Shakespeare was famously a prolific adaptor—most notably, King Lear is an adaptation of an earlier drama, King Leir. Theater, perhaps more than any other genre of writing, is endlessly interested in retelling familiar stories from new angles. Adaptations make up a sort of netherworld in which living playwrights converse energetically with the dead.

My own relationship to adaptation is complex and evolving. About a year ago, I professed shocked when my friend, the playwright Adrian Einspanier, observed that basically all my plays could be categorized as adaptations of some sort. I took stock of my recent work. My play The Good John Proctor is a prequel to The Crucible. My play Jane Anger is inspired by a real Elizabethan England proto-feminist pamphlet. My play How to Load a Musket is a curated docu-drama of the verbatim interviews I conducted with historical reenactors. I realized I had been trafficking in adaptation for years without seriously contemplating the form.

So I began to wonder: what IS this impulse that drives so many of us playwrights to adapt each others’ work: is it to critique it? To celebrate it? To cash in on the name brand recognition? To isolate and explore a particular theme? Or to situate ourselves in a story which, in its original form, might not accurately reflect our own experience? Why are certain plays adapted dozens of times over while other plays are left untouched? Also, when we adapt other people’s plays, do we owe anything to the writer?

Jeffrey Hatcher, a playwright who has worked prolifically as an adaptor, told me:

Adaptation is always a betrayal because you're changing what the original writer intended, and I think you can and must betray many things. But you must show fidelity to the core ideas of the play—its thematic concerns, its spirit, where it lives theatrically and how it lands dramatically. If you adhere to those core elements, then I do think you can cut, change and betray 1,000 smaller things.

For the purpose of this essay, I’m avoiding discussion of adaptations of books and movies, as well as musicals. My focus is restricted to PLAYS which come from OTHER PLAYS, and to this end, I’ve divided theatrical adaptation into three categories: faithful adaptation, conversant adaptation, and challenging adaptation.

Faithful Adaptation

I define a “faithful adaptation” as one which adheres closely to the plot, characters, and themes of an earlier text. This category most often applies to canonical works rendered in translation. Such adaptations are typically produced by experienced translators who aim for accuracy and completeness, while exercising judgment to make dialogue speakable and theatrical beats clear. At times, however, well-known English-speaking playwrights who do not speak the source language are invited to adapt these works. In these cases, they collaborate with one or more translators to grasp the original text’s meaning, and then create an adaptation that honors the source while bearing the imprint of their own artistic voice.

Perhaps the most adapted playwright is Anton Chekhov, the chronicler of Russian discontent, and the quintessential “playwright’s playwright.” The deceptive simplicity of his plots, and the rich expansiveness of his characters, allow for endless variation and interpretation.

Sarah Ruhl spoke of her experience adapting Chekhov’s Three Sisters:

Usually when I’m asked to work on someone else’s material, I have to believe it’s better than my material or I wouldn’t bother doing it—otherwise I’d write my own play. So I start with the premise that Chekhov’s better than me, I will learn from him, and I will have his words in my head for a while.

Of course, adapting language that’s in translation poses a specific challenge for a playwright. Here is Heidi Shreck, describing how she approached her process of adapting Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya for Broadway two years ago:

My first step was just to do a literal translation; I do speak, read, and write Russian, but my first literal translation was really bad. So I started working with a native Russian speaker… who…. also knows the play deeply... Then I took that and started adapting it into my own literal translation. That was when I started to get into really murky territory, like—what is it to be faithful? Faithful to whom? English has 100 times as many words as Russian. The play is very repetitive, but it doesn’t sound that way if you’re listening as a Russian speaker, because you don’t know there are a million other possible words. So this begins a series of decisions, of like, what am I trying to do here?

Paul Schmidt—one of the foremost American adaptors of Chekhov’s work—describes his approach in the foreword to his adaptations:

Chekhov’s language is ordinary language—flat, banal, unremarkable. It is this quality… that I have tried to make clear in… [my] translations….

Annie Baker's adaptation of Uncle Vanya is celebrated for the ways in which it retains the distinctive simplicity and naturalism of her own writing in its dialogue.

Here is a brief exchange from the Baker adaptation, in which Vanya sits in the agony of missing his sister:

Vanya: My sister…my sweet sister…where is she now? If she only knew. Akh, if she only knew!
Sonya: Knew what?
Vanya: That it’s so–the misery, the–
Nothing.
After all the…
Nothing.
I’ll go now.
(he leaves)

Baker reflected in Interview Magazine on her process of adapting a play that has been adapted by so many others:

There’s no shortage of Chekhov adaptations; I did have a crisis like a year ago where I said, “Why am I contributing another Uncle Vanya to the already enormous stack of Uncle Vanyas in the world?” [But] I actually ended up feeling really good about it; through the translation/adaptation process I realized how completely different mine is from any of the others, and how different they are from each other, and how none of us are actually hitting upon the original. The more… there are, the closer we’ll get to communicating the original to audiences.

Halley Feiffer took a less traditional tack to her adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, titled Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow. Speaking of her inspiration and unique process of adapting to the New York Times, Feiffer reflected:

In Three Sisters, there was something so inherently millennial about the way these three women behave. They are so entitled, so obsessed with their own unhappiness, so unwilling to take any actions to overcome said unhappiness, so cruel, judgmental and petty—and at the same time, so capable of love, compassion and growth. I thought it would be fun and funny to translate the play into millennial speak and then start to strip away that stylized syntax. I used several translations and had them open in front of me on my desk and would literally read each of them a line at a time and then filter the words through my demented warped brain.

At the beginning of Three Sisters, the eldest sister Olga bemoans her appearance. Here is an excerpt from Paul Schmidt’s adaptation:

Olga: I’ve gotten old. I’ve lost far too much weight; I’m sure it’s all because of the girls at the high school–they keep making me so angry….I think if I’d gotten married and could stay home all day long, it would have been better somehow.

By contrast, here is part of Olga’s same speech in Feiffer’s adaptation:

Olga: …I look like shit, but what else is new. I’ve always looked like shit. Even when I was born, I looked like a little baby faced turd. “Hey shit!” That’s what everyone calls me. That’s not true I’m just making a joke but still. Everything about me looks like shit.

The other writer perhaps most frequently employed in the field of faithful adaptation is, of course, Henrik Ibsen—Chekhov’s Norwegian contemporary, often referred to as “the father of modern drama.” Amy Herzog has adapted Ibsen twice for Broadway in the last few years. Her first adaptation was of Ibsen’s most famous play, A Doll’s House—the story of Nora Helmer, a wife and mother who has a proto-feminist awakening and, at the end of the play, leaves her husband and children for an independent life. Her second adaptation was of the slightly lesser known Enemy of the People, Ibsen’s take on a man who faces a backlash for speaking out about water contamination in his town.

Herzog approached the task of adaptation quite differently for the two plays. Discussing the liberties she took when adapting Enemy of the People in American Theatre magazine, Herzog commented:

There are real changes to the dramaturgy; there’s a large character that was cut, and we don’t have the children onstage. There are things about characters’ backgrounds that are different, and there are characters who weren’t in certain scenes that I put them in. Unlike with A Doll’s House, which I felt essentially had a perfect play inside of it and just needed a few things to be stripped away, with this I felt, for it to be really legible to us, it needed more construction.

Herzog also took into context the events of Ibsen’s actual life while delving into her adaptation. In the same interview, she reflected:

He wrote A Doll’s House and was celebrated for it, and then he wrote Ghosts and he was pilloried. He was really hurt, and so he wrote this thinly veiled parable about a doctor trying to tell people that their town’s baths are poisoned and they don’t want to listen. So there’s a totally righteous, heroic story in the play, but there is also a petty rage, and I find that really interesting.

Two years ago, I received a commission to adapt Rossum’s Universal Robots, a play written in 1920 by the Czech writer Karel Capek. Commonly referred to as R.U.R., Capek’s play is at once a period piece and a sci-fi thriller. It is also the origin of the English word “robot,” taken from the Czech “robota,” meaning forced labor or servitude. The plot revolves around a factory which mass produces robots (who are, in Capek’s rendering, physically identical to humans). By the end of the play, the robots, who have become increasingly advanced and aware of their superiority to humans, decide to emulate the violent tactics they’ve observed in people by killing all of mankind.

When I first read R.U.R., I was struck by how deeply prescient the story felt, for a play that had been written over one hundred years ago, long before computers or AI. I liked the sort of strange formality of the characters. The humans in the play—especially the men—seemed a lot like the robots in the play, and that tension felt interesting to me. I decided that the best adaptation tack for me would be to remain faithful to the remarkable original text, preserving Capek’s ideas and structure. I was following the logic of Paul Schmidt, who had written:

I believe… most theater texts need continual retranslating. While the language of the original remains fixed in time, the language of every audience changes enough in forty or fifty years to render a new translation necessary.

I do not speak Czech, and so the first step in my adaptation process was to work with a Czech woman who provided me with a direct translation of the play. I went back and forth between her version and a different translation as I navigated how best to interpret Capek’s work. My primary aims were to clarify, simplify and streamline—to make the play as producible and accessible as possible to modern audiences. I slimmed down the cast by creating a system whereby every human character doubled as a robot character. I enforced a unity of setting. I made many cuts in places which felt repetitive or long-winded. And I massively simplified Capek’s ending—which felt, to me, a bit maudlin and overwritten. I wanted the dialogue to flow, but I also tried to preserve some of the weird stilted flavor of the translations—thinking of yet another quote by Amy Herzog:

That a really good translation has a whiff of foreignness, that there’s some way that you feel the foreignness of the original.

Here I will own that this process of adaptation was often frustrating. When I first read R.U.R., I was delighted by it, but my work adapting felt frequently more similar to my day job editing college essays than to the all-consuming vigor of writing my own plays. Some days, I found myself annoyed with Capek. There were places in the text where our interests as playwrights clearly diverged (Capek had little interest in character psychology but dearly loved long declamatory monologues for men). It was frustrating to find problems I didn’t know how to fix, and to try and make sense of inconsistencies without an explanation from the person who created them. When I finally began to workshop the play with actors and a director, I found I felt very little ownership over R.U.R. I was only one voice in a room weighing in on what Capek had written, and part of a collective of people thinking about how to bring the play to life today. This was a strange sensation, but also freeing and exciting in its departure from the usual egocentric pulsing of new play rehearsal.

But this was just one form of adaptation.

Conversant Adaptation

My next category—conversant adaptation—describes a play that converses with an earlier play through the borrowing of plot events or characters or themes, which are then serviced to bolster a new and different story.

An example of Chekhovian conversant adaptation is the late great Christopher Durang’s Vanya Sonia Masha and Spike. Durang’s riotous comedy is not an adaptation of any one specific play, but a mash-up of names and themes and scenarios from all of Chekhov’s oeuvre. Th setting is a country estate… but instead of rural Russia, we’re now in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania. The play centers on three middle-aged siblings—Masha, Sonia, and Vanya— whose names are explained early on by Vanya, who comments to Sonia:

VANYA: It's been our cross to bear that our parents gave us names from Chekhov plays. The other children made such fun of us with our mysterious names. Such was the burden of having two professor parents; and so active in community theatre as well.

Paul Schmidt observed that “Chekhov began his career as a comic writer; comedy was what he knew best” and Chekhov famously labeled all his plays (with the exception of Three Sisters) as comedies. Vanya Sonia Masha and Spike beautifully splashes around with this quality of Chekhov’s writing—the existential comedy at the center of human existence—and ratchets it up into an absurdist key. Towards the end of Chekhov’s The Seagull, the character of Nina, in acute financial and mental distress, keeps repeating the phrase “I am a seagull.”

In the next excerpt from Masha Sonia Vanya and Spike, Sonia delivers a diatribe to her brother Vanya in which Durang is riffing on Nina’s famous line from The Seagull as well as the title subject of the Cherry Orchard.

SONIA: I know I complain, but in some ways I love it here. It’s where I’ve been since I was eight years old. I came from an orphanage, into a family that either loved me, or pretended to, I get confused about that. And it’s pretty here. And I love to look at the pond. I love the wild turkeys who wander about the property. I like learning they're so awkward that they sleep in trees but repeatedly fall out of them. I identify with them. I often fall out of my bed, thrashing about in my restless sleep. I am a wild turkey. I am a wild turkey. And I love the cherry orchard in the spring. All the pink blossoms, nature so resplendent.

VANYA: The cherry orchard? What cherry orchard?

SONIA: We have 10 or 11 cherry trees, they blossom every spring. Do you not remember?

VANYA: I remember. But it's not an orchard. You don't call 10 or 11 trees an orchard.

Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 is a very particular example of conversant adaptation: a sequel. Hnath’s play takes place fifteen years after the final beat of Ibsen’s original play when Nora has walked out on her family. His plot is very Ibsenesque in its drama of actions and their moral consequences. In the play, Older Nora has used the independence she fought for fifteen years before by becoming a published author who has written a very popular (and meta) novel about a woman leaving her husband. Her book has sparked a sort of revolution amongst the women who have read it, which include the wife of a very prominent judge. The judge, outraged, has tracked down Nora’s true identity and discovered that she is still married to her husband. He is threatening to expose her as a married woman unless she retracts everything that she’s written, and so Nora has come back to her husband to try to convince him to divorce her for good.

The critic Hilton Als wrote in the New Yorker of Hnath’s adaptation:

Hnath’s… work, is an irresponsible act—a kind of naughty imposition on a classic, which, in addition to investing Ibsen’s signature play with the humor that the nineteenth-century artist lacked, raises a number of questions, such as, What constitutes an individual achievement in this age of the simulacrum, when everything owes something to something else?

Als also compares Hnath’s work to Tom Stoppard, writing:

Like so many of Stoppard’s works in which historical figures come up against the playwright’s irrepressible love of ideas, Hnath’s script is a kind of metafiction. A Doll’s House, Part 2 is a play about a play.

Stoppard’s most famous work of conversant adaptation is his 1966 absurdist tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are quite small parts—childhood friends of Hamlet’s, who are hired by the King as pseudo-spies to discover Hamlet’s secret motivations. Hamlet outwits them by forging a letter which leads to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s deaths offstage.

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, it is now Hamlet who is a minor character, while Stoppard investigates the meta, existential state of two men who exist perpetually “waiting in the wings,” fated for death. The action of Hamlet plays out here, but much of it in the background. The play also owes some inspiration—if not direct adaptation credit—to Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, another story which explores boredom and purpose through the comedic relationship of two aimless male characters. Indeed, Stoppard’s play begins with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern betting on a coin toss 92 times in a row.

A quite different conversant adaptation of a Shakespeare play is Jihae Park’s Peerless, a warped and wonderful take on Macbeth. Park takes the tale of the murderous Scottish general Macbeth and his ambitious wife Lady Macbeth, and transfers it to an American high school where two Asian-American twin girls (M and L, respectively) resort to violence as they navigate the ruthless world of elite college admissions. Macbeth fights to be King of Scotland, but M and L are fighting for the one minority affirmative action spot at the prestigious unnamed College.

By placing the high stakes of the play in the political landscape of college applications, Park’’s story is not only more comedic in tone than Macbeth, but about something else entirely. She explores the ways in which identity can be commodified into a devastating and incisive weapon. The sisters brag about being “double minority” (referring to their gender and ethnicity), and they are outraged when a white-presenting male from their school scores the affirmative action slot at “The College” after discovering he is 1/16th Native American. There are no daggers: murder in Park’s story is committed by the vicious manipulation of a tree nut allergy and a withheld epi-pen. The three witches in Macbeth are transformed into a character called “Dirty girl,” a white girl who utters prophecies in the school yard. The relationship between the sisters—the unnatural tightness of their bond, and their brutal ambitions for both themselves and each other—is the central relationship of the play.

Clearly, the Famous Dead White Man is overwhelmingly represented in the genre of adaptation. My friend Emma Horwitz chose to look elsewhere for inspiration in her play, Mary Gets Hers, an adaptation of Abraham, or The Rise and Repentance of Mary, written by the tenth century canoness and first known (though not so famous) female playwright Hrotsvitha. Abraham tells the story of Mary, a young orphan, who falls into a life of prostitution before being saved and redeemed by her uncle Abraham, a monk, and his monk friend Ephriam. Emma described her early process of engaging with Abraham to me:

I pulled up Abraham and thought: What kind of momentum does this little text from the 10th century have to offer? The answer is: quite a bit! The original text moves very quickly, almost without sentiment… The characters are exclamatory, and believe what they believe with a comical level of authority. The scenes are quick, sharp, and take no time getting to the most dramatic element. There is no time to waste on this Earth, Hrostivtha seemed to be saying, and I agreed.

I got through some more scenes when it occurred to me that I was reading a play that was nearly tailor made for my personal enjoyment…. I felt like I had stumbled upon an unproduced Marx Brothers movie… I deeply recognized the rhythm of this comedy, the dramatic set-up of this world and the two monks who drive its action… I had no idea who Hrotsvitha was, having never taken a theater history course before, but was tickled by the idea that there was a woman writing raunchy comedies in the 10th century in order to convince young women to be good Christian girls.

In Mary Gets Hers, Emma made major changes to Abraham, including the beginning and ending of the play. Also, crucially, she specifies that her play be cast with all women and gender-nonconforming performers. She describes the origins of this casting decision and the general adaptation tone of the play as follows:

The verve of this play is inspired by the constellation of girls who I imagine lived at Gandersheim Abbey. the same girls who Hrosvitha likely wrote Abraham... to read, or see, or even perform themselves, with and for each other, by candlelight in a dim room. And just as Hrostvitha infused the genre of Christian hagiography with the stylings of Terence’s roman comedies, so have I infused this medieval comic-drama with my own heritage as a queer, Jewish writer of the 21st century.

Here is an excerpt from a scene between the two monks in Mary Gets Hers:

ABRAHAM
it’s just: i’m still so worried! i’m so worried that this poor orphan girl’s loveliness and purity has already become ruined by the taint of sin, or worse, i’m worried that even if her loveliness and purity has not already become ruined by the taint of sin she will be at great imminent risk of soon being ruined by the taint of sin if she does not at least become betrothed to God—!

EPHRAIM slams his book shut

EPHRAIM
she isn’t at least betrothed to God?

ABRAHAM
which is why i come to you, ephraim!

EPHRAIM
but how old is she?

ABRAHAM
almost eight

EPHRAIM
and you say she is not yet betrothed to God?

ABRAHAM
not even a little!

This excerpt to me demonstrates exactly what Horowitz was seeking from conversant adaptation: it is a scene between two monks thousands of years ago arguing about faith and purity with the cadences of modern Jewish queer comedy. What was first borrowed has been transformed to create something new.

Challenging Adaptation

My last category, “challenging adaptation,” addresses adaptations which not only incorporate elements from the original play, but actively challenge or critique it—often in a meta way with the original playwright named or referenced explicitly.

Take for instance James Ijames’ Pulitzer Prize winning play Fat Ham, an adaptation of Hamlet which centers a black family at a cookout in the American South. Ijames uses many of the basic plot points of Hamlet but twists them into a new, comedic form. Hamlet is now Juicy, a queer young black man taking online classes in HR at the University of Phoenix. His father, Pap, was a barbecue pitmaster who went to prison for killing a man. Pap was then killed himself in a hit job orchestrated by his own brother, Juicy’s Uncle Rev, who promptly married Juicy’s mother, Tedra. Hamlet’s “play within a play” is replaced by an active game of charades. There’s an amazing sequence in which Juicy sings passionate karaoke to "Creep" by Radiohead–a pretty classic Hamlet choice of song. And, there is meta commentary. Take, for example, this exchange between Hamlet and his mother.

Juicy: The king, my queen, is dead.
Tedra: Huh?
Juicy: It’s Shakespeare. Kind of.
Tedra: You watch too much PBS.
Juicy: How can one watch too much PBS?
Tedra: You don’t need to know all that.

And then, a little later, speaking about Uncle Rev:

Tedra: Just be nice!
Juicy: How nice the quarrel was…
Tedra: What?
Juicy: Shakespeare.
Tedra: If you bring up that old white man one mo time. Don’t nobody want to talk about his ass. You act like he got all the answers. You look crazy out here quoting Shakespeare and shit.

At the end of the play, Ijames breaks the fourth wall, and the characters contemplate how to end a story of intergenerational violence with an ending pre-written hundreds of years before. Similar to Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fat Ham’s characters are at war with a fate already decided for them. Ultimately, Ijames challenges Shakespeare, and rejects an ending that would inevitably involve a scene of murdered black bodies. Instead, Fat Ham ends with a glorious party, a celebration of blackness and queerness, and, of course, more karaoke.

Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins' brilliant An Octoroon is an adaptation of the 1859 hit play The Octoroon, by Dion Boucicault. The original play is an ante-bellum melodrama set on a Louisiana plantation telling the tragic story of an enslaved woman who is one-eighth black (or, an Octoroon). Jacobs-Jenkins play is, in many ways, a true example of challenging adaptation—he recreates much of the plot of the original play but also comments upon and explores his own act of adapting in fantastic, fantastical ways.

An Octoroon begins with an actor playing the role of BJJ, a fictionalized version of Jacobs-Jenkins. He stands onstage in his underwear and speaks directly to the audience, recreating both sides of a conversation he has had with his therapist about Boucicault:

“Who is that?”
“He's a playwright. He’s dead. He wrote in the nineteenth century.”
“I've never heard of him.”
“Yeah - no one cares about him anymore. He's dead.”
“... So your role model is someone no one cares about?”
“I mean, people cared about him when he was alive.”
“Oh, okay... And what did he write?”
“Um, well, he’s probably best known here for writing this play called The Octoroon?”
“The “Octoroon?” What's an “octoroon?””
“It's a person who is one-eighth black.”
“Ah. And you... like this play?”
“Yes.”
“Okay... Well here’s an idea: Why don't you try adapting this “Octoroon” - for fun.
I think it’s important to connect with things you feel positive feelings for.”
So I did. Or I tried to.

Just a few lines later, BJJ fucks with our sense of reality by saying:

BJJ: Just kidding. I don’t have a therapist. You people are my therapy.

Soon after, Boucicault (who is named Playwright in the script) enters (also in his underwear) and complains drunkenly to BJJ:

Time is like... so fucked up. You know? Why, you ask? Well, first of all, I'm apparently not famous anymore, which sucks. You don't even know who I am.

An Octoroon explores and fucks with the performance of race and identity in dizzying ways. Jacobs-Jenkins mixes stilted formal speech from the original play with contemporary dialogue—especially in the scenes between slave women. The black playwright applies white face so he can star as the two white male leads in the play. Another character, Br’er Rabbit—a
trickster character from African-American folklore—wanders in and out. In the original production, the person in the rabbit suit was Jacob-Jenkins himself, while an actor portrayed the “playwright” role of BJJ.

Jacobs-Jenkins reflected on his process of adapting Boucicault’s play in Bomb Magazine:

I was interested in how authorship surrounds the discourse of that play, historically. An Irish guy wrote a play about American slavery. The rules of who gets to write what always fascinate me. I also walked into that process thinking, This racist guy wrote this racist thing a long time ago. This is going to be easy. But the deeper I went, the more my point of view on Boucicault and how he saw himself as an artist changed. A friend of mine once told me that one of the pleasures of the play was seeing me “fall in love” with him…

I needed to figure out how to turn off or make audiences deactivate their sense of power over the play, which was structured by the expectations they walk in with about the kind of play a black playwright might write. What I built into that opener is a playwright—or two playwrights—disappearing into the play. You have to move through Branden then Boucicault to get to the thing. The authorship deconstructs itself. Though, interestingly, this character is not the author—not me. Everything he says about himself is a lie, and then he tells you it’s a lie—which becomes important for entering into a world that keeps shifting.

I tried my first foray into “challenging adaptation” this past year when I explored an adaptation commission for the 1714 comedy The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret, by Susannah Centlivre. I was thrilled by the idea of shining a retroactive spotlight on a prolific female playwright who was writing with great success centuries before I had even contemplated female playwrights existing.

When I started on Wonder, I had been percolating on ideas for a very specific sort of play, and I felt strongly that Susanna Centlivre could help me write it. I wanted to create a classic ensemble comedy in the style of The Government Inspector or A Servant of Two Masters (incidentally, two plays written by men which have spawned several celebrated adaptations). I was intent on learning how to write the kind of tight and twisty plot structure that big farce requires. Perhaps most importantly, I wanted the roles for women to be genuinely funny. I’ve found there’s a sort of strange, inverted sexism which occurs in much contemporary comedy (including some of my own early writing!). In order to avoid writing female characters as sexist stereotypes, playwrights slate the women into the “straight men” roles, forcing them to bear the weight of conscience or morality, responding stiffly while the male characters clown around and get the big laughs. So, in adapting Wonder, my primary intention was to create female characters who were every bit as dumb, self-absorbed, and disgusting as the men. Feminism comes in many forms!

I have maybe never enjoyed writing a play so much. I took Centlivre’s play, set in Lisbon in the early 18th century, and set it in the present day aboard a cruise ship headed from Paris to Portugal. Centlivre’s plot is centered on the hijinks and misunderstandings between two sets of lovers. I kept much of that plot and the character names, but demoted the lover misunderstandings to the B plot, while inventing an A plot involving a fantastical art heist. Reading Centlivre’s play, I was struck that the central theme of the story was not love, but friendship. Isabella and Violante, the two female leads, are constantly jeopardizing their romantic connections (albeit with toxic and childish men) to zealously prove their platonic friend love for each other. At the end of the play, when they both marry their respective male lovers, I felt disappointed. I decided that my adaptation could not end with marriage or kissing. It had to end with a celebration of friendship.

The lead/audience surrogate in Wonder is a maid named Inis—a ladies maid in the original—and a cruise ship toilet maid in mine. Inis realizes early on in my play that she has no friends and is wildly lonely. She spends the play doing classic farce maid things–delivering letters, poking into people’s business–but it’s all motivated from her sort of desperate desire to make friends. Additionally, Inis is aware that she’s in an adaptation and is often frustrated by it. Centlivre begins her play with a rhyming plea to critics to be kind to her. Here is part of my adaptation of this address, delivered by Inis, who had just asked the audience if there are any critics in the house:

INIS

Just tell me: are there critics here tonight??
                                         (surveying the audience, then)
So I feel like there are--now don’t be shy, it’s alright!!
There’s nothing to fear, I’m just Inis (the maid) 
Seriously, who’s a critic? C’mon guys, don’t be afraid. 
                                          (approaching a man in the audience)
Sir! Are you known for blistering critique? 
Have I read you in the Times or perhaps......Newsweek? 
Or do you prefer mystery, to review without credit 
Perhaps you post take-downs on tik tok or reddit? 
The reason I ask is, I must now confess 
Our female playwright is petrified of press. 
She beseeches the critics to recall her poor plight: 
The plight of a Woman, of a Woman who Writes! 
Just imagine: she wrote this poor play while balancing stuff 
Like cooking and baking and cleaning and such 
Straightening her hair and dumping the trash, 
Plucking her brows, while waxing her ‘stache. 
She’s spent so much time trying to please everyone 
It’s a wonder that she has got anything done!
Not to mention, she’s based the plot of this show 
On a very old play, by some broad you don’t know! 
This lady was none other than Susanna Centlivre 
An actress and playwright, a true female achiever 
Of great talent and wit, who gained so much acclaim
It’s a real bummer today no one here knows her name.
Soo... you may hope that tonight might solve that dilemma
This old play will be staged--and with it, dear Susanna
Shall rise from the grave, in all her great glory
And you’ll leave here sated on a rich night of #herstory.
Well you won’t!!! For--I’m sorry--tonight’s a crude adaptation
By a playwright who’s comfy with gross violation. 
She’s taken the work of Susanna--our muse!
First, hacked it to bits, then set it here, on a cruise! 
It’s hopeless! Two women?? Please, hear my appeals
How can they write plays, whilst walking in heels? 
It can’t come to good--so please, give them a break!
Dear critics, be kind, and for pity’s sake 
Write raves, if you write, raves we’ll never forget.
If you hate us, that’s fine: just keep that a secret. 
                                                  (a little ominous) 
A secret, of course, is a hard thing to keep. 
It weighs on the soul and haunts over sleep. 
                                                  (perky again) 
So let’s hope you do like us, and praise us, in time
In exchange, this I’ll grant you: it’s the last line I’ll rhyme.

My adaptations of R.U.R. and Wonder! have not yet had their first productions, and I’ll be curious to see how my relationship to adaptation—as well as to the original playwrights—will evolve over time. Right now, Wonder! feels like my own play, one which Susannah Centlivre helped me realize. R.U.R., by contrast, feels like Karel Capek’s play, which I have helped him to update so it can be appreciated by modern audiences. But maybe these are the wrong frameworks through which to understand something so slippery as adaptation.

In an email, Emma Horwitz wrote me:

You meet a pre-existing text with your taste and intuition. The original is made by someone else’s taste and intuition. You can assume or guess at the mathematics and crafts they used to get to the thing they created, but there is always the x factor of a writer’s idiosyncratic personality, regardless of history or even of ability. In this, the process of adaptation is like having a deep conversation with another artist. A dialogue. No one’s voice comes out on top—you’re just adding to the pile of conversation and opinion and question that others across history have had. But instead of keeping your inquiry to the dinner table, you get to your desk, and start writing… Adaptation is the answer to the question: If you could have dinner with any writers, living or dead, who would it be? I would have dinner with all dead writers. And so, I have to keep adapting their plays to remain close.

I think this piece of writing from Emma is pretty perfectly expressed. I wouldn’t personally feel the need to adapt it. But maybe someday, someone will.