Playwright: Nick Jones
& Peter Anderson, adapters
At: Smoke & Mirror Productions,
Loyola Studio Theater
Phone: ( 312 ) 409-1000; $12
Runs through: Sept. 4
The challenge of adapting poetry to the stage is one of context: poetry tends to be abstract or at least abstruse. If you place it on stage in an abstract—meaning disassociated—setting you compound the abstraction rather than elucidate the words and emotions. This is the problem with Giving Sorrow Words, which at best seems to be a concept rather than a finished show. It was reviewed at a preview, but its limitations will not disappear with another performance or two.
It's presented on a blank stage, literally providing no physical context for the 12 poems. Objects—chairs, tall poles, wooden quarterstaffs—are brought on and off as needed, sometimes smoothly and sometimes stalling the flow. Some central scenic device is needed for focus: a platform, two benches, a story circle, something. Projected video and shadow play in the opening minutes provide momentary visual interest but these devices aren't repeated. They certainly could be.
The printed program organizes the poems by season: fall, winter and spring. The poem texts provide no apparent reasons for this, and make one wonder why there's no summer. The show barely runs 40 minutes, so it couldn't hurt to complete the year with another 15 minutes of verse. The first four poems, Fall, go by so quickly and are so run together that there's no sense of individual voice or message, not even in a poem by Rilke.
The Winter and Spring sections are far more dramatic and effectively supported—if loudly so—by musical selections from Native American drumming to passages from Mozart and Verdi. The overwrought sturm und drang of the Verdi Requiem provides vivid end-of-the-world accompaniment to a physical passage depicting a great human catastrophe, inspired by William Stafford's poem, Yes.
In fact, all the poems and the show's title are taken from a volume of poetry as therapy, produced in response to 9/11/01, yet the stage adaptation of Giving Sorrow Words is not specifically therapeutic. That's all the more reason why it must establish its own raison d'etre, its own emotional and physical context. Right now, the piece is too short ( it seems designed to be performed during school Assembly Period ) and without a suitable purpose.
Its strengths, then, are those of a handful of the most easily discerned poems, which tend to be the traditional, less abstract ones such as the marvelous Hopi prayer of the Spring section:
Hold on to what is good
even if it's a handful of earth;
Hold on to what you believe;
Hold on to what you must do;
Hold on to your life
even if it's easier to let go;
Hold on to my hand
even when I am far away from you.
