|
David Adams Richards'
Nights Below Station Street
Adapted for the stage by Caleb Marshall
Original music composed by Michael Doherty
Drawn from the acclaimed award-winning novel, 'Nights' centres on Joe
Walsh a recovering alcoholic and unemployed mill worker, as he struggles
to win back the respect of his wife and atone for the neglect of his
troubled daughter Adele. To do so he must hold his head up in a
community that wrote him off long ago. As with much of David Adams
Richards' work this play is driven by character; it is a love story
about the reconciliation between a father and daughter. Full of humour
and biting sarcasm, this is a play about redemption, and articulating
forgiveness without the vocabulary to.
"They bring such compassion to the characters, such love and
warmth to the book I think it's a tremendous success."
"Caleb brings an original sensibility to the material as well as
a grasp of dialogue that is second to none in the country. He
understands character, has a fine feeling for different measures and
intonations, and knows the disparity between peoples and classes and
what that creates in terms of pathos and drama." - David Adams Richards
"Caleb Marshall's work is a perfect stage adaptation of one of
the most important novels in the Canadian literary canon, a production
that is at once wickedly funny and deeply moving, a production that
forces the audience to contemplate the true nature of human
virtue." - Phillip Lee, Award Winning Journalist and Writer
" Caleb brought a sad, poignant humanity to these characters
which leaves them imprinted on the mind." - Colleen
Wagner, Governor General's Award Winning Playwright
"...it shows Caleb's ability to find the poetry in the
prosaic...It looks at communities and characters, and their choices, in
a way that is
unflinching but never judgemental." - Kelly Lamrock, MLA Fredericton-Fort Nashwaak
"...brilliant music and soundscape...a powerfully moving
portrait of an indomitable working stiff bent by alcoholism and injury,
unemployment and inarticulateness-- but not broken…rich and ambitious
production of an equally rich and ambitious script..." - Russ Hunt Reviews
Received the 2001 Stratford Festival of Canada Tyrone Guthrie
Committee
Eliot Haze Playwright Development Award
To Artistic Directors and other potentially interested
parties:
I am writing in support of Caleb Marshall's superb stage adaptation
of the David Adams Richards novel Nights Below Station Street. This
summer I had the pleasure of both reading Mr. Marshall's script, and
viewing the production of the play at the Notable Acts Festival in
Fredericton, N.B. The play remains true to the novel, and allows its
characters to take the audience places that the novel was unable to go.
Adapting Nights for the stage was a challenge on many levels.
Richards' award-winning novel is a subtle and carefully nuanced
exploration of the life of a troubled family. The novel is rich with
dark humour, expressions of great love and pain, but all of this emerges
through characters, who either are hiding their feelings or saying
things they don't mean to say. The novel's hero, Joe Walsh, is a man of
few words, and his great strength and heroism is often revealed through
what he does rather than what he says. This problem was resolved in an
earlier adaptation of the novel for the screen, by making Joe's
outspoken daughter Adele the hero of the script and letting her words
carry the narrative forward.
Mr. Marshall's adaptation is a remarkable step away from the
screenplay and back toward the novel because he faces these challenges
head on and remains true to the intent of Richards' vision for the
story. Joe and his wife Rita are unquestionably the heroes of the stage
play, while Adele emerges as the complicated, funny and tragic character
that she is in Richards' original work. In the end, the audience is left
with the kind of profound understanding of these characters that the
novel provides.
The play begins and ends with Joe caught in a winter storm saving the
life of Vye, a man who is his antagonist throughout the narrative. The
central message of much of David Adams Richards work is that our true
character is revealed in moments such as the meeting of Joe and Vye in
the storm. In these moments of altruism, of transcendence, we see most
clearly the connection of the human and the divine. When we are at our
best, we reach out to each other. Mr. Marshall's production allows the
struggles of Joe to unfold effortlessly before us until the dramatic
final scenes in the forest in the storm.
Caleb Marshall's work is a perfect stage adaptation of one of the
most important novels in the Canadian literary canon, a production that
is at once wickedly funny and deeply moving, a production that forces
the audience to contemplate the true nature of human virtue. I wish Mr.
Marshall all the best as he brings this work to the stage.
Sincerely yours,
Philip Lee
Director of Journalism
St. Thomas University
Fredericton, NB
For Production Rights contact The Noble Caplan Abrams Agency, 416 920
5385
Representative: Rachel Neville Fox, racheln@canadafilm.com
"An artist with a vision - Actor, director and writer Caleb
Marshall of Fredericton is making a name for himself both nationally and
internationally in the world of theatre"
"... Marshall is preparing to tell two different stories this
summer, each as part of his role as artist in residence with NotaBle
Acts Summer Theatre Festival. He has a lead role in Lutz by National
Theatre School playwriting student Ryan Griffith. As well, Marshall is
directing his own adaptation of Nights Below Station Street, the
Governor-General's award winning novel by David Adams Richards. Besides
being one of his favourite books, Nights is special to Marshall. First
off, Adams Richards is his uncle. He wrote the book while he was writer
in residence at the University of New Brunswick and living just around
the corner from Marshall's family. "Nights was published in 1988…I
was fifteen when it came out, so it was really the first of David's
books that I read as it kind of came out to the world." In 1997,
the book was made into a film for television and Marshall auditioned for
a part. He didn't get it, but his roommate did. It was a couple of years
later that he suggested to his uncle that Nights would make a great
stage play.
Finally, after the fourth or fifth time Marshall mentioned
this, Adams Richards told him to do it -so he did. " That was right
around the time I went to Stratford. The idea was formulating and I
pitched the idea to the Guthrie committee and, in September of 2001, I
received the Eliot Haze Playwright Development Award from the Stratford
Festival to continue the work and develop the project," he says.
" I started the long slow process of chipping it into a play"
It was four years of pulling scenes, moments, lines, images out of the
novel and putting it together to begin to realize the story he felt was
there. It was at this point that he went to England to work on his
master's degree in directing. When he returned to Canada, he grabbed the
opportunity to finish Nights. " Coming back, I don't know if it's
that I had two-and-a-half months until we opened or if it's that I'd
just spent four months intensely looking at theatre from a director's
perspective, but after four years of slowly chipping away and any cut
that I felt was classic to the novel being painful, I came back free to
write for those characters," he says. "So it was four slow
years and two rapid, rapid months."
Now that rehearsals are
underway, Marshall has found great joy in seeing Nights come to life as
a play. " The more real it gets as we rehearse, the more truthful
and almost painful it gets, the absolutely funnier it gets," he
says. "The play is funny and heartbreaking in the same
moments." Considering the book is set in New Brunswick and written
in Fredericton, Marshall is excited he's been able to return to
Fredericton to stage his adaptation..."
Excerpt from The Daily Gleaner, Balance Profile July 15, 2006
Representation:
Rachael Neville-Fox @ the Noble Caplan Abrams Agency, Toronto
(416)920-6343
|