Odysseus and Alice

A few weeks back, the director who asked me to take a look at adapting Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ read through the ninth draft and wondered if maybe there might be some kind of prologue featuring the Gods.

I simply cannot tell you how much time I spent working through various options, concepts, and ideas in my head and on paper over the past few weeks.

Nothing worked.

Finally, in sheer desperation, I went back to the original text and extrapolated a conversation between a father and a daughter that I felt might have something and sent it off to the director with the recommendation that we not use it in his production. I like the dialogue, but I can’t see how it fits into the overall conceit I’ve built into the rest of the script.

No word back yet, but now I’m slowly grinding my way through a tenth draft of the script — fixing awkward pieces, streamlining moments and language, trying to find any shred of a consistent voice.

It’s not nearly as painful as I thought it would be.

I may post some of it here, just to get some feedback although it’s also likely I’ll get a few people together to read it in the next month or so.

(By the way, if you live anywhere near Los Altos, California, be advised that a production of my adaptation of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ will be opening soon.)