into his adaptation of Mockingbird. In his version, Atticus Finch is the liberal lawyer defending Tom Robinson, a Black man who is falsely accused of rape. Traditionally, Finch has been held up as the hero of the story – a moral hero and model of integrity. While Sorkin acknowledges Finch’s traditional status at the beginning of the play, as the play progresses Sorkin shifts the way in which we see Finch. By shifting a bit of the plot and fleshing out some more of the Black characters in the piece, we begin to see Finch as a significantly more flawed moral hero, one who needs to change himself before he can fully live up to the principles he espouses. This shift outraged some audiences and critics; however, we believe, it made the adaptation a much more vibrant and engaging play for today. By using Finch to show us how White America’s idea of racism has, or has not, changed as much as it should, we organically see why major racial inequities persist today. In our minds, Sorkin’s choice honors the original material even more than a strict adaptation would because it reaches into the soul of the piece, and connects the original questions the author is asking with the contemporary situation in which those questions are being asked.
When you begin working on your adaptation, you are going to have to make this choice over and over and over again. Where will you
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