On Adaptation (revisited)

The Odyssey (2026)
Directed by Christopher Nolan

As we drove across the country this summer, for our annual visit to Maine, my wife made plans to spend the night in Albany, arriving in time to catch a screening of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. She taught that poem to first year high school students for several seasons, so she is quite familiar with the work, while I am not. But I like Nolan, the cast is (as the kids say) stacked, and I was looking forward to it.

Not only did I enjoy the film, I was moved. Like, seriously, when was the last time I was made to deeply feel something, watching a movie? I experienced a deep melancholy, a feeling of great loss. I was troubled. I still am. I’ve been thinking about it for two weeks.

And the memes are killing me, particularly those that focus on Robert Pattinson.

Those trolls who were prepared to bury it at the box office may have been excited to learn that Emily Wilson, scholar and recent translator of a best-selling version of The Odyssey also hates it, but for diametrically opposing reasons. They hate that it has a diverse cast, she says it isn’t diverse enough. They say it has a “woke” message, she says it has no message at all.

Anyway, it’s a fucking blockbuster, on track to break one billion in global box office on its third weekend in theaters. What are ya gonna do?

Adaptations are a puzzle, transforming a piece from one medium to another. What to keep, what to lose, what to emphasize, what to ignore. And what to outright change – and that’s certainly going to be contentious to someone.

Nosferatu by Jim Shepard (1998)

This summer I have been reading Nosferatu, Jim Shepard’s 1998 novel about German film director F.W. Murnau. Drawing from historic record, it is fiction told (largely) from Murnau’s first person perspective, about his upbringing, his time as a pilot in World War One, and becoming the celebrated director of Nosferatu, The Last Man and Tabu. It is also the story of one man’s struggles with passion and guilt in a time when his relationships were literally a crime.

Adapting Bram Stoker’s supernatural saga Dracula into a visual medium to create Nosferatu at the nascence of the motion picture era was an artistic challenge, and several of Murnau’s experiments with light and shadow are iconic while other seemingly clever tricks with slower frame rates and reverse exposure today seem a bit silly, taking the edge off Max Schreck’s horrifying performance as the titular character.

In Shepard’s novel, the director laments to his journal the static nature of the camera – early cameras were huge and heavy – and how he wished it could move. In a later film, The Last Man (also known as The Last Laugh) Murnau either pioneered or pushed forward many schemes to get the camera to do just that; to pan, to track, the zoom, to swing, even. If those methods had been available to him in 1921, who knows how much more affecting his vampire film may have been.

The Machine Stops (2026)

Last week (still on vacation) a few of us headed out to see a local theater production. The day before, the wife and I took a wrong turn through a village and I was surprised to see a large banner advertising a stage adaptation of The Machine Stops, the early 20th century science fiction short story with which I have a long personal history, producing a radio drama of Eric Coble's stage adaptation for our NPR affiliate, and even making reference to it in And Then You Die.

Sticking out of the program was a letter-size page of director's notes explaining his thoughts about the story and how this production came into being. Hot take? Don’t do this. Telling people what to think about the thing they are about to see just before they see it is never a good idea.

That's what your blog is for.  

Reading it over – after the performance – did clear up a few questions. It was originally a thirty-five minute adaptation, rich with movement and sound and style and passion, performed by high school students, created for a high school theater festival. The costumes, lighting, the ensemble choreography were all very effective in telling E.M. Forster’s classic tale of a future when mankind has chosen to live underground, apart from one another, all of their necessities served by the Machine. And it was all right there in this production – especially powerful were the constant droning sounds of the Machine, created entirely by the voices of the ensemble, making their sudden absence all the more startling when, well. Spoiler alert. The Machine Stops.

Unfortunately (checks director’s notes) in order to serve an adult audience, and to expand the slight original material to an hour, the production had been expanded to include laborsome tangential stories meant to incorporate modern relevance, to wit; opinions about Covid, quarantine, and Liberal government overreach.

Really, I want you to imagine enjoying a seamless and well-executed multidisciplinary performance that comes to an abrupt stop every ten minutes so that company members in street clothes can drag a chair and a table onto a well-designed set, and perform seemingly unrelated and obvious agitprop under a nondescript spot before moving on. It’s crazy.

I bet the original high school version went over like gangbusters, and those young people deserved it.

There have been several summers when I would be here, on vacation, and also using that time to conduct research for plays. One year I was reading books on the Globe Theatre, and the voyage of the Sea Venture and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Another, it was all about the Lusitania, the “Great Silence” and even more about World War One. Those were for assignments, or commissions, what have you. Most of the adaptations.

This summer I have been reading and re-reading a certain novel, and like The Machine Stops, it is another work of early 20th century science fiction. This one was, shortly after it was written, adapted into a classic silent film, one which I would like to adapt into a stage play. 

And there are perils in adapting early science fiction: Do you play it straight, which (depending on the work) may seem dated, and lack the desired sense of immediacy? Do you entirely update it, as many modern films have done (see: Spielberg's War of the Worlds or Will Smith in I, Robot) and become something entirely other than what fans of the work are expecting? And how much do you push your idea of what the message of the story may be, to the alienation of certain audiences, as with The Odyssey, or this local production of The Machine Stops?

It is a voyage upon which I look forward to embarking.

See also: On Adaptation (2011)

The Machine Stops (radio drama)

Senior year in high school, Mr. Knapp assigned E.M. Forster's short story The Machine Stops. What seemed charmingly prescient in 1986 has become alarmingly so in the almost thirty years that have passed.

In brief. two hundred years into the future (the year 2109, according to Forster, best known for novels like Howard's End, A Room With a View and Passage to India) humanity will have destroyed the surface of the planet, and created a self-exiled under the surface of the planet where every individual human lives their existence in single room where all necessities are provided by The Machine.

No one desires to come into direct contact with anyone else, all communication is conducted through The Machine. They spend all leisure time (which is to say, all non-resting or feeding time) staring into the screen, through which they communicate and receive thoughts, messages and "ideas".

To my teenage mind, this was a remarkable turn-of-the-century concept of television. I had no idea of how computers and what we would later call the Internet would occupy our potential for expression or communication, and the similarity between Forster's world and this is much more accurate than that of Wells or even Bradbury.

However, let us return to 1986. Mr. Knapp asked what contemporary event came to mind when reading this story. A recent (two weeks ago) return to my alma mater reminded me of how reticent my contemporaries are to volunteering responses. So I do not believe my memory is too inaccurate when I suggest that a fat second or two went by, no one answered, and I finally put my hand up to suggest, "Chernobyl?"

Yes, that is exactly what he was suggesting. The Chernobyl disaster occurred on April 26. (Side note, at Prom that year we were served Chicken Kiev, which made for a number of tasteless jokes.) Since that time, the threat of and benign disinterest in global climate change suggests that it will not take any specific "accident" to drive us underground.

Also, too ... in reference to our capacity for viewing as a solitary intellectual endeavor, our English teacher inquired about any or all solitary activities, and whether they were not in and of themselves, selfish activities, even if they were arguably healthful. He was and is a marathon runner. Hours and hours on the road, away from his growing children, wasn't that inherently self-involved, even if it didn't render him on of Forster's pale, formless blobs of humanity?

This was an element I made reference to in my solo performance And Then You Die (How I Ran A Marathon in 26.2 Years). Since that time I have questioned my pursuit of running and how much time it takes from my family. I have since reconciled that fact that every minute I spent exercising gives back two that may be lost to a sedentary lifestyle.

In any event, this was one of the formative works of my youth. In my 30s, I thought occasionally of adapting a play from this material. Fortunately for me, Eric Coble did it first.

Commissioned by the Hiram College Center for Literature, Medicine and the Biomedical Humanities, Eric wrote a one-act stage play, which was presented at a symposium at Hiram and later at the Ingenuity Festival in Cleveland in 2005. I missed those productions, but asked Eric if I could read it. Centering as it does on two protagonists, Vashti and her son Kuno, with a dozen or more voices coming through The Machine, I felt it would make an excellent radio drama.

Following the success of our radio version of I Hate This in late 2005, WCPN producer Dave DeOreo asked, and now, what next? I suggested The Machine Stops. Then I asked Eric.

Creating this show was a particular delight, involving as it did some of my favorite voice talents (Jazmin Corona, Tim Keo, Nick Koesters, RaSheryl McCreary, Dawn Youngs) and giving Dennis Yurich the chance to create some truly delicious themes and sound effects. In particular, the subtle, throbbing humming of The Machine was unsettling in the extreme.

Also, we employed a number of Foley effects, executed by Kelly Elliott, inspired by the works of Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and Terry Gilliam (Brazil), among others.

Be sure to listen to the Q&A with playwright Eric Coble at the end of the broadcast. The reference to MySpace may startle you.