A Tradition Unbound

Movies are made from books all the time and no one thinks twice about it, but lately putting a novel on the stage seems somehow more unwieldy and unnatural, a great stunt if you can pull it off, as the Royal Shakespeare Company did with Dickens’ “Nicholas Nickleby” back in the early ‘80s. Opinions differ as to whether the Mark Taper Forum has worked similar magic in its current two-part adaptation of John Irving’s Dickensian novel “The Cider House Rules,” but the six-hour show about a turn-of-the-century abortionist and his orphaned apprentice, with a cast of 22 playing multiple roles, has drawn sufficient admiration and enough devoted fans to suggest that its creators are on to something, however imperfect.

There’s a long, if sometimes forgotten, tradition of adapting novels for the American theater going back to “Life With Father” (1939) and on through “Mister Roberts” (1948), “Billy Budd” (1951), “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial” (1954) and many others, including the more recent award-winning 1988 Steppenwolf production of “The Grapes of Wrath,” directed by Frank Galati, who also directed “Ragtime.” But most of these were “naturalistic” attempts to recast prose as drama, with none of the pages showing. The style of “Cider House” (which continues at the Taper through Sept. 27) is different, a form of literary homage whose mission is to preserve as much of the author’s original voice as possible through a narrative that constantly reminds us we are being told a story by the actors. Some might even call it a “reader’s theater,” with a stated purpose of directing the audience to leave the theater and head to the bookstore for the print version.

It’s not an altogether new idea and is reminiscent of the “Nickleby” experience, though the method can be traced to the “story” theater movement of the ‘60s (when Paul Sills was dramatizing “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” in Chicago) and, if you like, all the way back to the most primitive form of theater: men and women sitting around a fire telling tales out loud.

That “Cider House” can hold an audience’s attention for six hours gets you thinking about the technique, not to mention the ingenuity and talent of those who have conceived, adapted and acted it--in service to the language and ideas of John Irving, of course. And wondering perhaps why, in a theater trying harder than ever to compete with the technology of the movies, something so elemental seems to have such power? Or is that a question that answers itself? And are the shelves of fiction at Barnes & Noble the place where resident theaters like the Taper should be looking to find their next offerings?

Jane Jones, the play’s co-director, with Tom Hulce, has made no secret of the fact that she turned to this hybrid form a dozen years ago “because I was tired of going to the theater and not seeing good stories on stage.” An actress (she and Hulce met in a production of “The Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket,” written by Peter Parnell, whom they hired to adapt “Cider House”), she had never been much of a reader until she discovered in her late 20s that she was dyslexic. While reading books aloud to address this, she became newly converted to literature and the notion that she wanted to share the experience with others. Which is how she came to start Book-It, a theater collective devoted exclusively to putting books on stage. It began in New York, moved with her to Seattle and led ultimately to the mammoth undertaking of “The Cider House Rules” produced at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and now the Taper.

“Over the years I’ve found out that lots of other people have done similar things, but I had no role model at that time,” she says about Book-It’s beginnings.

She never saw “Nicholas Nickleby” either, as it turns out. “Are you kidding? I was a starving actress in New York City. I didn’t have $100. I wish I would have seen it. I could have learned so much from it.”

Jones and her company began with short stories. “Somewhat edited but whenever possible almost word for word. It can be tedious; it can also be very enlightening.”

The rights were easy to get, often for little or nothing. She says it’s gotten harder recently because Hollywood has become more aggressive in optioning literary properties, and the theater cannot hope to compete with Hollywood’s deep pockets.

Book-It’s objective, she says, was to rediscover “how the pure art of sitting and listening to language is the root of theater, and so to return theater to its roots of storytelling. To let language be the thing that transports you, to bring stagecraft into it but bring it in through the art of the immediate senses--the interpretation of an actor, the simplicity of a lighting change.”

They did short stories by Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Graham Greene. They did D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in a 2 1/2-hour production that became a hot ticket in Seattle. “We had no playwriting in it whatsoever, just editing. Every single word on stage was Lawrence’s.”

Adapting “Cider House” proved much more complicated and required the services of playwright Parnell, who began working on it in 1993, but Jones maintains the principle remained the same. “The language is so transcending. It was always, let us not get in the way of John’s language or John’s story. But let us tell this as simply as children would.

“That’s what I would say to every cast member: How are you going to do this? You’re going to do it the way you would do it if you were playing house and you were 6 years old. . . . Because children always use their imagination. As adults, we have been fed so much media and pyrotechnics on stage, so much loud music, so much computerized whatever, our imaginations are not very hopeful any more.”

Still, there is the matter that novels and plays tend to work differently; novels are long-distance runs, with time for digression and rumination, while theater, like movies, is a comparative sprint that demands ever moving forward toward conflict and confrontation.

The primary challenge of putting a book on stage is finding a way to activate the narration, the wordy exposition that frequently takes up large chunks of a novel. In “Nickleby,” directed by Trevor Nunn, characters at times delivered such narration directly to the audience, “breaking the fourth wall,” as it’s referred to in the theater. Characters commented on the general story line and even on their own characters.

The characters of Irving’s “Cider House” do something similar when brought to life by actors at the Taper, yet there’s a difference as well. Parnell has turned some of the narration into dialogue and constructed an omniscient voice that comes out of the mouths of different characters. “Sometimes people are sharing the narrative within one sentence,” says Myra Platt, the actress who plays Candy, a woman who falls in love with Homer (Josh Hamilton), the orphan at the center of the story. Platt is a co-founder of Book-It.

She insists that Book-It “doesn’t seek to replace any other form of theater but that it simply began with a company of artists who loved to read.”

She also says that “Cider House” in its own way might be called cinematic, because it’s built on rapidly moving short scenes. For an actor onstage this means, “You have to be in the moment at the moment.”

Jane Carr, the English actress who plays kindly Nurse Edna as well as a prostitute and another character, was in the touring company of “Nicholas Nickleby” and remembers “the scenes were longer,” but in both cases says, “it’s a very strange journey for an actress, changing costumes constantly and saying, ‘Who am I now?’ ”

At the same time, she says the technique of addressing the audience directly can come as a relief. “Actors are always trying to communicate what they’re thinking and sometimes you want to just step forward and tell it.”

For his part, Parnell is uncomfortable with the word “primitive” to describe the structure of the play he has molded from the 552-page novel. “I think the scene in which you’re examining a fetus and wondering whether a fetus has a soul is not something I would call primitive,” he says. “If there’s anything primitive about it to me, it’s not the technique but that people are gathered together in a place to hear a story.”

Indeed, the tone and texture of “Cider House” is plainly, sometimes disturbingly modern, compared to the storybook quality of “Nickleby.” The clinical discussion of how a condom can slip off during sex, for example, or the med school instructions on the use of vaginal specula and curets during abortions is unlikely to make anyone think of Dickens.

In Seattle, during the first production in a small “black box” theater, some audience members fainted during the abortion details, remembers Michael Winters, the actor who plays the leading role of Dr. Wilbur Larch, the complicated humanitarian and abortionist who runs the orphanage where most of the action is set. “When we started we were in a black room with bleachers, no costumes, we had a gurney and one door. It was closer to us being in a cave then,” he says referring to the matter of the play’s primitive nature.

Certainly there’s much more to look at onstage at the Taper in Broadway designer John Arnone’s pretty, suggestive set, and the separation of actors from audience in an 800-seat house is more pronounced. “But it’s always seemed to me just another way of telling a story onstage,” says Winters, who has drawn top notices for the sweet anguish of his performance as Larch. “The style never seemed that extreme to me. The thing that remains is the narrative line: What’s going to happen next?”

Which has always been one of Irving’s strengths as a novelist, a strength that Parnell, Hulce and Jones have preserved in relocating the story to the theater. The epic scope of the story traverses 70-some years, beginning in the late 19th century and continuing into the 1950s. We follow Homer from birth (literally, in this case) in an orphanage named St. Cloud’s, through his failed attempts to be adopted, his powerful bonding with the father-like Larch and the crisis that comes when he realizes what distinguishes St. Cloud’s from other orphanages. A young man, he leaves St. Cloud’s, falls in love and becomes a father in disguise only to return to the orphanage years later to face up to his antiabortion feelings again, in a transforming moment of decision.

It’s a huge story, with numerous colorful secondary characters, one of which, a muscular bisexual orphan named Melony, has become a star-making turn for actress Jillian Armenante.

“Can you imagine writing from scratch this journey for the stage?” asks Gordon Davidson, the Taper’s artistic director, who saw the play in Seattle and decided to bring it here. “I’ve had people try to write epic plays, and they’re hard.”

It’s been said that the novel is the only narrative form that can truly take you inside someone’s

head and allow you to experience another person’s thoughts, and that movies, television and the theater can only approach this by superimposing voice-over narration on dramatic events, as seems to be happening more often, from “The Opposite of Sex” to “Ally McBeal.”

Parnell disagrees with the premise. “I would say that a novel gets you into someone’s head over time, and the time you spend alone reading a book is different from sitting in a room sharing a narrative voice.”

As to why directors and playwrights are drawn to something like “Cider House Rules,” he says, “For one thing, I think that for whatever reason, the novel is a little more generous in a way that I don’t always find in the theater. The modern theater is full of dark and despair. Maybe it’s because of TV and movies that we go to the theater to find something more iconoclastic, but it’s nice to find a form that can do both.”

Irving, whose novels “The World According to Garp” and “The Hotel New Hampshire” were made into indifferent Hollywood movies and who is himself adapting “Cider House” into a screenplay for director Lasse Hallstrom, has said that the theater has never held much interest for him. Which is unremarkable in a time when many educated people consider the theater effete, but odd when you consider the possibility that Irving’s whimsical, fabulist imagination is more suited to the suggestive space of the stage than the demands of film. The author has also said he has been pleasantly surprised with what Parnell, Jones and Hulce have done with his book.

So, what is its future and the future of the form? Is it going to New York? Jones says the creators and producers haven’t yet held their “summit” to fully assess the Los Angeles production, which, like any two-part show, has been a tough sell but is reportedly nearing capacity at the weekend marathons when both parts are staged in one day.

Davidson says, “I’m hopeful that it will [go to New York] because I think it should be seen there.”

“We just took it on as an experiment,” says Jones, who was introduced to the book by Hulce, the Oscar- and Tony-nominated actor. “The whole thing has been extraordinarily amorphous and may continue to be amorphous. We may decide that doing the entire book is not the best way to do this, or we may put an hour back into it.”

There is some evidence other theaters around the country are taking up the same mission as Book-It. Chicago has a company called Cit Lit, San Francisco one called Word for Word. As for more books into plays at the Taper, Davidson says it could happen. “I think the impetus comes during a period when there’s a lull in the vitality of playwriting,” he explains. He says he’s always wanted to put “War and Peace” on the stage. Not that it would be done in the “reader’s theater” style of “Cider House.” “I think fully dramatized,” he says.

“I think you’re going to see more and more of this,” says Jones, whose company is next adapting Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening.” “I notice Terrence McNally has started using narrative. You know, exposition is difficult. In some ways, you can get right to it in one paragraph if you just tell it. But you tell it actively. You don’t just stand there and deliver it. The old Indian thing is, ‘Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I won’t remember, involve me and I’ll understand.’ ”

And one more thing, she says. “Speak in a loud, clear voice and tell the story.”

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“The Cider House Rules, Parts 1 & 2,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 628-2772. (Parts 1 and 2 are paired and must be purchased together.) Tuesday and Thursday (Parts 1 and 2, respectively), 8 p.m.; Wednesday and Friday (Parts 1 and 2), 8 p.m. Also, marathon performances each weekend day encompassing Parts 1 and 2: Saturday and Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 27. $58-$80 (includes both parts).