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I've been thinking a lot about the importance of being able to relate to a book, which is something we've kind of been discussing in our Thursday sessions with Prof. Dalke. In my last posting, I said something about it being unfair to Forster to try to push his novel to make it fit our time. 

For another class, I just read the essay "Aiming the Cannon at now: Strategies for Adaptation" by Susan Jonas. Jonas is a director and dramaturg who rewrites classic plays and adapts them for modern times. She asks many of the same questions we've been asking in class: "Why is this considered a classic? What of it is timeless and universal? What is not?" 

She wants to, in her words "infiltrate plays". She wants to use the classics and reshape them to make a point about modern times. Because she is a feminist dramaturg, she wants to give a voice to those left out of the classics, and to those who have been discriminated against for race, gender, or sexual preference. She does this in a variety of ways. She sometimes changes the gender of characters, includes snips of famous speeches, transplants plays to alternate times, and includes lots of alternate media, including music. 

She claims that, because a play was meant for a different audience, if we don't change it for our audience, then our audience will be seeing it differently than intended anyway because they're of a different time.

I kind of agreed with what she was saying. I generally enjoy adaptations of plays set in modern times, providing they're done with the right kind of motivation and research. And I think that with plays you have an option that you don't have with novels. Plays are meant to be done again and again, and a good playwright leaves gaps and intends for his or her plays to be interpreted different ways to keep them fresh. This is different from a novel, especially if we take into consideration that Forster said he no longer likes Howards End. I guess Forster intended for Howards End to be read again and again, but not in the same way that a play should be performed again and again. Novels to me just seem like they should be separate stories, something comfortable that you can return to, something unchanging. 

Plays, though, I see as something that moves. Something that you can constantly change or find a new piece of depending on your cast, or your director, or your dramaturg. I think this is more relatable to biological evolution than the novel, because plays to me are constantly changing. They adapt to their current environments but are never fixed.