The musical version of Was beginning this weekend as the first offering of Northwestern University’s new American Music Theatre Project isn’t the first theatrical version of Geoff Ryman’s origins-of-Oz novel to be developed on the campus. In 1994 a student production of Was with a script by NU professor Paul Edwards opened to an admiring audience; it was followed in ’96 with a professional production by Roadworks that won critical acclaim. That version got a Jeff award for best adaptation and brought inquiries about other mountings, but Edwards hasn’t been able to get the play onstage again. Ryman, the London-based author of the epic fantasy about L. Frank Baum’s classic tale and the movie based on it, gave permission for the first two productions and then–great and powerful as Oz himself–decided not to allow any more.
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Edwards has been teaching students how to turn literature into drama for 26 years at Northwestern, where he’s associate professor of performance studies. His sojourn in the land of Ryman began when another professor, David Downs, fell under the spell of the 1992 novel and asked him to adapt it for a campus production that Downs would direct. “Compressing Ryman’s novel into a stage play was a challenge,” Edwards says. “Was is a great big many-stranded novel with lots of layers and subplots.” To deal with that complexity, he wrote a script in the chamber-theater style originated by a former teacher of his, onetime NU professor Robert Breen. “This is not a style everybody likes,” Edwards says. “It retains the narrative language of the original source, and very often characters will do a kind of Brechtian speaking of themselves in the third person.” But he thought it was the only way to do justice to the sprawling novel, with its interlocking multiple plots.
This winter Edwards will direct a student production of his adaptation of Madame Bovary. He doesn’t expect to hear from Flaubert.
