I believe that when someone adapts a piece of art from one genre to another, they should really take to heart the concept of adaptation. The tranfer from one genre to another shouldn’t be seamless; otherwise, why adapt at all? People who complain, for example, about books being adapted into movies, quibbling with this missing detail or that one always baffle me. The question shouldn’t be: is it a faithful movie? It should be: is it a good movie? (For an example of an overly-faithful, bad adaptation of a book into a miniseries, see Empire Falls. Actually, don’t.)
That said, there’s one adaptation that I find an exception to the rule, a piece of theater adapted into a movie (by the playwright) that still very much feels theatrical (perhaps because theater is simply in the DNA of the story). I’m talking about John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. I assign it in my Intro to Creative Class and reread the play and rewatched the movie recently and I still find it as dazzling and strange as ever. And thank God Guare didn’t simplify or streamline the plot or cut any of those wonderful monlogues. It’s about as funny and lovely and devastating a piece of art (in any genre) as I’ve ever read/seen.
