DramaLit Blog 1.0: BU School of Theatre

I came across an article in the Arts Beat Blog for the New York Times explaining how the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love is in the early stages of being adapted for the stage. Now, I take great issue with this. Film and theatre are my two great loves (Robert Redford is the third, but that’s besides the point) and one would think that this news would excite me to no end. However, what I know to be true is that the art of film and the art of theatre are two wildly different beasts.

I have seen some faithful adaptations of play to film (Doubt, Driving Miss Daisy, Chicago), and some successful adaptations of film to play (The Producers, Grey Gardens, Hairspray) but all in all, the transition is usually a flop. Take Catch Me if You Can which after a one year run, closed on Broadway September 4th. Or It’s a Wonderful Life, considered one of the greatest classic films of all time, adapted to a stage play has gradually become reduced to elementary school fodder. The reason is this: writing for film and writing for theatre are incredibly different mediums.

Last year I was fortunate enough to take a class called Role of the Playwright with Jon Lipsky, and currently, I’m enrolled in a screenwriting class. My first revelation occurred when I passed in my first screenplay of the semester, and my professor began to tell me that I was being “too detailed”, “too descriptive” and “too decisive”. I was not supposed to know the world of my play intimately, I was just supposed to provide the action and the dialogue. The director will choose what to do with my script, and then make any final changes once it’s been sold. The creative process is certainly…different when it comes to screenwriting. This does not mean I value it any less, or find film to be any less important, it just highlighted something I already knew to be true: film and theatre are hugely artistic mediums.

I do have faith, however. Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love and he is at the helm of scripting its stage play adaptation. He is no stranger to the theatre as he’s won critical acclaim and countless awards for his plays like Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and The Coast of Utopia. If anyone can make this transition I believe it’s him. So for now, I’ll sit in wild anticipation of this production and hope that Stoppard and the team behind Shakespeare in Love can prove me wrong. But they better give Ben Affleck a call now if they want him to make another cameo.