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An insightful look into the adaptation of Saul Bellow's novel, The Adventures of Augie March, for the stage by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, David Auburn. The novel, set in Chicago during the 1930s, follows the journey of Augie March, a young Russian Jewish immigrant, as he navigates life and seeks to grow up and away from home. information about the main characters, the playwright's approach to adapting the book, and the author's background and influence.
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Photo: Sebastian Arboleda, Chaon Cross, Stef Tovar, John Judd, Patrick Mulvey, Kai Ealy, Marilyn Dodds Frank, Neil Friedman, BrittneyLove Smith, Luigi Sottile (Michael Brosilow).
Young Augie March is a product of the Great Depression: plucky, resourceful, searching for love, and striving to grow up and away from home. Through odd jobs and encounters with unique characters, Augie explores what it takes to succeed in the world as a true individual. The Adventures of Augie March is an epic coming-of-age story that bridges continents and stages of life, exuding the endearing confidence of a boy taking in a complex world. TIME, PLACE & SETTING The main setting is Chicago in the 1930s. Augie travels from Chicago to Mexico, Italy and even shipwrecked in the Atlantic Ocean. CHARACTERS The novel has more than 35 characters. The adaptation remains true to the book’s epic form by keeping a large number of characters, as well. ● BASTESHAW: A ship’s carpenter. ● REBECCA MARCH: Augie’s blind mother. ● GEORGE (GEORGIE) MARCH: Augie’s younger brother, born with a mental disability. It is an open question whether George understands what his family members are saying about him. He is affectionate, gentle and easily frightened. ● SIMON MARCH: Augie’s older brother. ● GRANDMA LAUSCH: An imperious and formidable Russian-Jewish émigré from Odessa, Grandma Lausch boards with the March family and tyrannizes over them. ● KREINDL: A shrewd and enterprising Austro-Hungarian veteran of World War I. Kreindl works as a street vendor, matchmaker, a purveyor of stolen goods and sells rum for bootleggers. ● FIVE PROPERTIES: A Russian Jewish immigrant to Chicago, Five Properties served in World War I with the American forces, driving transport wagons for the U.S. Army in Poland and fighting at the Battle of Chateau Thierry. ● CLEM TAMBOW: Clem is Augie’s high school classmate. The son of a Russian Jewish local political fixer, Clem prefers not to work or attend class. Unemployed, addicted to cigars, and fond of spending the day in bed, he entertains himself by strolling with a cane through the streets of Humboldt Park, speaking in a plummy British accent and affecting an aristocratic manner. (Tambow means ‘abyss’ or ‘deep pool’ in Russian.) ● STEVE “THE SAILOR” BULBA: Bulba is Augie’s beefy, dangerous and untrustworthy high school classmate. When not in school menacing his physically smaller peers, Bulba is a denizen of Einhorn’s poolroom, where he likes to sit in a shoeshine chair and watch the older men play games of snooker. ● WILLIAM EINHORN: Wheelchair-bound William Einhorn is a teacher and mentor to Augie. ● TILLIE EINHORN: Tillie is a benignly self-satisfied, unperturbable, uncomplicated person. Bellow describes her well-coiffed head as being “mostly physically endowed”; in other words, she has more hair than wit.
CHARLES NEWELL: When did you first encounter Saul Bellow’s work, particularly this novel, The Adventures of Augie March? DAVID AUBURN: I think Seize the Day was the first Bellow I ever read. I read Herzog before Augie March, but Augie was the one I connected to most strongly, at least as a 20-something person. It’s an accessible novel for a young person; it’s a picaresque tale of a young kid coming-of-age in Chicago, and it traces his life until, very roughly, the time of the book’s publication, which is the early 50s. It’s Augie telling his story, and he encounters seemingly everyone in Chicago—it’s the great Chicago novel in many ways, and it’s a very easy book to sort of get lost in, to be swept up in. There’s this vast canvas, and it’s immensely likeable and loveable. CN: Can you explain what it is about the novel that you first thought about when adapting it? DA: Before I proposed it to you, I had a number of impulses. One, just love of the work, and also the feeling that it was overflowing with great roles for actors. There are hundreds of characters in the book, and they’re all indelible, and the language with which they speak is both realistic and earthy and sort of magical and poetic. I think that the idea of that language in actors’ mouths was what excited me. CN: And you’ve chosen select characters from the hundreds that Augie encounters. How did you make the choice of which characters, and how does that help tell the story that you want to tell in the play? DA: One of the hardest things about this has been having to forego using so much wonderful stuff, and I have a feeling that a lot of people will say “Why didn’t you include…?” because there are so many wonderful characters. It ultimately became a question of selecting the ones that I thought served the point of each individual episode with the most narrative or dramatic force, and occasionally combining characters in the book into single figures, elements of them into single figures, but I still lie awake at night wondering if I’ve made a mistake in leaving out this episode or wondering how we can get this other bit in, because there are so many wonderful pieces. CN: Let’s talk about the Bellow language. You can spend so much time on a single page just digesting it and understanding it. How did you bring the heightened language into characters’ voices? DA: There are a number of mute or semi- mute characters in the book. So I thought, let’s let these characters very occasionally and strategically voice the insights or the descriptions that Augie is coming to but doesn’t quite have the language to say himself, because he’s young, he’s still in formation. His brother Georgie, for example, who’s all but mute, can suddenly speak with the eloquence that Augie himself is kind of reaching for, aspiring to. It’s a device that I’m really excited about. I think it will be thrilling because you feel the complexity of the language, it incorporates it in a way that doesn’t make it a roadblock to the dramatic action, and it helps us see how Augie is understanding his circumstances.
CN: Going back to the early drafts that you first sent us, take us through a little bit of that journey. Were there moments when the adaptation seemed either unlocked or locked up? DA: It was very hard to begin, because there are no scenes as such in the book. There are countless incidents, but you might have what amounts to a full scene or episode spread out across a hundred pages. If you go looking for a discreet scene that defines the relationship between Simon and Augie, for example, you’re not going to find one. It took a while, but I eventually got a sense of at least the kinds of pieces that should be in the play. I wanted a big piece about Augie’s childhood, a big piece that takes place when he’s in this sort of young adult period and hanging out with students, you want a big piece in Mexico, you want a big piece post-Mexico. At a certain point, having a mental map of what the play could become helped a lot. CN: How about the journey you took to understand Bellow the man, and Bellow the writer? DA: I saw Bellow occasionally when I was in school here, I would see him working around campus. There’s a new biography by Zachery Leader, which is very comprehensive. The material about his childhood is especially useful, since many of the characters in Augie are based at least in some part on people that he knew, and it’s illuminating to know a bit about the real people he supposedly drew from. The book keeps pitting Augie, who is a kind of searcher, against these people of great certainty, these characters who have these sort of monumental worldviews, and are convinced of the direction that their life and other people’s lives should take. Bellow’s real brother was the prototype for the character Simon. The energy in that figure, and Augie’s relationship to him, informs the dynamic of the whole book, and of the play—that dilemma of a questing, questioning person being drawn into and resisting, or not, the pull of a very powerful personality. CN: If you could ask Bellow a question when adapting, what would you want to ask him? DA: What does there have to be an eagle for? [Laughs] I’m joking. That’s a line from the book. I love the eagle, the outrageousness and craziness and power of that whole sequence. It’s key to the book and we wanted to make certain it was central to the play. CN: How do you think Bellow would respond to the stage adaptation of his novel? DA: Bellow did write a play and he liked the theatre, so my hope is he’d be receptive to what we’ve done. I’ve certainly done it with every intention of being true to his sensibility as I understand it. To watch a video about hearing the playwright talk about the adaptation, visit this link: https://youtu.be/PDMO6C--670. THEATRICAL ADAPTATION The Oregonian: From page to stage: tricks of the trade in adapting theater from books By Marty Hughley | Link: https://bit.ly/2B05rJ
“I always liked the way that provided another layer for the actor to inhabit the character, another way to get at subtext and intention,” she says. Actors, designers, musicians and so on share the weight in carrying a story from page to stage. “That’s the beautiful part — you are not adapting the book alone,” Acito says. “As a novelist, I have to create the field of flowers, the streets full of people. If I’m writing a play, that can be three lines – haiku for the stage designer to take off from.” Acito also points out that most novels deal at length with the internal states of their characters, whereas theater is external, relying on action, or at least dialogue. “And what’s fascinating on the page can be inactive and boring on the stage.” But that’s one of the places where the real writerly art of adaptation comes in. “You have to ask: What is at the core of this story, what makes it operate, and how do I put that onstage,” says Posner, who’ll be back in Portland later this year to stage “And So It Goes,” his adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut short stories, at Artists Repertory Theatre. “If there’s something in the story that has to be expressed, you have to find the best possible way for that to live onstage, whether that involves music, poetry, projection, narration.” It’s important, too, to recognize that trying to recreate a book onstage is a fool’s game. “Anyone who says they can adapt a novel without losing nuance and texture and detail is just lying to you,” Posner says. ‘You can’t come close to it.” On the other hand, a theatrical adaptation opens a story up to other ways of telling, other sensations, other ways of layering emotions and ideas. “It’s successful,” Hunter says, “if it delivers the story that the audience expects to hear, but at the same time brings something fresh to it and helps you see it anew.” (from OregonLive.com) ABOUT THE BOOK’S AUTHOR First to Knock, First Admitted: The Adventures of Saul Bellow Court Theatre’s Resident Dramaturg Nora Titone shares how author Saul Bellow's upbringing as a Jewish Russian immigrant in Chicago influenced the writing of his novel, THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH.
1. Immigrant Saul Bellow arrived with his family in Chicago on July 4, 1924, smuggled by bootleggers across the border from Canada. He was nine years old. He would remain an “illegal alien”—we would now say, “undocumented immigrant”—until the age of 27.
Bellow was born in 1915 in Lachine, Quebec. His parents were Russian Jews. They had originally come to Canada to flee anti-Semitic violence and political persecution in their home city of St. Petersburg, Russia. The Bellow family arrived on American soil two short months after the U. S. Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, a drastic and sweeping revision of federal immigration policy. The new law slammed the door on a tide of humanity that had been flowing to America since the late 19th-century, ending the greatest era of mass migration to the United States in its history. From 1880 to 1924, waves of newcomers, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe powered the rapid growth of Chicago. The city’s population quadrupled in thirty years’ time, growing from 500,000 residents in 1880 to over 2 million in 1910. By 1924, when Bellow took up residence with his family in the Russian Jewish enclave of Humboldt Park, 70% of Chicago residents were foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents. His whole life, Bellow retained a vivid impression of the first day he spent in America: July 4,
rushed out of me.” The novel’s language came to his mind so swiftly, he remembered, “All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.”
3. Mythologist While Bellow transmuted the phrasings and cadences of Chicago’s immigrant residents into a new kind of heightened literary language, he also likened their personhood to figures of myth and history. The cast of characters populating Augie’s street-level world are compared to gods and heroes of Greek mythology, or heroes from the annals of world history. Simon, Augie’s body-building older brother, is afflicted with bouts of insanity like his mythological correlate, Hercules. The orating, wheelchair-using real estate broker William Einhorn is at once equated with Hephaestus, the blacksmith God of Invention, and President Franklin Roosevelt. Grandma Lausch, physically infirm but ruthlessly tyrannical, is compared to Emperor Timur, the 14th-century conqueror of Asia and heir to Genghis Khan. Rebecca March, Augie’s blind, incapacitated mother stands with the many mortal women in Greek mythology who, seduced and abandoned by Zeus, give birth to demigods. Augie himself is likened to Alcibiades, legendary orator of 5th-century B.C.E. Athens, beloved by the gods for his charisma and gift of self-expression. Bellow suggests gods and geniuses walk the streets of Chicago, reincarnated as immigrants and workers. With immigrants from the “old world” no longer free to enter America, this promise is forestalled. Bellow begins the novel with a quote from Heraclitus, the 5th-century B.C.E. philosopher: Heraclitus says that “a man’s character is his fate”— not race, ethnicity or physical endowments. The publication of The Adventures of Augie March in 1953, when he was 38 years old, launched Saul Bellow’s reputation as a novelist and established the future Nobel Laureate’s literary renown. Congress, meanwhile, would not end the exclusionary quota system imposed by the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act until 1965. The opening lines of Augie March — I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent— stand as Bellow’s testament to the city that shaped him as a writer, and to thee liberating potential of the American immigrant experience. ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT David Auburn is an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter who lives in New York City. His plays include: The Adventures of Augie March , based on the Bellow novel (Court Theatre 2019), Lost Lake (Manhattan Theatre Club 2014), The Columnist (MTC/Broadway 2012), and Proof (2001 Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, New York Drama Critics Circle Award). Films include The Girl in the Park (writer/director), Georgetown , and The Lake House. Stage directing credits include Long Day's Journey into Night (Court Theatre, Chicago); The Petrified Forest, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Anna Christie , A Delicate Balance , Period of Adjustment , Sick (all Berkshire Theatre Group); and the Off-Broadway world premiere of Michael Weller’s Side Effects (MCC).
David Auburn’s play Proof premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club in May 2000, and opened at Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre on October 24, 2000. Proof won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He is also the recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Grant, Helen Merrill Playwriting Award. and Joseph Kesselring Prize for Drama.
