Flowers In My Hair

Someone dear asked me recently to wear flowers in my hair.

Until they bloom fully, I'll send this instead.


(It's Maxfield Parrish's Reverie.)

Alice, Part Two: What I Learned From The Films

Sorry about the long delay (two days... an eternity in e-time... or should it be i-time... no, we don't want to put an "i" in front of anything else). I've been a little distracted as of late (all good things), not to mention that I just got pulled to be the musical director for Our Town and so I'm back, once again, in rehearsal.

What I Learned From The Films.

Shripriya mentioned that this would be a useful guide to aspiring filmmakers as well as aspiring theatre directors. I agree. I think that any filmmaker wanting to get started should find and view as many of these films as possible (a good compendium of titles, plus some mild analysis/criticism, can be found here). They're useful to compare and contrast shots and cuts as well as casting, design, style, and all of those wonderful things.

Anyway, here are some things I've noticed -- set up, rather arbitrarily, as "rules."

1. Do not presume yourself cleverer than the source. This does not work. Lewis Carroll was a very intelligent man. In addition to being an author and poet, he was a mathematical genius. Your jokes are never more funny than his jokes. This is a hard rule to follow when creating an adaptation, because one always wants to include a few wink-wink-nudge-nudge moments, but they must be very judicially employed or else they will end up like the Mad Hatter Tea Party scene in William Sterling's 1972 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. He stays blindingly faithful to the text until he hits this scene, whereupon he suddenly allows the Mad Hatter and March Hare to start spouting his own jokes -- along the lines of "What did the father ghost say to the baby ghost? Spook only when you are spooken to!"

Was "why is a raven like a writing desk" not a good enough riddle?

2. Concepts will work, if they do not violate Rule Number One. One of my favorite Alice films is the Broadway Theatre Archive recording of Elizabeth Swados' Alice at the Palace. She remains faithful to the text and to the spirit of the story, but sets it in a meta-theatrical, presentational vaudeville milieu. In other words, Alice does not journey underground, but onto a stage; and the characters she meets are not only characters, but actors as well. Imagine yourself opening a strange door and finding yourself walking out onto a brightly lit stage in a darkened auditorium, with people coming towards you and singing. What would you do? That's the concept Swados sets forth, and it succeeds brilliantly. Perhaps it succeeds because it takes the foremost tenet of Carroll's book -- a person finds herself immersed in strange world -- and builds upon this theme while simply changing the setting of the strange world.

3. Be very careful when cutting the text. This is not just because there are book-lovers out there who will wail if you skip over the chapter where Alice meets the gnat. It's because the text -- any text -- is built upon a particular framework, and removing scenes or lines or even words is like pulling sticks out of a game of Pick-Up-Sticks (or Spillikans, since we're talking Brit-lit). Eventually, the tower of sticks will collapse.

Through the Looking Glass is even more crucial because Alice meets a different character on each square of the chessboard. If a character or scene is cut, she's lost an entire square and she'll go through the play (or film) making fewer stops than she should. Don't think your audience won't notice.

David Ball, in his book Backwards and Forwards (another must-read for filmmakers, Shripriya) gives a much better example even than Alice. He reminds us that, for the sake of length, most directors cut the Fortinbras plot from Hamlet, and make it a story about domestic rather than international revenge. Yet with the Fortinbras scenes gone, Hamlet makes fewer stops than he should, and the story we get isn't at all the story Shakespeare wrote. The audience usually doesn't notice because they haven't read or don't remember the original, but the addition of the scenes (go watch the Kenneth Branagh film) makes the story so much richer -- and it makes so much more sense.

4. Allow your audience the pleasure of contextualizing. In the 1985 Irwin Allen megahit T.V. miniseries Alice In Wonderland (which included Through The Looking Glass), he allows the Dormouse to begin his story about the three little sisters who live in the treacle well -- but then has the March Hare instantly interrupt with "that's the same thing as molasses!" Thanks for stopping the narrative flow, Mr. Allen. Not to mention that it deprives the audience of making the discovery of what treacle is on their own, and disrupts the otherwise pleasurable activity of having to pay very close attention to the Dormouse's story to discover what exactly is in this well along with the three little sisters.

5. Don't skimp on the rabbit suit -- or, Choose Your Design Well. Elizabeth Swados' "actor in rehearsal clothes" makes a much more convincing rabbit than the handful of poor men stuffed into fuzzy onesies who appear in other films, because he takes the time to move and sniff and thump like a rabbit. Likewise, certain visuals make much more of an impact than others. When writing an adaptation, have you set yourself scenes which can be staged in dramatically arresting ways? And when directing one, have you selected and refined those moments? Or have you stuffed the show in a onesie?

6. Leave space for music and dance. This, I think, applies to everything. Possibly to life as well.

That's all I have time for today... the next installment will tell how I wrote my adaptation, and which of these rules I chose to follow, and which I chose to break. ^__^

Alice, Part One: My Relationship with the Text

I teach an "introduction to directing" class as part of my graduate assistantship. At the beginning of the semester, I sat my students down and told them that everything I needed to learn about directing, I learned from Alice in Wonderland.

There's a picture, somewhere, of a three-year-old Blue in a polyester nightgown with Garfield printed across the front. It's Christmas morning in Tempe, Arizona. I had just received my first real copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass -- a blue paperback Puffin. Inside are not only the two novels, but a handful of essays, poems, author's notes, and the famous diagram in which Carroll explains how his chess problem works.

(I say "first real copy" because prior to that I had owned a "fake copy;" a picture book based on the Disney movie which came with an audio cassette that read the story aloud. I used to put on the cassette and run around the house in my own little blue dress and white pinafore, acting out the story as it played.)

Anyway. I still have the blue Puffin, although this past Christmas I received Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice to supplement it, and to serve as my go-to for this Hyderabad project, because I think if I opened the paperback copy one more time, the pages would crumble and fall to pieces. The back is already covered with tape, and new tape to hold down the yellowed tape, and my favorite chapters have long since peeled away from the book's spine.

I don't know why Alice -- that is, why I was so attracted to this book, more even than Peter Pan or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or any of the other books I loved as a child. Possibly because Alice was young and clever and a girl, like me; possibly because I was attracted to Carroll's sophistication even before I knew what it was (the book, after all, is not at all written "for children" and is a complicated network of puns and allusions); possibly because the book taught me things, like logic and poetry and chess.

Possibly because the unique magic of this book is that it can be read in two entirely different ways -- the completely literal way, as it would be read by a three-year-old who thinks "glory" does in fact mean "a nice knock-down argument" because that's what it says on the page, and the analytical way, as it would be read by someone who's solving for the chess puzzle and who understands the subtle references to Tennyson and Wordsworth and Disraeli. And the magic is that with every passing year and every rereading, one can make a new discovery and shift from the former to the latter interpretation.

It could also be because the director in me loved the film adaptations. There are currently more than twenty different films based on the Alice stories, and I've seen about half of them (the ones I haven't seen are out of print or too obscure to be found). I told my directing class that everything I needed to learn about being a director I learned from watching Alice, and it's (at least partially) true -- after sampling these films one learns a great deal about staging, action, mise-en-scene, tempo, rhythm, casting, literal-vs.-non-literal storytelling, etc. etc. etc.

One also learns -- and very quickly -- that there's no one way to tell a story, which I think is something that gets lost in current teachings about theatre and the focus on the "right" or "best" interpretation.

Prior to this project I've created three stage adaptations; a musical based on James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks, a play-with-music based on Choderlos De Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and a play-set-to-music based on Alice in Wonderland. The Thurber and the Alice adaptation were both given public performances; the De Laclos became an unstaged project, although some of the music was performed "in concert."

I've always kept the twenty Alice films close to mind when I've worked to adapt a piece of literature for the stage, and they were of course immediately present when I began to write the adaptation for Hyderabad...

(I'm going to leave that as a cliffhanger for you, as there is still other work for me to do tonight, but the rest of the story will follow shortly. ^__^)

Nickel and Dimed Photo-Style Dance Mix!

Well... looks like the next post will be on Alice. ^__^

But... later. Right now I have a few other things to do, and it will take some time.

Meanwhile, the Nickel and Dimed production photos have just come in, and I'm delighted. So I'll do a quick post on photos to tide you over until you get the longer post on Alice.

Enjoy!

What Blue is Doing in Hyderabad

I was just thinking today, when I put up the last post about directing and children's literature, that I hadn't yet mentioned on this blog what I was going to do in Hyderabad.

I suppose I could make you guess. It would be interesting to see what kind of responses came up.

But the truth is that I am going to Hyderabad to direct an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass with students at a location which I am going to piquantly leave unnamed for now.

I'll be spending four months there, guest directing the project. We're even working on translating the piece into Telugu and possibly touring it to local schools.

This combines all of my favorite things -- theatre, teaching, literature, writing (I had the privilege of creating the adaptation, and I can blog about that process if you would like, as it was more fun than can be described), linguistics/translations, and working with children.

So now you know, and we can all be excited together until I get to go. ^__^

For All The Fans of Girls' Literature

... and come on, girls' literature is everyone's literature.

Do you remember in Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes when Pauline and Petrova played Tyltyl and Mytyl in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird? And how the book included two large scenes from the play within its text, so we could understand what was going on?

When I was a kid I used to act those scenes out with my Barbie dolls, holding the book flattened out under one knee and reciting Mytyl and Tyltyl's lines.

So when I got into grad school, and they asked me what play I wanted to direct, I said "well, what about Blue Bird?"

Here are some production photos (used by permission).

First: Tyltyl and Mytyl by the window, watching the party outside.

Second: Bread, springing to life.

Third: The children finding the Garden of Birds in the Palace of Night.

There are many more photos (including the ones of the twelve-foot puppets). If you would like a link to the entire set, email me at thisblog'stitle at hotmail dot com.

Again, click on any image for the detail view.

Hindi Lesson 3: Is Dadiji Sweet, or is she Wicked Sweet? Plus: Pratap Counts Bikes!

From Inside Higher Ed: A recent study by the National Academies has just taken the time and effort (and who knows how many grant dollars) to prove what I blogged here for free -- that most foreign language study at universities is surface-level and ineffectual. The cutest part is that IHE calls this study "the most extensive review ever." Like, totally.

Meanwhile, in Pratap-land, we learn the finer details of categorizing old people:

प्रताप: दादी जी बुर्ही है लेकिन बहुत अच्छी है।

It means "Grandma is old, but she's very good."

Now help me out with this, though, before I condemn Pratap for making a false correlation (as if all old people were "bad," but Dadiji is an exception).

He's calling Dadiji acchi, which seems to be the feminine form of accha, which -- from my limited understanding -- is not only an adjective meaning "good" but also a colloquial, catch-all form of praise. That is, what Pratap is saying is much closer to "Grandma is old, but she's really cool."

Yes?

Pratap also visits the Kumars' garage and announces that there are "दो-टिन पुराणी सैकिले है." Two or three bikes? Come on, Pratap, you're standing right there. Is it that hard to tell how many bikes there are?