This week, a stage adaptation of Milan Kundera’s celebrated novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” will run at the Hopkins Black Box Theatre, LSU’s experimental performance lab.
LSU instructor Tracy Stephenson directed and adapted the play from the 300-page novel. Stephenson had to condense the story at some points to keep the play less than two and a half hours long.
“Every page of the novel runs a minute, two minutes on the stage, [so] it’s about one sixth of the length,” she said. “You have to decide which characters of the story are important and what minor characters have to go.”
Stephenson said the hardest part is to make the language, which is fairly intellectual, understandable to an audience.
“It’s difficult to have that voice [of the narrator] in the voice of the characters,” she said.
Stephenson said she decided to adapt “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” because the peculiar layout of the story is part philosophy and part plot.
“I thought that it would be a challenge to adapt something with such a strong narrative voice,” she said. “You interpret the story differently when you hear the narrator’s voice.”
Stephenson selected the work because of how it vacillates between moods. “The play goes back and forth between cynicism and optimism,” she said.
Set in Prague in the time of the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” centers around a surgeon named Tomas and a photographer named Tereza, lovers who meet in a countryside café.
Tomas believes sex has nothing to do with love, and therefore strictly sexual relationships mean very little.
In accordance with his philosophy, he has many mistresses. These mistresses cause Tereza, who attaches herself to Tomas, pain. The two share a similar pain. Tereza hurts because Tomas always comes home smelling of another woman, and Tomas suffers because Tereza feels pain.
LSU doctoral student Justin Trudeau plays Tomas.
“I just got married, and I’m playing a philanderer,” Trudeau said. “You can read him as a jerk, or as someone who cheats on his wife, but I think the way Kundera writes him is as someone we can relate to.”
Trudeau likes the play mainly because Stephenson decided to write much of Kundera’s philosophy that narrated the action in the book into the play.
“If you take out the philosophy it becomes a story about a guy cheating on his wife,” he said.
Because the book contains so much sex, Stephenson decided to depict sex symbolically rather than graphically.
“We don’t try to represent sex in a realistic way,” she said.
Instead, the characters push at each other, groan and speak in collective monotone to represent sexual intercourse, which also helps express a character’s emotions toward another character during the intercourse.
Practicing for the play ran an average of five days a week for a full six weeks, and Stephenson believes her cast and crew are ready for the performances.
“I’m really pleased with the work my performers have done,” she said.
Performances run Wednesday, March 19 to Saturday, March 22 at 7:30 p.m. in Room 137 of Coates Hall. There also will be a performance Sunday, March 23 at 2 p.m. A suggested donation of $5 will be accepted at the door.
Play bears heavy burden of adaptation
March 20, 2003