Every time I go to see a…

Every time I go to see a Rasaka Theatre production, I want to see what one of my stories would look like, acted out. I finally started working on adapting some of the stories to stage this morning. I'm working on a sequence from Bodies in Motion -- right now, it's tentatively titled "The Tin Cup", and is presented in four acts, each act being adapted from a story:

• Seven Cups of Water
• Sister Mary
• A Gentle Man
• Monsoon Day

I did the easiest one first -- "Seven Cups of Water" is pretty theatrical in its staging already. While it's a bit dialogue-light, it does have one talky scene, and there certainly is plenty of action in the rest of the scenes. :-)

I'm not sure how well the others will adapt; they're all so interior. Do I add in a bunch of new dialogue? Interior monologues? Aren't those going to come across as trite and strange? Shakespeare does interior monologues, but I think they're mostly fairly brief, compared to the rest of the dialogue. If an entire act is told in monologue, that seems likely to be tedious.

I'm also not sure how to handle the fact that the two protagonists' stories branch off into separate tales after the end of "Seven Cups" and Act I. Not sure whether to run them as completely separate acts, self-contained, or to perhaps interpolate some of the untold story in the background. I.e., when Sushila is thinking about letting her sister steal the baby in Act II, would it be interesting to have Mangai's life unfolding in pantomime upstage? Or just distracting? I think simultaneously would be distracting, but what if the Sushila scene froze just long enough for us to get a snippet of Mangai's life?

I suspect I'll end up keeping the distinctions clean, truer to the spirit of the stories, but it's fun thinking about the possibility.

I've sent the first draft of Act I to my readers' list; excited to see what they think. (If you're not on my readers' list and want to be, you can always just add yourself to it).