Note: This is a guest posting from Autumn McConnico, production dramaturg for our fall MainStage production of Jane Eyre.
Jane Eyre’s adaptor, Christina Calvit, is a Lifeline ensemble member and has written numerous award-winning scripts, including the previous version of Jane Eyre. She revamped the script for this new production, and answered some questions for us about her work.
Q: When did you first read Jane Eyre? What got you involved in this adaptation that first time around?
A: I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager. When we did the show back in 1991, it was purely because Meryl Friedman (the director at that time) and I loved the story. In this current production, there are other things that interested us as well… but back then we just thought it was a great book that deserved to be on stage.
Q: I’m curious about how you begin an adaptation. With books of fair length like this one, hundreds of pages, there are so many words, scenes, characters: in the face of making a 100-page script, many may seem like distractions. How do you find the story you really want to tell from a book? What was particularly clear – or challenging – about Jane Eyre?
A: There is usually something thematic that catches at me…for Jane Eyre it was a persistence of childhood trauma. Then I look at the book through that prism and see what pops out. And I normally don’t deconstruct a book in my work, so I look at the way the story is told and try to include what’s necessary to that. And I look at the dialogue to try and find the very best. The hard thing with Jane Eyre is that there are so many, many great scenes. So much great back and forth, especially between Rochester and Jane. It’s hard to choose.
Q: In this show, Jane’s past before arriving at Thornfield is told to us in a rather uncommon way. What brought you to this approach for the people of Jane’s past?
A: The first third of the book is all about Jane’s youth. It’s interesting that Bronte devotes so much space to it. You could make it happen in real time (and some of the movie and TV adaptations do), but I wanted to heighten those experiences and make them more important symbolically. So the show opens with a nightmare mash up of people from Jane’s past: Aunt Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst, the headmaster of Lowood school, and Helen, her best friend at Lowood. They are the inner voices that have shaped her idea of her own self-worth and guide her choices, for good or bad. And they follow her for much of the play.
Q: What are you most excited about for this particular production? Do you have words for fans of the book who might be wondering what they will find in our show?
A: I like the nontraditional casting and staging—exploding the book a bit out of its period. It’s an epic story that people come back to again and again, so it obviously speaks to us beyond the 1840’s. The cast is amazing and the design is like nothing we’ve ever done at Lifeline before. It’s a different kind of Jane Eyre. I’m hoping people will enjoy what they’ve always loved about the story and also see it in a new and deeper way.
Q: What’s next?
A: I’m off to shoot a commercial in Austin for Vitamix! Everyone should have one!
Thanks, Christina!