The Tom Sawyer Adaptation

This is a rough approximation of my process in adapting Twain's Tom Sawyer into my script.  In the Fall of 2002, Monica Flynn, the Executive Director of Wichita Children's Theatre, asked me to write an adaptation of the novel for their professional touring company's 2003-04 season.  I had written many shows for her theatre (over 20) and knew very well what they were looking for in a show.  

My main obstacle was the fact that, as a kid, I didn't really care much for the story.  I read the book in school (let's put it this way:  I was SUPPOSED to read the book in English class....) and watched the Mickey Rooney film-- and my opinion was that the story was too old-fashioned for my taste.  I grew up in the 1960s in rural Indiana and I wanted spaceships or monsters in my stories.  As an adult, I had come to realize Twain's brilliance (mostly through Hal Holbrook's performance as Twain) -- but not enough to re-read the novel.  Now, I had a reason to read it--REALLY read it.  For quite a while it had been on my "list" of possible new scripts, now I had motivation to get to work on it.

I require one year from the time I agree to write until the time the theatre begins rehearsal.  I take 6 months to research (in the case of adaptations), four months of stewing and pondering in my head, and two months of actual writing and finalizing the script and music.  This may seem a long time, but I'm a stay-at-home-Dad, and my concentration/writing ing time is at a minimum.

I found that I had two major challenges:  

The first was to cut the number of actors needed down to a bare minimum of FIVE,  3 men and 2 women -- that's how many actors the theatre was using for the other show they would be touring at the same time (my "The Wizard of Oz").  They had originally asked it to be FOUR actors, but I refused to try that.  There are over 20 major characters in the novel and many more minor ones.

The second challenge was that since the touring company performs in a lot of school gyms during school days, so the show needed to fit into a typical 50-minute school period.  I needed to cut the show down to 45-55 minutes without having people coming up after the show and saying: "but you didn't include my favorite part!"  An audio book of the unabridged text was 7 hours long, so cutting over 6 hours of the show was a bit overwhelming.  I remembered which parts of the story I liked the most when I was a kid.  To be honest, I tried especially hard to keep those parts in-- sometimes successfully, mostly not.

I knew for the music, I wanted to keep the style in a bluegrass/country feel.  Even though Bluegrass music didn't come into being until the 1920s or 30s,  it just seems the perfect atmosphere for old-time Missouri. 

Since I was to direct the original production (a practice I usually refuse-- but WCT had a scheduling problem with their usual directors), I needed a fresh perspective to look the script over and give me the feedback and perspective normally provided by a director.  John "JB" Boldenow, who has been the original director of most of my shows was kind enough to look it over and gave some valuable direction for me.  Having stared at the script for six months, I was beginning to have tunnel-vision as far as the show was concerned. 

An outline of my "process:"

1.    Read the book
2.    Read Cliffs Notes and all the online reviews, reports, analysis of the story I could find
3.    Imported the text of the novel into my word processor
4.    Added one-sentence descriptions to all the plot elements of the novel text file.
5.    Assigned French Scenes to the text of the novel
6.    Converted Twain's dialogue into script dialogue form
7.    Converted Twain's narration into Narrator dialogue
8.    Began the process of cutting the script down to 45 minutes running time without songs.
            A.  Replaced long sections of narration with shorter recaps
            B.  Replaced scenes with short mention in Narration
            C.  Cut out scenes, plot elements that were generally not deemed crucial to story
9.    Assigned scene locations according to novel vs stage limitations
10.  Drew graphs to visualize the plot sequence with characters, decided what characters to keep based on possible actor assignments.  Decided plot elements according to characters kept, scenery.
11.  Began revising/editing Twains text in dialogue to better "theatrically conform" to rest of adaptation.
12.  Watched Hal Holbrook's "Mark Twain Tonight" and Ken Burns documentary on Twain
13.  Began adding Twain Quotes to his narration to add some "Twain-isms."
14.  Began adding original (hopefully, appropriate) one liners or other humor where possible
15.  Added possible song Titles/descriptions at possible locations in script (trying to disburse them evenly throughout the script).  Most lyrics were written at this time.
16  Sent script to a few trusted colleagues and got feedback, made judicious changes based on that feedback.
17.  Cut the script even more in an attempt to get it within an acceptable performance running time.
18.  Wrote music and adapted the lyrics to fit the music.
19.  Sent the script to my son's 4th grade class and had them read and comment on it.  Many of them had never heard of the story, so they were treating it as a new work-- not as an adaptation.