In Trip to the Small Screen, ‘Far East’ Is Reinvented

A.R. Gurney frankly was nervous about adapting his highly stylized off-Broadway hit “Far East” for the PBS drama showcase “Stage on Screen.

“I thought we were going to kill it,” says Gurney, the award-winning author of such acclaimed plays as “Love Letters” and “The Dining Room.”

“We had to transpose it from the theater, which is a very imaginative medium, to television, which is a highly realistic medium. We had to keep the story line taut and yet make it believable in a television medium without losing the kind of exotic quality we had.”

As difficult as it was for Gurney, he found reinventing “Far East”--which is drawn from his experiences as a naval officer in Japan--an exhilarating challenge. “It was exciting to see if we could do the same dance to different music,” he explains.

Premiering tonight on KCET, “Far East” stars the original off-Broadway cast. Michael Hayden plays Sparky Watts, a young naval officer--an heir to a Milwaukee beer fortune--who while on a tour of duty in Japan in 1954 falls in love with a sweet Japanese woman (Miou). Trying to thwart his love affair is Julia Anderson (Lisa Emery), the unhappy wife of Watts’ captain (Bill Smitrovich). Connor Trinneer also stars as Watts’ buddy, Bob Munger, who is blackmailed by his gay Japanese lover into stealing top-secret documents.

“Far East” was originally staged in the abstract style of Japanese Kabuki theater. “We had the four main actors,” Gurney says. “The rest of the cast was done with very Japanese theatrical devices. . . . This was all done in a kind of high Japanese simplicity.”

A character called the Reader presented the play. “She sat on a platform suspended above a stage,” says Steven Tabakin, the associate producer of drama for “Stage on Screen.”

“She would cast her voice to play all the invisible characters, and clacked her sticks together and played different percussion instruments to indicate the quick scene changes,” Tabakin adds.

Before Gurney began the adaptation, he, director Daniel Sullivan and “Stage on Screen” executive producer Jac Venza had to decide if the style of the play would work on TV. “We all agreed that the theatricality looked phony and fake on television,” Gurney says. “There was an awful lot of back and forth of what was going to be represented realistic and what was going to be abstract,” Tabakin says.

Instead of just four characters and the Reader, Gurney populates the TV version of “Far East” with many more secondary roles and fleshes out the role of Watts’ Japanese lover. In the play, in fact, there was only one brief scene between Watts and his girlfriend.

Still, Gurney says, “some things were lost. In the second act of the play, the captain and his wife are playing golf and that is where they have this big argument. She wants to get rid of the Japanese woman and send her to Tokyo, and all the time they are teeing off and driving down the fairway. But it is all done in a highly stylized way, which you can do on stage.”

But Gurney realized that scene would take too long to play in a realistic manner on TV. “So I had to change all of those scenes so they would take place in bed with the captain and his wife or them having breakfast,” he says. “When we changed the place of the scene, the dialogue [became] different. So that was an example of how we had to rework the play in order to have it work on television.”

No member of the creative team, though, wanted “Far East” to betray its theatrical origins. “The title is ‘Stage on Screen,’ so we felt that we needed to get the sense that this is a play we are putting on television,” Gurney says. “We tried to maintain the stylized quality in the opening moments (which features Miou in her kimono listening to the radio in her room) and the lighting.”

“There was a real effort on everyone’s part to keep that theatricality,” Tabakin echoes. “The decision to shoot [on videotape] with multi-cameras enabled us to move extremely quickly. It is as close to being in the theater as you can get.”

Having the original cast made the whole production move smoothly, Sullivan says, and the play was shot in just nine days at Lifetime Studios in Astoria, Queens in New York.

“Michael Hayden at the time was appearing on Broadway in ‘Cabaret,’ ” Tabakin says. “We were racing the clock to get him out to make his 8 p.m. curtain. It was fast and furious.”

So fast and furious, Gurney was still writing the screenplay during production. “I didn’t really visit the set very much. I am one of those guys, I can’t just sit down with an old laptop on the set and write. I have to hunker down in my own place.”

And his initial fears about doing “Far East” for television have long since disappeared. “I thought so much of the popularity of the play had to do with the form and the freedom you get with the Japanese form. But fortunately, Dan Sullivan is a wonderful director and he focuses on the people and the realism of the situation.”

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“Stage on Screen: Far East” can be seen tonight at 9 on KCET. It is rated TV-PG-D (may be unsuitable for young children with special advisories for suggestive dialogue).