From Stage to Screen, or the 14-Year Itch

Times have changed. Film adaptations of plays were once an inevitability, but for three new screen adaptations, the road to celluloid has been long and winding. “Little Voice,” which opened Friday, based on Jim Cartwright’s London hit “The Rise and Fall of Little Voice,” took six years to make the leap. “Dancing at Lughnasa,” director Pat O’Connor’s powerful rendering of Brian Friel’s Tony Award-winning drama, took seven. “Hurlyburly,” David Rabe’s controversial hit, took 14 to reach its Christmas Day opening.

What’s the problem? Well, let’s put it this way. How many of the following stage-to-screen efforts have you seen in recent years: “Bodies, Rest and Motion,” “Oleanna,” “Orphans,” “North Shore Fish,” “Death and the Maiden,” “The House of Yes,” “Curse of the Starving Class”? If your answer is one, none, or “say what?” you’re in good company.

The recent box-office kiss of death is only one of many warnings ignored by filmmakers in their determination to capture a favorite stage experience for all time. If “Little Voice,” “Lughnasa” and “Hurlyburly” captivate audiences, it will be because they have successfully understood these time-tested rules:

1. Movies move, plays talk. Revealingly, the truly great silent movies of the ‘20s were not adaptations of plays but narratives, often based on epic novels, which exploited the panoramic, scenic and experimental possibilities of the medium.

2. Movies, like novels, tend to be naturalistic. Plays operate in a stylized hyper-reality of time and space. Play-talk is concentrated, poetry disguised as everyday chat. It can sound funny, if not phony, on celluloid. As Pauline Kael said in a 1971 review of the movie version of Chekhov’s “The Seagull”: “A character who is left behind in an early chapter [of a novel] to reappear later on can come and go with ease in a movie, but that poor stage character who exits and waits in the wings for his logical, structured reappearance is likely, in a play, to convey precisely the impression that he has been waiting in the wings.”

3. Movies are a director’s medium. Theater is the kingdom of the wordsmith and, more significantly, the actor. In a movie, the actors’ performances are not fixed until the director has made the last editing changes, selecting from various versions of filmed lines and scenes.

4. Different audiences. Play audiences are, generally speaking, more educated, older and wealthier than movie audiences. With the notable exception of the stampede of junior high school girls for “Titanic,” movies made for box-office appeal are still dictated by the imaginations of teenage and young adult males.

In adapting “Little Voice,” in which Jane Horrocks plays a painfully shy girl named L.V. who copes with an overbearing mother (Brenda Blethyn) by withdrawing into her late father’s pop record collection, director Mark Herman revised the dialogue with those audience differences in mind.

“It’s such an interior piece, and Jim Cartwright writes very theatrical language that would be completely inaccessible to a movie audience. So I retained it in Brenda’s character [the play’s most organically “theatrical”] and replaced it in the others.”

Conversely, Herman needed to underline the theatricality of at least one major element of the play: the mousy L.V.’s stunning facility for impersonating such charismatic performers as Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Billie Holiday. “I had two major doubts about being able to transfer it to the screen. One is that the play mostly takes place in L.V.’s bedroom, which is hardly cinematic. The other is how to capture the excitement of being in the same room with someone doing all those voices.”

One couldn’t find a more contrasting experience to the caressing musicality and mother-daughter axis of “Little Voice” than the bruising, male-dominated world of “Hurlyburly,” in which Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey and Chazz Palminteri play three amigos who abuse their women, betray one another and in general behave very badly.

While the movie’s director, Anthony Drazan, also had to contend with a one-room play (the living room of a Los Angeles home), he insists that “I didn’t want to open up the play for the sake of opening it up. One of the challenges was to take David Rabe’s hyper-real text--this is not straight-ahead reality, this is not ‘Twelve Angry Men’--and see what kind of visual grammar I could employ to complement it.”

There is nothing elaborate or distracting about the house that shelters the Mundy sisters in “Dancing at Lughnasa,” and that’s part of the point.

When a house becomes a silent character as it does in “Hurlyburly,” there is a danger that it will upstage the speaking characters by its detail. Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart” (1986), which was as much about the relationship of three sisters to their four-walled environment as it was about their connection to the past and each other, became a movie about a big, fabulous Victorian. In his 1990 version of “Hamlet” (starring Mel Gibson’s blue eyes), Franco Zeffirelli expended so much energy zooming in and around Elsinore that one came away with the impression that the director had discovered a wonderful old castle and couldn’t wait to share it with the world.

But Shakespeare, unlike other members of the classical fraternity (Chekhov, Ibsen, Moliere, the Greeks), seems to fit into movie shoes comfortably. That may be because his plays roam with a cinematic sweep and fluidity through space and time.

Despite the forbidding challenges, most filmmakers exhibit an enduring--if occasionally patronizing--affection for the theater. Indeed, some of the greatest films of all time are movies about the theater that were never plays but written directly for the screen.

Some of the most entertaining stage-to-screen transfers--think “A Raisin in the Sun” (1961), “Dinner at Eight” (1933), “The Cocoanuts” (1929)--treat the screen like a proscenium, reveling in the text’s inherent staginess, its language and its potential for performance pyrotechnics.

But consider: In the realm of pop entertainment, is there anything more stagy than a Hollywood sitcom shouldered by transplanted New York theater actors like Christine Baranski, Calista Flockhart and David Hyde Pierce? Why? One suggestion: Discouraged by the diminishing audiences for drama on Broadway and the negligible financial rewards off-Broadway, the would-be Ben Hechts and George S. Kaufmans of today take their writing talent directly to TV.

As long as there are one or two plays a year that beat the odds and actually have a life, there will be a producer idealistic--and perhaps foolish--enough to see them to the screen. Like “Hurlyburly,” “Lughnasa” and “Little Voice,” however, they will probably be relegated to the off-Broadway of celluloid, that low-profile, low-budget and high-integrity world of independents. So even if only 7 1/2 people get to see it, those few have a fighting chance of seeing something as faithful and true to the playwrights’ intentions as he or she could ever dream.