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The Secrets of a Literary Text

Posted by DCA Theater on June 2, 2011 in January-June 2011 Season, Lighthousekeeping

by Georgette Kelly, playwright of Lighthousekeeping, a work adapted from the novel by Jeanette Winterson

When I first read Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping, I knew I would read it again.  And again.  And again.

I read the book in waves and cycles.  I reached for it with each major change in my life.  I returned to the lighthouse when I needed to cope with isolation, loss, grief, and distance.

As I read and re-read, the book’s characters began to inhabit my mind and unfurl their secrets.  The more I read, the more I wanted to know them intimately, first-hand, through a live experience.  I wanted to meet them.  In other words, I wanted my literary experience to be enriched by performance.

Performance Studies scholar D. Soyini Madison has written that “Performance opens the secrets of a literary text…[and] this is a political enterprise.  It involves unearthing the subtext in literature and the unearthing of subtext in experience.  But the archeology of unearthing is never neat.”

Through writing plays based in literature, I strive to unearth the secrets that Madison describes.  It is not that I want my plays to be messy.  Indeed, I want them to be well structured, with very precise language.  But I do want them to question core assumptions, to dig up the (sub)text that has been buried by everyday life.  I want to tell stories that are open-ended, cross the boundaries of the fourth wall, and insist upon an active, questioning audience.

This is never neat.  It is unsettling and demanding, and these very qualities draw me to performance.  Theatre requires that I abandon my individual reality and join with others in a shared truth: the world of the play.  As audiences and artists, we must agree to a precarious collective, lasting only a few hours, where our assumptions about life can be shaken.  In the best theatrical experiences, both audiences and artists leave with questions—about how we interact with others, how we shape our realities, and how we tell our own stories.  These questions change us.

When I fall in love with a literary text, as I have fallen in love with Lighthousekeeping, I use performance as a tool to study it.  The process changes me too; theatrical adaptation is my lens to clarify the text, therefore I become a playwright.  Once the text is embodied, it reveals more about itself and, subsequently, I learn more about myself.  This learning process has had a profound impact on the way I see the world.  It is my goal that my audiences also gain insight into the literary texts I explore, and into the subtext of their own experiences.