Theater and the novel may be familiar bedfellows, but novelists themselves rarely take on the role of playwright.
Two current Chicago productions highlight unusual instances of the obliteration of that Maginot Line. “The Day Room,” now at Remains Theatre, is celebrated novelist Don DeLillo’s lone excursion into the terrain of the theater. “Black Snow,” opening May 10 at the Goodman Theatre, is inspired by the late Soviet novelist Mikhail Bulgakov’s uproarious, brutal and dehumanizing experiences as dramatic adaptor of one of his own novels.
On the surface, DeLillo’s play is the more straightforward exercise, a rare excursion by an established novelist into the foreign terrain of playwrighting. The author, who describes himself as private but not reclusive, says in a rare interview that his brief 1986 foray into theater was a delightful escape and change of pace.
“My works often begin in my mind with images, and for `The Day Room,’ I had an image of a man on a hospital bed, menaced by shadowy figures in the background, the entire scene taking place on a stage,” DeLillo says. “That’s how I knew immediately I wasn’t dealing with an idea for a short story or novel. The image itself was on stage.
“Those images, for all my works, originate in different ways, sometimes at street level, with people I see, voices I hear, and at other times, in an old, vague image that over the years develops a face and body,” he adds.
In the case of “Libra,” his fictionalized treatment of conspiracy theories and President Kennedy’s assassination, it was news imagery, he says, “some 20 years of history pushing me toward my typewriter.” With “Mao II,” his latest novel, it was two photographs, one of novelist J.D. Salinger snapped unexpectedly in his seclusion, and the other of a mass wedding of thousands of members of the Unification Church-two images that supply important story lines in the book.
In his play “The Day Room,” his image of a hospital bed led to a personal, dreamlike, poetic drama in two acts, each half set in a different, partially surreal setting. The first is in a hospital, where patients and doctors may all be lunatics, and the second is in a hotel room boasting even more bizarre, outlandish residents.
“A book is finished,” DeLillo writes in “Mao II.” “A play is never finished.”
He admits the line came from experience. “I wrote the first act of `The Day Room’ quickly, and I’ve made only minor changes since. But the second act isn’t finished to this day, which doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily get back to it. But there came the time it had to be delivered to a set of actors. Your work for the theater eventually becomes material used and embellished by other people.”
Some novelists would find that fact discomforting. DeLillo didn’t. Working closely with the drama’s first production, present at rehearsals nearly every day when “Day Room” premiered at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre, DeLillo says, “It was refreshing, just what I needed. I’d been working on `Libra’ and I welcomed a departure from the world of social conspiracies and assassinations. Or rather, let’s say, I left one world of conspiracy and entered a more palatable one.
DeLillo’s experiences are clearly in stark contrast to Bulgakov’s. Today the great Russian writer is beloved as a novelist. His posthumous masterpiece, “The Master and Margarita,” is obligatory reading for undergraduates and others interested in 20th Century literature. Oddly enough, his novels were mostly banned in his lifetime (he died in 1940) and his only success came early, during the 1920s, with a play called “The Days of the Turbins,” which Bulgakov adapted from his novel “The White Guard.”
“Black Snow” is a much later fictional account of his experiences adapting that work, a novel written in the late ’30s, when the playwright was impoverished and dying. It tells of his adventures and misadventures with the Moscow Art Theatre, which he calls the Independent Theatre, and of his battles with theater bureaucrats, general managers, literary associates, casting people, actors and the legendary Konstantin Stanislavsky, whom Bulgakov calls Ivan Vasilievich.
In adapting the Bulgakov work for the stage, actor and playwright Keith Reddin describes his task with a sentence worthy of another literary great, Gertrude Stein: “I’m a playwright adapting a novel by a playwright who adapted his novel into a play and then wrote a novel about adapting it. I’m a guy writing an adaptation about a guy who wrote his own adaptation.”
In practice, though, he sees the work’s virtues more accessibly. “We joke that it’s a sort of Soviet `Noises Off.’ “
The fictional rehearsals, Reddin says, are fraught with mishaps and tempestuous artistic differences. “We see Stanislavsky subject Bulgakov’s pla to his famous method, and Bulgakov believes the play is thrown out the window in the process. Instead of what’s in the script, the actors perform exercises as if on an imaginary cloud.”
Strangely, Reddin faced the same second-act woes that beset novelist DeLillo: no ending. Bulgakov died leaving “Black Snow” unfinished. The story ends just as rehearsals begin. Reddin says he took advantage of a wealth of recent Bulgakov scholarship, including first-hand diaries and letters, journals and notes, to come up with his own second act, one he hopes will be faithful to Bulgakov.
“Absurd, surreal, dangerous, dark and funny,” is how Reddin describes the Russian master, adjectives that incidentally apply to DeLillo and “The Day Room,” as well. Reddin and Bulgakov go way back. He first stumbled onto Bulgakov while a student of Frank Galati at Northwestern University, and in 1986 he wrote “Highest Standard of Living,” about a student doing research on Bulgakov in Moscow. He says he’d hoped to adapt “Black Snow” for many years, but considered the idea impractical, needing some 15 actors to play 50 or 60 parts, in a wide variety of locales.
“That’s a big requirement for most theaters, even in New York,” he says. Just over a year ago, the Goodman’s Michael Maggio (who is directing the production here) read some early drafts and the Goodman commissioned the full-length work. So far, institutional theater has proved a godsend, not a hindrance. “I’m lucky,” he confesses.
“Not all literature is stage-worthy,” Reddin says. ” `Black Snow’ has the advantage of being about the theater. There are scenes of actors rehearsing scenes on a stage, scenes within scenes, as it were. It becomes that funny thing of the mirror reflecting the mirror, ad infinitum. But more important is that it’s not just an inside joke, either. It’s a backstage comedy that has something to say about oppression.”
One can only hope Bulgakov, from the great beyond, will at long last agree. To quote DeLillo: “It’s wonderful for a novelist to get out of his room once in a while and engage in a true collaboration.”
