Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2015

This article provides a critical cultural history of the radio-film adaptation series The Adventures of Mark Twain, which was written by Arch Oboler and commissioned by Warner Bros. to promote their picture, The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944). This series offers invaluable insights about Hollywood’s advertising of film on radio, its exploitation of films, and radio-film adaptations. Because Oboler’s Twain dramas directly and indirectly advertise the film, they serve as early examples of branded entertainment. Similarly, as Oboler tapped Twain material not addressed by the film, the series also serves as an antecedent of contemporary intermedial and transmedial adaptation. Recovering the interaction between Warner Bros. as sponsor and Oboler as writer, this article also addresses the complex question of adaptation authorship, and the general tensions between cultural expression and the cultural industries in American mass media.

Culture can be readily seen as a repository for adaptation, but if attention is given more resolutely to the idea of the plurality of cultures, then it is possible that we should adjust that rather simplistic perception drastically. This article presents a theory, expressed in broad but comprehensive terms, of the place of adaptation in the constitution of theatre, at many different originative moments. It also goes beyond the realms of film and theatre to suggest that human cultures not only express adaptation, but are founded from the beginning on the capacities of a uniquely adaptive species, from constant adjustments in material existence through to artistic practice. The article also examines how the idea of cultural adaptation can be found to be operative within current terminology applied to performance and ­society. Adaptation is the natural state of human cultures, not merely a facility within them, and the author draws on wide reading in the social sciences and the history of ­theatre to support his thesis.

This article considers the figure of Hester from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and its adaptation to contemporary African American and Irish dramatic writing. It focuses on In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2001) by African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, as well as Irish dramatist Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats … (1998). These theatre-makers consciously manipulate The Scarlet Letter in that each Hester figure is a racially different and already marginalized woman who goes on to murder her child. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, I argue that Parks and Carr combine complex and overlapping processes of adaptation to expose the slippery relationship between signification and affect, and to reveal how affective economies shape and control racial and gendered bodies as well as their movements in space. In doing so, these dramatists call into question accepted conventions of judgement, justice and morality. Through processes of domestication, recontextualization and actualization, Parks and Carr engage complexly with hotly debated issues within their individual national contexts and in the wider, western milieu that they share.

Orson Welles’s 1941 stage production of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) serves as a prime example of his sensitivities. Welles’s involvement in the project exemplifies his life-long interest in topical and controversial American subjects, as well as literary adaptations. More importantly, however, it appears as a special moment in which he fused his passion for realist techniques, with those more associated with expressionism. Welles’s Native Son then appeared as a confrontational exercise in terms of theatricality and adaptation. This article traces Welles’s involvement with Wright’s celebrated novel, describes the production and its relationship to the novel, and aims to situate it within Welles’s dynamic career.

Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (eds) (2013) London: Bloomsbury, 292 pp., ISBN: 9781441192660, p/bk, £21.99

Immaterial Culture: Literature, Drama and the American Radio Play 1929–1954, Harry Heuser (2013) Bern: Peter Lang AG, 358 pp., ISBN: 9783034309776, p/bk, £52.00