Since my first reflection on the process of adapting TNK, I can’t say much has changed about my feelings towards it. By that I mean that adapting it never felt like a chore, all the way through the end. Given that the premise upon which we wrote our adaptation was so radically different from the original script, we were able to take some significant liberties with its diction, tone, and style. This made the whole process a very creative one, teetering on the edges of writing a new play entirely while still sticking to the original plot. We pushed the play a little more towards the comedy side of tragicomedy, which of course made the whole process feel less like work. In fact, when we wrote together in class, you could hear constant, suppressed laughter coming from our part of the room.

After going back over the script, I found it easier to picture onscreen. I’ve made a mental image of what I imagine each character to look like, as one would do when reading a book, just without the narration. Everything has to be told through dialogue and onscreen action, but there are no complications that you would deal with onstage (e.g. requiring that everybody exit a scene to prepare for the next one; the camera can just cut to other characters). A film would obviously make use of more vivid, realistic settings than a play would, which made our movie script a little less technical to write than a play script. There are less stage directions and exaggerations, as a camera can focus in even on the subtle changes in a character’s face to indicate their reaction to something – i.e. no need for highly animated theatrics. This changed the way we wrote the dialogue: characters don’t have to worry about turning their back on an audience or making their tone more extreme to reflect their emotions, which meant we could make characters have more regular, realistic conversations.

Perhaps the best example of changing the script and scenarios to adapt to the screen is the scene in which Emilia and her friend are talking about Arcite and Palamon in Act IV. In the original, this part of the play is a soliloquy in which Emilia has a very tragic, heartfelt response to the situation concerning the two suitors. In our adaptation, however, this scene is a highly sarcastic conversation between her and her friend in which she comes off as shallow, only wanting Arcite for superficial reasons without giving Palamon a chance. Only by the end of this conversation does her friend convince her to at least get to know Palamon. Essentially, we adapted Emilia’s character to reflect a more realistic – though vacuous – modern person, and changed the scene to involve a friend so that we don’t have to awkwardly break the fourth wall in a soliloquy onscreen (though some directors and actors can pull that off really well – see Kevin Spacey in House of Cards).

One thing that changed as we wrote was the sort of static set of characters that we were originally going to go with. They were mostly all going to be Texan or Midwestern (except Palamon and Arcite), taking on a gritty, matter-of-fact register. However, as we went on writing, we realized that it was just boring to write everyone’s lines in largely the same style. So, we diversified it a little bit – the Jailer and his friends are from Brooklyn, and Thesùs and his family are all Cuban, for example. This made it more entertaining and kept us more personally interested in what we were writing. Perhaps my favorite character to write lines for was the Wooer, even though he may play a small part. In our adaptation, the wooer is a cross-dressing male prostitute with a sort of sassy, feminine voice. He livens up the scenes with the Jailer and his friends by adding some serious contrast to their tough, New Yorker accents.

Thesús and his family were also interesting characters to write for – rather than being virtuous and respected as Theseus is in TNK, Thesús is a wildly rich drug dealer with a backwards, violent sense of honor. Due to his sheer power and sway over others, nobody wants to speak against him, even when he makes a blood sport out of Palamon’s and Arcite’s competition for Emilia. The whole family seems to loosely maintain a sort of traditional, Catholic-Hispanic structure despite the fact that Thesús is a notorious drug kingpin. Emilia seems to be the only relatively sane one in the family, and tries to stop the fight between Arcite and Palamon from occurring by speaking against Thesús, ultimately to no avail.

At any rate, these events were entertaining to script, and writing them definitely opened my eyes to some of the basic considerations a scriptwriter must take. I am happy with the finished product, but I think that with more time (not that we weren’t given enough time, we were just too busy with other things to collaborate easily), we could have made it richer. Since we based it on the Big Lebowski, we focused a great deal on the humorous aspect of it. However, we could have spent more time deepening the dark humor and irony that define the Coen Brothers’ classic. Overall, this is the most fun I’ve had with Shakespeare, and I’d be eager to continue doing similar work with other plays.