I recently gave myself a self-lesson on screenwriting by adapting my play A Question of Color into a screenplay ("and visions of Sundance danced in his head"!).  The experience convinced me that every playwright, at least once, should re-draft a stage script into a screen script because the economy imposed by screenwriting flushes out a lot of flabbiness in both language and staging and requires that images speak as loudly as the words -- in fact, more loudly, since it is always the tyrannous eye, and not the ear, that must be pleased at the flickers.

One thing that has always nettled me about stage work is what I consider the over-ripe respect given to something called the "text." Not to be too post-modern about it, but what is a "text"?  At its very basic (at least in what might be called traditional theatre -- pieces like Hamletmachine are in another universe altogether), the "text" means the words on the page (and not necessarily all the words -- how many directors and actors automatically discard the stage directions put in by the playwright?).  The focus then becomes, as Hamlet advises, to speak the words well and suit them to the appropriate actions.  The engine of this kind of text, then, is words, words, words.

But for the most part nature has not built our brain for words -- nature has wired two-thirds of it for vision.  Yet how many thousands of plays depend upon words to get across their ideas and meanings, appealing to (and sometimes press-ganging) the left sides of the audience's brains while the rest of their synapses remain uninvited to snap and crackle.  Language like Shakespeare's verges on music, and music can strike right to the emotional center just the way images can, but most words in plays are not at that level -- we are forced to listen to them rather than see and feel them, aural rather than incarnate.

In screenwriting, a writer cannot stop at the ears.  Robert McKee, in his manual Story, points out that screenwriting is the opposite of stage-writing: one starts with the images, and then layers on words if needed -- language can, in fact, can and must be discarded if it gums up the resonance of the image.

So, in re-drafting Color for the screen, I felt immensely liberated by having to think first about what I wanted to show and then only later about what I wanted to tell.  In fact, doing so helped me solve a few problems in the stage version that I couldn't otherwise unravel because I focused too closely on what the characters were saying and not what they were doing.  I ended up producing a script that more closely matched what I had really wanted to accomplish in the stage play.

And then, even more revealing and rewarding, was back-drafting from the screenplay to the stage script.  I imported a lot of what would be on the screen onto the stage because the vitality given to the action by having to deal solely in images tightened up the stage work immensely.  Scene transitions became smoother, the characters more direct and forceful, the story both clearer and deeper.

I am not judging one way of writing as better or worse than the other. It is not about ranking but about dialectic, the creative push-pull between two different art forms.  The screenplay's devotion to images can impose its own tyranny because a film, unlike a stage play, cannot ever really do anything that hinders some sense of forward (if not always progressive) movement. In a stage play, one can make that stop (asides, monologues, etc.), one can take discontinuous turns and make abrupt shifts (which are other manners of  stopping).

But the text's "authority" (and writers' tendencies to get pause and get "writerly" for their audiences) can also get in the way of the underlying dumb-show of images and movement needed to carry the piece along its emotional and symbolic paths.  Here, screenwriting's demand for active imagery is a fruitful way of resisting the aural regime.

By borrowing what works best in each medium and then blending them as needed, I found that both my screenplay and stage play became much more composed pieces, not some words added to some images added to some music but something integral, integrated, each element's boundary replaced by a bleed so that each had a wholeness that could not be unraveled.  In fact, I would say that doing these kinds of re-translations makes theatre really become theatre as opposed to an outpost of something called reality and realism (which film handles far more effectively than theatre ever can).  It allows theatre to re-capture its essence of a dream-time that brings us closer to the home we call ourselves rather than reportage on the interesting but transient thing we call "reality."

©2002 Michael Bettencourt

Michael Bettencourt has had his plays produced in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles, among others. Continued thanks to his "prime mate" and wife, Maria-Beatriz click here for other Commentary by Michael Bettencourt

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