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STAGE ADAPTATION IS ANOTHER VIBRANT RUDE AWAKENING
By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS CRITIC
Tuesday, September 9, 2003
Hand it to Austin's Rude Mechanicals theater collective for wrestling onto the stage seemingly un-stageable works of literature.
In 1999, they turned Greil Marcus' hallucinatory history of punk rock, "Lipstick Traces," into an explosive tour de force, which they've toured nationally and internationally to critical acclaim.
Now the Rudes have transformed James Kelman's Booker Prize-winning novel, "How Late It Was, How Late," an existential stream-of-consciousness story written in the first-person slang-filled voice of a working-class Glasgow, Scotland, rough.
The Rudes did so with Kelman's blessing. The Scotsman was a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Texas in 1998-99 and again in 2001. Impressed after seeing "Don B.'s Snow White," the Rudes' 1999 adaptation of Donald Barthelme's surreal rewrite of the classic fairy tale, Kelman agreed to let the collective adapt his bleak tale for the stage.
Emphasis on "adapt"; the Rudes have transformed Kelman's 400-page novel into a turbulent 90-minute multimedia presentation.
Sammy (intensely played by guest British actor Dikran Utidjian) is a shoplifting, drunken ex-con who is beaten savagely one night by Glasgow police and hauled off to jail. There he awakes to discover he's blind. Then things start to go downhill.
Sammy gets caught in a quagmire of Kafkaesque red tape trying to get disability compensation. He stumbles around Glasgow, brandishing a sawed-off mop handle as a cane. He returns home to find that his girlfriend has disappeared. Then the police drag him into custody again and question him for a crime they won't name. Finally, the medical authorities refuse to acknowledge that he's even blind.
The entire time, Sammy dreams of one thing: escaping to Texas, a paradise he's imagined from country and western songs.
While resident playwright Kirk Lynn's script maintains the rough feel of Kelman's vernacular language and Sarah Richardson's astute directing keeps the action at a nonstop pitch, it's the spare but inventive production design that gives "How Late" such a visceral edge.
A large U-shaped fabric-lined frame faces the audience and serves as the playing area for most of the action. At the same time, video projectors stream images of the actors who stand outside the main playing area (besides Utidjian, Lana Lesley, Ben Grimes and Robert Newell all play multiple roles) on to the background. Sometimes, the live feed is combined with still images of different locales. The effect is moving: While Sammy is desperately trying to wade through the red tape of a social service office, he is framed by the looming head of the ineffectual desk clerk (Newell) and the clerk's keyboard-clicking hands.
This week Kelman returns to town for a public reading and other events, including his first viewing of the stage version of his award-winning novel.
He'll likely decide that this production is one more argument that Texas is, indeed, a paradise for a Scotsman.