How I turned my novel into a play
(And it only took 25 years)
I began as a playwright, not a fiction writer. The first words I can remember writing were in a drama for the Cub Scouts. This guy comes out pushing a cart and starts yelling, "Ice cream! Ice cream! Every flavor! Vanilla! Chocolate! Strawberry! Lamb chop!"
I even decided on a career in the theater. Alfred Hitchcock handed me the Samuel Goldwyn Award in Playwriting for a Holocaust drama that I wrote while pursuing my master's in theater arts at UCLA. I ended up with a doctorate of fine arts in playwriting from the Yale Drama School. The wee George S. Kaufman, with his witty lamb chops, was about to take Broadway by storm.
Why didn't I? Laziness, I fear. My first plays weren't taken anywhere, but my first short stories were. I began to write more and more of them, they all got printed, and I just let inertia -- or is it momentum? or is it ego? -- carry me entirely into the world of fiction. Not that I didn't look back: Careful readers will find a play hidden, or not so hidden, in each of my novels, including "King of the Jews," in which an entire long chapter is devoted to a staging of "Macbeth." I had, it seems, plenty of nostalgia for the craft I had left behind.
"King of the Jews" appeared in 1979. It was, and is, an extraordinarily controversial novel. Not only did it explore the issue of how a Jewish ghetto council in Nazi-occupied Poland was forced to collaborate with the Germans, but it did so in a lighthearted tone that drove the same people who now equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism quite wild. Tragicomedy about the Holocaust is fine, as long as there is no comedy. But the book persisted: Translated into 11 foreign languages, it has never gone out of print; now Boston Playwrights' Theatre is giving my adaptation of "King of the Jews" its first full staging, starting Wednesday, with a brilliant cast of Equity actors.
How this production came about is another tale of arrested momentum. Perhaps because "King of the Jews" was only my second novel, it seemed natural to try to turn it into a play. A year or so after publication, I did. The old Phoenix Theater in New York gave it a wonderful public reading, with Wallace Shawn and 24 other actors playing the 25 parts. There was a good deal of interest in mounting a regular production, but before I could complete the required revisions, the Phoenix (perhaps at the prospect of doing a play with two dozen roles) went bankrupt. It has not risen from the ashes.
Over the years, I continued to work on the manuscript. Through the kindness of the Boston Playwrights' Theatre I was able to have more public readings, always with the idea of trying both to shrink the number of parts and to narrow the broad focus of the novel to the moral heart of a play. Finally, some eight months ago, I arrived at what I thought was the final version: a drama with just 12 characters, in which the first act focused on choosing the Jewish council, or Judenrat, and the second on how those simple people, waiters and musicians and cooks, struggle with the inhuman demand of their oppressors to turn over the names -- any names -- of 100 of their fellow Jews.
Well, I have had to think again. There is not a single page of my definitive manuscript that has not been criss crossed in red circles and arrows and the despairing X's of abandoned lines. Even before rehearsals began, the producer, Kate Snodgrass, and the director, Jon Lipsky, began to pull and tug at the structure of the play. Why was this Trumpelman, the leader of the Jews, sitting off in a corner so much of the time? Couldn't he act more like a king and less like a clown? Over time I came to see that what I had thought of as an ensemble piece, with all its players having essentially equal parts, had to be transformed. The Judenrat remains an ensemble, but one that requires, and now has, a conductor.
There was more for the above-mentioned egotist to learn. When I left home in Los Angeles for college in the East, Uncle Julie (who with his twin brother, my father, Philip, wrote "Casablanca" and 50 other marvelous movies) gave me a list of four items for a successful life: Buy an overcoat at Fenn-Feinstein, try the mushroom-barley at Ratner's, marry a rich girl so you can sleep to 12. The last item was "Never listen to an actor." That was the only point about which he was mistaken. All 12 actors have come to me with suggestions and complaints; it didn't take me long to realize that almost all of them were directed at some lapse of motivation, some note that was false to a character, to the world of occupied Poland, or to the atmosphere of the play. Hence that palimpsest of swirls , arrows , and X's.
The process has been humbling; it has also been a delight. So much so that I have begun to wonder whether my professional life has taken a 40-year detour. For me, writing a novel is, on average, six years of solitary confinement. But it takes only six months to write a play and, if you're lucky, the balance of the year is spent in collaborative effort with people who have a heightened ability to sense the inner lives of others, along with access to emotions the rest of us leave buried for the duration.
A last note: "Macbeth" isn't the only drama that found its way into "King of the Jews." My play, like Sartre's "No Exit," places human beings in a situation they cannot escape. And like the characters in "Waiting for Godot" they must act, but they cannot; they cannot act, but they must. It is a dilemma into which no human being ought to be thrust, but one in which history (including the history of the Lodz ghetto, on which this play is based) has all too often put its largest and least significant actors. Only imagination -- the exercise, for example, of putting on plays -- can help us avoid such a trap. It has been a privilege to share in the staging of this drama.
