Even for Steppenwolf, where actors are routinely pushed to their inner and outer limits, Cynthia Baker has an unusually demanding role in the company’s production of “As I Lay Dying.” Playing Addie Bundren, a Mississippi farm wife, Baker dies early in the first act, then spends the duration of the play as a corpse (a talking corpse in Act 2).
After she’s gone, Addie doesn’t get to rest in peace. Her malfunctioning family loads her body into a homemade coffin and hauls it 40 miles by wagon to a cemetery. By the end of the 10-day burial procession in the withering July heat, poor Addie has been subjected to so many extreme trials and tribulations–by fire, flood and buzzards–that she resembles “a piece of rotten cheese coming into an anthill.”
That pungent description is taken from William Faulkner’s 1930 novel, which is the source of the play opening Sunday at Steppenwolf after more than a week of previews. Having read the book before she auditioned for Addie, Baker was spooked by the prospect of impersonating a corpse, even though she coveted the role. “I thought I was going to have to get into that coffin,” she says, warily noting that one of Addie’s demented sons drills “air holes” into the box–and into her face.
Whether Baker will actually have to occupy the coffin (and for how long) will depend on how far director Frank Galati, who adapted Faulkner’s novel for Steppenwolf, insists on carrying theatrical realism. While the stage directions aren’t explicit on Addie’s ultimate fate in his script, Galati did suggest, in an interview during a rehearsal break, that the coffin will be empty when it’s washed away by floodwaters and nearly destroyed in a burning barn.
As for replicating the flood and the barn-burning, which are vital components in Faulkner’s tragicomedy, Galati also indicated that he will leave these disasters to his audiences’ imaginations, with only a minimal assist from Steppenwolf’s special-effects technicians.
For precedent, Galati reverts to Shakespeare. “God knows there are many highly elaborate and ornate productions of Shakespeare,” he says. “But the theater he worked in was a simple wooden platform.” Quoting from “Henry V,” Galati points out how the Shakespearean chorus advises audiences that they’ll have to accept a bare stage as the “vasty fields of France.”
For “As I Lay Dying,” Galati adds, the Steppenwolf stage will have to represent the vasty cotton fields of Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner’s apocryphal “postage stamp of native soil,” across which the Bundren family makes its funereal odyssey. “We’re doing everything that’s necessary but with our own muscle rather than stage equipment, and we’re doing it through the agency of the language and the power of the poetry and the willingness of the audience to use their own imaginations to make it real.”
Instead of Shakespeare, however, a better basis of comparison for the Faulkner psychodrama is John Steinbeck. “As I Lay Dying” arrives as the second half of an “epic” double bill, belatedly following Steppenwolf’s 1988 production of “The Grapes of Wrath.” It was Galati’s reworking of the Steinbeck novel that gave Steppenwolf one of its greatest hits, a production that brought him two Tony Awards in the “road company” version on Broadway, two years after its Chicago debut.
Superficially, anyway, the two theatrical pieces have much in common, including a basis in the fiction of Nobel Prize-winning authors (and substantial funding from AT&T). Set during the Depression, both novels are “road” books, tracking destitute rural families on misbegotten journeys. While Faulkner’s Bundren family goes only a short distance, next to the thousands of miles covered by Steinbeck’s Joads in their Dust Bowl migration fom Oklahoma to California, their pilgrimage is every inch as agonizing and eventful, but far more horrific, impressionistic and savagely comic.
“The novel is shorter, in some ways simpler, and the panorama is less immense,” Galati says, talking about his strategy in converting “As I Lay Dying” to the stage. “But it’s the journey inside that was so fiendishly difficult.”
Steinbeck’s trademark reportorial prose and conventional narrative are absent from the Faulkner work, however. “As I Lay Dying” is told in a series of monologues, 59 in all, most of them delivered in Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness (or unconsciousness) by the seven Bundrens: Addie (speaking from the grave); her perverse, conniving husband, Anse; their wild-seed daughter Dewey Dell;
and their four sons–Jewel, Darl, Vardaman and Cash, who builds his mother’s coffin while she watches from her death bed.
Though the Bundrens are primitive country people, their “arias,” as Galati calls them, are distinctive not only for simple-folk humor and rhetoric (“She taken and left us”) but also for bursts of operatic grandiloquence that is far beyond their limited vocabularies and intelligence, as when Darl observes how “the rain crashes steadily, myriad, fluctuant,” or the road signs become “starkly reaccruent.” Contrasting with the verbosity is the startling shortness of the chapters, the shortest of which is Vardaman’s: “My mother is a fish.”
Whether terse or prolix, it was Faulkner’s “bold and subversive” style that drew Galati back to the novel, which had made an indelible impression on him while a Northwestern undergrad. At the time, Galati also saw an adaptation of “As I Lay Dying” by an NU teacher that served as a lesson in how not to translate the Faulkner novel to the stage. “For some reason I can’t explain,” Galati says, “he created a single narrator to tell the whole story. That so defies what is experimental in the structure of the piece that it just didn’t work.”
Now a Northwestern professor himself, Galati has become an experienced hand at transforming fiction into theater, with adaptations of Stanley Elkin’s “The Dick Gibson Show,” Nathanael West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts” and several works by Gertrude Stein, as well as “The Grapes of Wrath.” Galati approached the Faulkner text much more reverently than his NU predecessor, though not as if it were written on holy parchment.
Describing his method as “cut-and-paste,” Galati stripped the characters’ speeches of the more blatant and confounding Faulknerisms and broke up some of the longer monologues into orthodox dialogue. “I didn’t revoice it or dramatize anything that was interior,” he says. “I’ve just let the novel speak itself in the voices of the actors playing the characters.”
Like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield, Faulkner’s characters speak in voices of “magic and genius,” Galati says, remarking on how artfully the Mississippi novelist was able to use “all the storytelling conventions of rural America during the period we have come to call `folk’ . . . folk lore, folk legend, folk song.”
After Mark Twain, Faulkner is probably America’s supreme folk humorist, never more so than in his novels about the comically rapacious Snopes family (among them, Flem, Mink, Admiral Dewey and Wallstreet Panic Snopes), who infest the South like boll weevils, eating away at the old aristocracy. Though tragic at its core, “As I Lay Dying” is also one of Faulkner’s most darkly humorous fables. “Sometimes it’s hilarious, sometimes it’s just heartbreaking,” Galati says.
Without careful direction, however, the Bundrens’ wagon could veer off onto “Tobacco Road,” ending up in a bumpkin patch of Southern Gothic slapstick and backwoods stereotypes (as the Steppenwolf troupe did with “Little Egypt” and “Coyote Ugly”). “That’s definitely a danger,” says Galati. “To overstress how funny the characters are, how quirky and grotesque, is to miss its terrible depths, the darkness, the poetry, the windy dread. It’s full of pain and suffering and loss–and deep, deep, longing.”
In adapting Faulkner to the stage, Galati is hoping to succeed where Faulkner himself faltered. The author’s only theatrical work, “Requiem for a Nun” (also published as a hybrid novel), was a flop on Broadway and London stages, though it was much admired by Albert Camus and other French intellectuals. Accounting for its failure, Michael Millgate, in his book “The Achievement of William Faulkner,” calls Faulkner’s play “ponderous and heavily stylized, sadly lacking in dramatic life.”
For the movie screen, Faulkner’s novels have been frequently and freely adapted, with highly erratic results. “The Reivers,” “Intruder in the Dust” and (particularly) “Tomorrow” were creditable transcriptions. But they were overshadowed by such pop travesties as “The Long, Hot Summer,” a corn-mush reduction of “The Hamlet”; “The Sound and the Fury,” with Yul Brynner in one of his wiggy roles; and the 1961 version of “Sanctuary,” in which the impotent rapist, Popeye, became a Cajun rogue named Candyman, charmingly played by Yves Montand.
Before staging “As I Lay Dying,” Steppenwolf had to get permission not from the estate of the novelist (who died in 1962) but from Ithaca Film Partners, an independent Hollywood film company that had hoped to film Faulkner’s book this summer. The company holds the theatrical and film rights to the novel.
“We didn’t want to grant the stage rights to anyone,” says Jerzy Kromolowski, the screenwriter and director, “but we felt a production the caliber of Steppenwolf would only enhance the film project.”
Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, the Polish-born Kromolowski says he’d hoped to begin shooting in Oxford, Miss., Faulkner’s hometown, late this summer, but financing hangups may delay the film at least a year, if not permanently. “It took me many years to get the rights,” he says regretfully. “I had to write a screenplay to convince Jill Faulkner that I’m not going to castrate the material.”
Besides the stage and screen incarnations, “As I Lay Dying” has been turned into a ballet and a blues opera, suggesting that it may be (or become) Faulkner’s most adaptable novel. No doubt some of the work’s adaptability to other media comes from its relatively lucid, linear story, as compared with intransigent works such as “Absalom, Absalom!” and “Light in August,” for which the novelist is more academically revered.
In Galati’s view, “As I Lay Dying” is much better suited to the stage than the screen, even if the natural and man-made disasters that afflict the Bundrens do seem to invite wide-screen treatment. “I wish the producer and director of the movie well,” he says, “but I have a much easier time thinking of the wonderful film made of `The Grapes of Wrath’ than I have thinking of how you’d film `As I Lay Dying,’ because it’s so grounded in language.
“By filming it, you’d just be turning a poem into an action sequence. I want to hear Darl describe the barn-burning. I want to hear and see in my mind Jewel’s apparition. . . . I believe the theater is a place where the word is sacred. And that’s why I’d like to keep this as much an experience of the power and force of Faulkner’s language as the spectacle of fire and flood.”
For all the reliance on Faulkner’s words, however, Steppenwolf won’t entirely forgo theatrical sound and fury for an empty stage. In a Steppenwolf office, production manager Claude Binder blocks out the action on a replica of the four-level set using miniature models of Addie’s deathbed and coffin, the Bundren wagon and the catfish that Vardaman confuses with his mother (which will come in two plastic versions, whole and sliced).
The production won’t have real horses or mules, Binder says, and fire will be simulated with red fabric blown by fans, behind a silhouette of the barn. But the production does feature four rain-making pipes, he adds. “And we’re going to have tons of water.”
To psych themselves up for their roles, Galati encouraged his cast of 20 to immerse themselves in Faulkner’s words, reaching back to the labyrinthine source. During rehearsal, it was apparent the actors were under his influence, especially Jeff Perry, who plays Darl. “It’s a myriad of great challenges,” he says of the play. “In some ways, it reminds me of Beckett and Pinter, in that it’s chasing the unexplainable and the mysterious. In practical terms, you realize you’re in fairly limitless territory.”
As a dying woman and then a corpse, possibly confined to a coffin, Cynthia Baker figured that her territory did have limits. “I thought it would be very easy,” she says. “You just go in there and be, like, dead.”
It took only a few rehearsals to convince Baker, whose Chicago stage credits include “Steel Magnolias” and “The Night of the Iguana,” that it wasn’t as easy as it looked. “To be dead is hard to accomplish,” she says. “It’s teaching me real discipline. This is the first time I’ve had to internalize so much, without extra movement or flamboyance.”