Re/constructed Acts: Capturing the Spirit of a Novel

This play in four acts is a meditation and reflection on Isabel Allende's landmark novel. It embraces the themes, characters, landscape, politics, and hidden corners of memory in the novel with a free hand. As with any work adapted from one medium to another, what results is an imaginary encounter between writers and their respective primary forms of expression-a transformation of sensibilities, structure, and soul written with respect for the novel, but with a keen acknowledgment of the difference between the demands of the stage and those of fiction. In this play, as in the novel, time is fluid and moves with the poetic freedom of memory; the stage space is a conduit for the shifting lenses available at any given moment in the story. I've chosen to focus the play on several key figures from the novel and their epic physical, interior, and emotional journeys. Naturally, an authence is going to come to this piece of theatre with their passion and love for the novel, with their own expectations as readers, and their intimate connection to the page. Allende's book is, after all, a contemporary classic, and matters of fidetity always rise when work is transformed from its first medium and voice into quite another. Everyone has their own version of The House of the Spirits in their mind. The close relationship that an author has with their reader in fiction can never really be reproduced on stage. A playwright's voice is only, however significant, one part of a much larger theatrical collaboration that involves actors, designers, musicians, a director, etc. I can only say that my work is faithful to Allende by its honest and bold infidetity: by tackling her exquisite tapestry of family stories and weaving them into something that is essentially concerned with power, sexuatity, censure, narrativity, the writer's consciousness, and the healing of the human spirit. While Allende's novel has been sufficiently burdened with its historical relationship to the genre of magic realism, in bringing The House of the Spirits to the stage, I have sought to recontile this expectation of genre with an embrace of the story's more ambiguous and complex exploration of how human beings move in and out of power, are caught by its allure, use and misuse it, and find themselves again through acts of writing and retrieving history. The ontology of geography courses through my play, and with it too the ontology of that which we call history, which is merely yet another fiction collectively authored by society. In the novel, we see Allende rescue history and stories that have been silenced by bodies broken and censored physically and psychologically. The novel faces the act of writing, the act of making memory flesh, and how it is central to how we think of stories in the first place. In my play, the story of one generation speaks to another, but it begins essentially with Albas body-the woman who embodies her family's history and the woman who rescues her family stories and her own body from extreme threat of erasure. …