adapting to the right medium

Last night, I watched John Krasinski’s film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.  I should say up front that I have never read the book.  My previous experience with the content was from another adaptation, a theatrical production that John Krasinski knew as well.

So this should be an interesting post… comparing two adaptations into different media without knowing the source material.  And I must distinguish between the quality of the adaptation and the appropriateness of its medium.

I’ll begin with the theatrical adaptation.  Picture yourself, if you will, at Brown University. In addition to the official theatre department productions and the various plays put on by student groups, occasional enterprising students mounted shows independent of any producing body.  These often happened in the upstairs space of the student theatre—a rehearsal room come lobby come rec room—dark and poorly maintained. In the early 2000s.

It was in this space that Chris Hayes (now Washington editor of The Nation) directed an adaptation of Brief Interviews.  Just a serious of monologues performed with a chair, sparse lighting, and pages in hand if the actors had not memorized their parts.  It was a who’s who of the best male acting talent at Brown.

I went to see the production with two girlfriends, fully intending on going to a party afterward.  Our experience in the theatre that night was so raw and powerful, disturbing, dare I say it—hideous—that our plans for the rest of the evening were abandoned.  We returned to my dorm room to drink rum into oblivion in silence.

Chris Hayes’ production was unapologetic.  It put forward a number of men’s stories for the audience to judge and to judge themselves by.  I can’t say whether it had the same feel as Wallace’s work, but I can say it is in my top five most affecting nights in the theatre.

John Krasinski performed one of the monologues that night.

So it was with a great deal of anticipation that I watched his film adaptation yesterday (with an associate producer nod to Chris Hayes). 

Alas.

By giving the interviews a framing device—Julianne Nicholson is a grad student interviewing men while coping with her own ex-boyfriend’s infidelity—the content was diluted.  Cheapened.  Context robbed the monologues of their ferocity.  And this particular frame left me feeling like this was supposed to be a romantic comedy that never got romantic or comedic.

The monologue performed by Dominic Cooper’s character in the movie was the climax of the theatrical production for me.  It’s brutality has only ever been rivaled for me by Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman.  But with the context of an angry student trying to fight a bad grade (or is he really reaching out for help?), it became overwrought.  John Krasinski’s monologue about the hippie rape victim becomes insipid when it is his excuse for cheating on his girlfriend.  Alas, the frame was poorly crafted.  The movie, disappointing.

But I wonder whether it would have been possible to create any film adaptation that would do the work justice.  A modern American movie version cannot allow a series of disjointed monologues and any plot threading them together softens some of the ragged edges. 

And then there is the lack of being present in a movie.  Theatre’s power is in its presence.  In the audience being in the room and sharing the experience with the performers.  Theatre makes the audience complicit in the production.  It implicates them while film distances.  (I am now thinking of Oskar Eustis making the same argument in a dramaturgy class at Brown.)

I write about Brief Interviews here, not because I felt like ranting about a disappointing movie, but because it has led me to think about medium.  Film was the wrong medium for an adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.  On the other hand, I have read plays and thought, “why is this a play and not a novel?”  

There are stories and experiences better suited to particular media and that is something, as a writer, to think about.