the long awaited First Major Project

Explanation

I was granted an opportunity to flex my adaptation skills for this first project. While I was reading “The Book of the Dead” from Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, I realized how theatrical it is. Right off the bat, Danticat uses conversational dialogue to do some exposition, which read like a script in my mind. Danticat also uses a fair amount of imagery and visual description so the reader can picture the scene while they read. It felt natural and fluid to transition “The Book of the Dead” from a short story (chapter? Vignette?) into a stage play.

Beginning the adaptation was tough because of the way Danticat uses flashbacks to reveal prior information to the reader as the story moves forward on its actual timeline. Danticat opens with Ka in the office and gives the reader a flashback of when she and her father arrived at the hotel. Flashbacks seem tough to stage, and could become confusing to the audience if they aren’t staged well enough. I decided to move some pieces around and tell the story chronologically, which seemed to work. Having Ka open the show by narrating as a disembodied voice seemed like a good, dramatic way to pique interest and make the audience watch. I also thought the disembodied voice, although brief, can be read as Ka’s confused struggle with her own identity. Her family is from Haiti, and Danticat makes it sound like Ka is really proud of this, but Ka’s parents have never taken her to Haiti, so she’s never been able to connect with the place she is so proud of.

There are a couple sections from the source material I had cut in order to make it make sense onstage. The issue was mostly narrative and flashbacks that I couldn’t convey through dialogue, but there were also a couple parts I didn’t feel were essential to the story and would just take up time on stage. I cut the whole ending, actually. There was so much narrative that added to the story, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn it into dialogue without being awkward and unrealistic. I wrote another ending, keeping in mind what I considered the key points Danticat conveyed.

I rewrote the moment her father touches his scar and she touches the same part of her face without thinking. I made sure they didn’t see each other because I wanted the audience to know that, although she feels (and probably wants to be) worlds away from him right now, they are connected in a bigger way. I wrote Ka’s mini-monologue to show her controlled grief, hurt, and anger at her father’s life-long lie. I show how she wishes this entire situation had never happened, not because she is embarrassingly empty-handed for Danielle, but because she wouldn’t have had to find out the truth. At the very end, she calls him father instead of Papa for the first time. She feels like she doesn’t know him or herself anymore.

Why does literature matter? is a very difficult question to answer…maybe because the answer hides in plain sight. Literature matters because it’s life. Literature isn’t just a written artifact one reads off of a page. Literature is written narrative, it is plays, it is stand-up sets, it is performance art, it is diary entries, it is photos, it is everything in life that has ever been documented. Literature matters in any medium because it connects us as a society, and I we would not have made it this far evolutionarily without creating and circulating literature and allowing it to connect us.