P resented live at the Deep Water Literary Festival in Narrowsburg, New York, on June 22, 2025.

Joey Stocks: Lynn and Lisa have something in common when it comes to adaptation. They’ve both taken popular books written by other people – Lynn with Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees and Lisa with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home – and adapted them into musicals.

Lynn worked with composer Duncan Sheik and lyricist Susan Birkenhead, and Lisa worked with composer Jeanine Tesori. To begin, would y’all briefly tell us how you and your collaborators came to work on that particular piece and some of the challenges that you encountered in adapting it to the stage?

Lynn Nottage: I just want to begin by saying thank you for including dramatists in this festival. We do think of our work as literature. But yeah, The Secret Life of Bees. How did it come about? The invitation came from the wonderful lyricist Susan Birkenhead, who said producers had approached her about adapting Secret Life of Bees into a musical. She then asked whether I would be interested? And I read the book, and I thought it was really beautiful, but I also have to say that I found some aspects of it problematic in today’s context. 

I don’t know how many people know the book. It’s about a young white woman in 1964, during the height of the civil rights movement, who has an abusive father, and she runs away with the Black housekeeper, and they end up finding refuge in a pink house that’s owned by three self-possessed and free-thinking Black sisters, who essentially function as magical Negroes. Yes, they’re wonderful. They’re brilliant characters. But at the end of the day they’re saved by this young white woman, who is freed from her own haunted past by the love and care shown to her by the sisters. And I thought to myself, is this a story that I want to tell?

So, I read the novel a few times and thought, “Okay, I think I can find my way into this, but I’m going to have to go at it sideways. The protagonist is not someone I identify with, so if I’m going to tell this story, I’m going to tell it from the point of view of the Black women, and how they’re navigating an evolving world.”

It took us a long time to deliver the first version of the musical, and I think that we didn’t entirely succeed. Our first iteration didn’t move far enough away from the book itself.  Unfortunately, we received a good deal of criticism for succumbing to old tropes and not really being in touch with how to make a story, which is at its core about race relations, resonate in a contemporary context. And I own some of that criticism because I wanted to honor the author whose work I do respect, so I didn’t push hard enough to honor my own impulses. When we revisited the adaptation, I think we were able to find a version that we all were more satisfied with. 

Lisa, I don’t know whether this is your experience, but the first time that I sat down to write, I could feel the author sitting on my shoulder. Like she was right there. Every word I wrote, I thought, “Oh my god, there’s Sue Monk Kidd.” It took me a long time to first put her in the drawer, then I’d take her out of the drawer, and put her in the closet, and then exile her from my house as I was writing. Once I was free from her shadow, I could really begin to lean into an adaptation that I could take ownership of.

Joey Stocks: Thank you. Lisa?

Lisa Kron: Probably many of you know Alison Bechdel’s incredible graphic novel, Fun Home. Briefly, for those who don’t, it’s a story of her relationship with her father. She grew up in a small town in central Pennsylvania. Her father was a high school English teacher, and throughout her childhood he restored the Gothic revival house she grew up in. He was also an undertaker and ran a funeral home which the family called the Fun Home. When Alison went to college, she realized she was a lesbian. She told her family. Her parents responded sort of strangely. Her mother revealed to her that her father was a closeted gay man. And then things were strange for about four months, and then he killed himself. Then twenty years go by, and she writes this graphic novel trying to understand what happened and what their relationship was.

I knew Alison a little bit. We’re the same age. And Jeanine Tesori is also the same age. Alison had been offered a lot of money for film rights, but she didn’t take it. Her thinking was a film is there forever, but a play or musical will disappear, so if it’s bad, she wouldn’t need to worry.

She gave us total freedom with the adaptation. She was like, “You know about theatre and I don’t.” She stepped back. She was available to us when we had questions—which I had many—but she really had no interest in being in our process or controlling the process.

Two things were difficult about it. One was the formal question of the difference between drama and a [graphic novel]. Thornton Wilder talks about the way novels look back but in the theater it is always now. I never remember the exact phrase—but it’s like you’re on the knife’s edge of an ever-unfolding present. You don’t know what’s going to happen.

[Alison’s] graphic novel is magnificent. It lifts you up and makes you feel like you’re in a forward-moving narrative. But it’s actually a recursive personal essay interrogating the narratives that she grew up with about her family. So, the big question was how to dramatize that.

In my plays 2.5 Minute Ride and Well, I figured out how to dramatize what essentially were personal essayistic questions. [Those] plays were also about interrogating received narratives, which is a weird thing to dramatize and make human, but that was the thing I had come to do. So I recognized that that was going to be the driver of [Fun Home]. It was really hard to do. The process was just super iterative.

I don’t believe that Fun Home could have gone to Broadway when we started working on it and been understood by mainstream audiences.  But when we got there, seven years later, the audience was ready.

I think that culture makes us recognizable to each other. Lynn’s heard me say this a million times.  It’s often said that the importance of diverse voices is that they allow us to see ourselves, which of course is true. But I think the real value of diverse authorial voices is that they make us visible to each other.

I think the thing that I want to hear from other voices is not what was my experience, or what was the experience of that person, but what do they see? They show us what the world looks like from where someone else stands. That’s how we enlarge our picture of the world. Culture is an accretion of ideas, images, artworks, that make us legible to each other.

At the time when we started Fun Home, the culture hadn’t leveled up to a place where a lesbian would be legible to a mainstream audience. Seven years later, by the time we came to Broadway, there was a tipping point moment. Gay marriage was nationally legalized the year Fun Home opened on Broadway. And so in the love story of college-age Alison, those audiences effortlessly recognized themselves. Whereas, in my experience, a few years earlier, they wouldn’t have been able to do that.

Joey Stocks: Right. Thank you. By the way, happy Pride.

In the world of adaptation, Marlon and Lynn also have something in common. They’ve both adapted their own work into other forms. Marlon adapted his short story into the limited series Get Millie Black. And Lynn, along with composer Ricky Ian Gordon, adapted her play Intimate Apparel into an opera.

Similarly, would you both tell us how you came to see your original text had the potential to move into another form and what were your challenges? Marlon, would you start?

Marlon James: Yeah. Even though I write novels, I still think I’m more influenced by cinema than by other books. Even when I teach creative writing, I have to stop myself from using film and stage examples. Also, pretty much every story I’ve written is a story of somebody telling a story. That’s the thing they all have in common. But that then becomes a challenge because we were talking about what happens with prose on the page [that’s] not necessarily performed. What do you do with that? For a long time, I thought the solution was to just kill that voice and go somewhere else.

With Get Millie Black, the original source is a short story I wrote called Immaculate. In Jamaica, Immaculate is the name of a Catholic girl’s school, and it’s like the pinnacle of virtue. Everybody knows. If I write a story about Immaculate, I’m tearing down everything, including the, you know, “Let’s protect our Virgin Jamaican girls.” It was also based on a real event that still haunts the country.

The things I realized that I would translate into cinema or TV were stuff I learned by trial and error. For example, if you grew up in a country like Jamaica—coming out of slavery and so on—there are a lot of ghosts hanging around, and the idea of being haunted. One of the things that Millie says in the first episode is, “Do you know how it feels when it’s the living that haunt you?” And it was weird for me realizing that the things that immediately translate are the themes and issues. I thought it would be the characters or their desires or what they look like and so on. Funny enough, none of the characters from the short story survived the adaptation. What they’re concerned with survived it. The themes they’re wrestling with survive it. The idea that we’re still struggling with colonialism survives that transition.

My second novel was the other way around. The Book of Night Women started as a play. Honestly, it was a matter of convenience. I’m like, I got to pick a title for my MFA. I can’t come up with an idea. I wrote this play for the drama class, so what happens if I add a whole 50 years around it? So, I always come back to drama, and that novel came out of it. There’s always been a back and forth, largely because my primary concern in writing is voice. Even when there’s a sort of a Greek chorus.

My lit teacher tells me the first time I paid attention in class was Shakespeare. Part of that is because my dad and I used to do Shakespeare duels. God, we’re nerds. You know, [we’d see] who can do the longest soliloquy. And I’d beat him, by the way.

You’d think because I’ve always had a closer relationship to drama than to fiction that [adapting Get Millie Black] would have been easy, but it wasn’t. It took years. The first time I took a stab at doing Get Millie Black was in 2015, and it came out in 2024. And a lot of that was figuring out because there are things you can get away with in fiction that I don’t think you can get away with on stage or in film. And then there are things that stage and film will teach you about [fiction].

Like, it’s staging that made me realize that a sunrise doesn’t need my help. I say that now to students. You don’t need a metaphor to describe a sunrise. A sunrise is awesome all on its own. Recognize the power of what’s actually in the scene. When you really get into Beckett, you know the power of what is there and what is not there. And that ended up spilling back into my prose. I’m realizing a lot of stuff I write down, I just don’t need.

Joey Stocks: Thank you. Lynn, was Intimate Apparel your first opera?

Lynn Nottage: Yeah, it was my first opera. It was a really interesting experience adapting it, because it was based on my play, Intimate Apparel, which I wrote for my mother soon after she died. For me, the play was very much a sacred space. And when I was first approached, I thought, “I don’t know that I have the capacity emotionally to re-enter and revisit everything that I was mining when I was originally writing the play.” But composer Ricky Gordon is very persistent, and when I reread the play, what I discovered is that its perfect form is actually an opera. There are two sopranos, a mezzosoprano, a baritone, and a tenor, and I thought, “It’s going to be very easy to find their voices.” But that was not true.

The first time that I set out to write the libretto—and writing libretto is very different than writing a play because it’s much more economical. You have to lean more heavily on the composer to find the emotional balance of the storytelling.  But the first time I wrote the libretto, I gave it to my collaborator Ricky, and he said, “You have just rewritten your play. You have not written a libretto.”

So I went back and thought, “Okay, I can do this.” I listened to all of the great operas, revisited a lot of the texts, and I went back and I rewrote the libretto. I gave it to Ricky, and he’s like, “Oh my god, you’ve rewritten your play again.” [Laughs.]

I was so determined to fix everything I felt was flawed about the play and all the questions that I had been asked about that drama throughout the years. And I thought this is my opportunity to write a better play. Then Ricky sat me down and said, “I’m going to explain something to you about writing an opera. The composer does 60% of the work. You don’t need as much language to say “I love you.” You have to rely on the composer to be able to do that with just the flourish of a musical phrase.” He said, “You’re not trusting me as a collaborator.”

 I’m like, “You’re so right.”

He said, “Here’s the experiment. Cut the play in half. Take out all of the exposition that you feel is absolutely necessary and let me do that work.”

So I went back, and that’s how I arrived at the libretto. I really love Intimate Apparel, the opera. I feel like it fixed a lot of the problems with the play, and it also invited me into this entirely new world, which is writing librettos and collaborating with composers in ways that I never have before. It’s really different than musical theatre, which was my gateway drug into the opera world.

Joey Stocks: And it’s fantastic. If y’all have not seen it, you have an opportunity to stream it on pbs.org.

Lynn Nottage: Yes. On Great Performances.

Joey Stocks: Any discussion about adaptation isn’t complete without addressing fidelity. You’ve all touched on this already, but do you have any thoughts about how faithful one should remain to the original source material, even if you’ve written that original source material yourself? How promiscuous can an adapter be?

Marlon James: My experiences of that are actually all bad. [Laughs.] Because there have been attempts to adapt all of my novels, and none of them have happened. I think a huge part of the problem is what do you remain loyal to? For example, with A Brief History of Seven Killings, what happens whenever they try to adapt it…Bob Marley is thematic in the book, but once you enter a Hollywood room, they think what can bring in the dollar signs. So suddenly Bob Marley is a character, and he has an exterior life, and so on. I said, “I know the estate pretty well. This is never going to happen.” So, you end up sometimes in discussions you would never have had anywhere else.

I’ve seen what happens when you’re too faithful, and then the drama ends up inert. Particularly when you deal with Hollywood people, they really love to fix things that are not broken. Which is one of the reasons why I always end up screaming when they [adapt] Shakespeare. Don’t get me started on that.

One of the reasons why I think I’ve been unsuccessful in that area is because we can never agree on what we keep, what we add, what we take away? ‘Cause, you know, I write some longass books, so what do you do with it? And discussions that would never happen [in theatre], like a person looking at me straight and going, “So PG or R? What do you think we should do?” Which is their code for how gay can we keep it?

I can’t speak for what happens for [theatre], but I can tell that the downside is that you can end up with something that goes nowhere because we can’t decide what we take, what we leave, how we interpret. Does Harriet Tubman become a white woman for Julia Roberts [Laughs.]

Lisa Kron: Yeah. I think it’s what you said, what do you remain loyal to? What do you hang on to? I think that is the essential question.

With Fun Home, first of all, the graphic novel is so incredibly made. It was great source material for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it’s so layered. There’s so much there. I felt instinctively like it would make a good adaptation for a musical, but I had never written a musical so I could have easily been wrong. In retrospect, I think the reason it did work is that it is about a family suffused with longing to connect, and inexpressible longing is what musical theatre is for, because that’s what music in musicals conveys. It conveys longing. Yearning.

We knew there were going to be people who came who had never read the graphic novel and we knew there were going to be people who came who had read it ten times and loved it. The dream was that the people who were like, “I know you’re going to fuck this up,” would be like, “Oh yes, that is the thing I love.” And the people who had never read it wouldn’t be like, “I guess if I’d read the thing, I’d understand this.”

Something I realized pretty quickly is that an adaptation doesn’t lift off from the source material. It has to re-originate on its own. It has to be its own thing. I worked on it for a year before Jeanine came into it, just trying to understand what is the essential thing happening, which was very difficult because it’s so beautifully made. I would start to read it and be sucked into it. I had to read it for months before I could even start to understand its formal mechanisms. I’d go through it and think, “I’m going to look for every time there’s an action. I’m going to write down every character.” You know, try to break it down ultimately to understand what is the essential thing that’s happening.

I would say 90% of the musical Fun Home is not in the [graphic novel]. It all had to be invented. That’s the reason I mentioned that Alison and Jeanine and I are all the same age, because when Jeanine and I look at it now, we’re like, “That scene…did that happen to Alison or did it happen to you or did it happen to me?” Because we were just pulling from our own lives while all the time going back to the book. Even in the final rewrites, we’d go back to the book even though we were making things up. [We’d find] something in a panel and being like, “What is the dynamic here? How are we going to recreate that in a scene that we will make up?”

Lynn Nottage: Yeah, I think you’re so right, Lisa. You’re talking about looking for what’s essential…looking for the essence of something. When I’m doing an adaptation, I always look at what’s unsaid but inferred. That, for me, is really where the piece lies, because you have to build it out, particularly in the dramatic form. 

I’m in the process of adapting Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, which is one of my favorite books ever. I’m in awe of it every time I read the novel. It’s a really beautiful text, but it’s very much about the interiority of the characters, but it’s also very episodic. When approaching the adaptation, I asked myself, how do you take this rich narrative and make it dramatic? What I realized is that I had to go deep underneath the language on the page to find the essence, to find the dialogue, to find the drama, to find what’s motivating all of those characters, and a way to build it out in three dimensions. 

Marlon James: It’s always weird when you have to do that with your own work.

Lynn Nottage: Yes. Yes.

Marlon James: It’s like, “Didn’t I see that when I wrote it before?” Which I think happens to you a lot as well.

Lynn Nottage: My favorite thing is when I look at a line and I think, “Oh my god, did I write that?”

Marlon James: What you were saying about now you have to go find the hidden things, which you don’t necessarily think of when you’re writing the text originally, and then you almost have to become your own close reader, which I hate doing. Then you go, “Oh shit, that was there. Secret gay longing. Who knew?”

So, yes, I agree. Even with your own work, you have to find these things that you didn’t think were there.

Joey Stocks: Lisa, I think you said Fun Home was your first musical and Lynn, Intimate Apparel was your first opera. Was Get Millie Black your first series, Marlon?

Marlon James: Yes.

Joey Stocks: So, now that you’ve dipped your toe into all those waters, can we look forward to another Lynn Nottage opera, another Lisa Kron musical, and another Marlon James series? If so, can you talk about it?

Marlon James: I mean, there’s nothing to talk about yet. We have to get the grand go-ahead from HBO. But I hope it happens. I keep going, “This show is so cheap. This show’s entire budget equals four days of Game of Thrones.” I actually checked.

Joey Stocks: And I hope that we’re looking forward to a Marlon James play.

Marlon James: Maybe. I keep turning my plays into novels. I guess I should stop.

Lynn Nottage: I just premiered a new opera at Opera St. Louis, This House, which was an adaptation of my daughter Ruby Aiyo Gerber’s play that we co-wrote together, and was composed by Ricky Ian Gordon. And then we have another opera, a commission from the Metropolitan Opera, which is an afro-futurist piece composed by Carlos Simon. 

Joey Stocks: Congratulations! That’s great.

Lisa Kron: I’m going to be in an adaptation by Lucas Hnath of Tartuffe at New York Theatre Workshop. I’m also working with the European director Barrie Kasky on an adaptation of (and I can’t say this enough) not the movie but the original story of Yentl. I’ll just say that a bunch more times. Not the movie, but the original story by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Joey Stocks: Fantastic. Do we have any questions in the house?

Audience Member #1: Thank you so much. I wanted to ask if any of you have experience in theatre that is based on documentary.

Joey Stocks: So, like Anna Deavere Smith?

Audience Member #1: Yes.

Lynn Nottage: Yes. I can answer that question. I don’t do verbatim theatre, but I have a lot of experience with documentary theatre, and I’ve written two plays, Sweat and Ruined, that were very specifically based on experiences that I had in communities. One being with refugee women who were fleeing the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2004. I spent two to three years going back and forth to east Africa interviewing refugee women. Ultimately, I chose not to tell their stories verbatim but to really do an adaptation of what I heard as a loose adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. And then Sweat was based on two years of interviews that I conducted in a small city called Reading, Pennsylvania, which at the time was the poorest city of its size in America. It had once been this huge industrial powerhouse and was undergoing a lot of economic strife. And I just decided that I was going to try and interview everyone from the mayor to unhoused people living in the forest. Again, the play is not verbatim, but it’s very much inspired by the interviews that I did.

Then after I wrote that play, I went to Reading, Pennsylvania, and created a performance installation called This is Reading, which was a verbatim piece, which we performed for a month for the people of Reading using their own words. And we did something which I think is kind of astonishing. The piece was their words, but we also created an algorithm that, as people entered the performance space they could go into a video recording booth and tell their own stories. And the last movement of the piece was all their stories woven together and then projected. We didn’t adapt their words, rather they saw their words in real time interwoven with the stories of others. The goal was to show that everyone, regardless of race or class, shared a narrative.

Audience Member #2: I think this probably depends on the project, but what if anything is non-negotiable? What cannot change in an adaptation?

Lynn Nottage (indicating Marlon): I think that’s a good question for you.

Marlon James: Definitely not the sexualities or the gender orientation and so on. I’ve been in discussions where we’re dancing around how straight can we make your gay guy. Yeah, it’s all in the code of, “So PG or R?” I wouldn’t have my characters make compromises on screen that they wouldn’t have in the book. Hopefully, we’re past the whole Julia Roberts as Harriet Tubman era. But you never know.

Lynn Nottage: You never know. My play Ruined was adapted for HBO, and my one non-negotiable was a line at the end of the play where the character says, “I’m ruined.” HBO wanted her to say it at the very beginning, and I thought, “Well, then there’s no point in telling this entire story.” We fought for two years, and I said, “I’m not going to move.” And then they just didn’t do it.

Lisa Kron: Why did they want that?

Lynn Nottage: Because they wanted Oprah to play Mama Nadi, and perhaps she was reluctant to appear to be morally ambiguous and unlikeable in the way that the character is written. She wanted to be beloved from the beginning. And I’m like, “No, the story is really about a woman who you despise until the very end. And then you come to understand why she makes all these complicated and questionable choices. And that’s the journey of the piece.”

Joey Stocks: Another way around this is to adapt work that’s in the public domain. And then you don’t have to argue with anybody.

Audience Member #3: It’s been so great to hear the three of you together. Thank you so much. I’m listening to you and also to many of the people this weekend talk about, “Okay, so this took from 2017 to 2024. This took nine years.” Or like, “I thought I knew how to do it, and then I stuck in the drawer because I had it all wrong.” And I’m wondering what are you telling yourself the moment when you realize, “I’ve gotten it all wrong and have maybe nine more years to go.”

[Laughter.]

Marlon James: I don’t know if I ever looked at something and gone, “Man, nine more years.” [Laughter.] The funny thing is the time really does fly in a way. I had to be told it took that long. The creative process, the writing, the rewriting, the research, the whole process just takes the time that it takes. And usually we have to be told it took us eight to ten years.

Lynn Nottage: You don’t think about it.

Lisa Kron: Yeah, the thing that you said about starting to work with Ricky Ian Gordon when you were like, “This will be easy.” I mean, I don’t know when I’ll learn that that’s just never ever true.

Marlon James: We really never learn.

[Laughter.]

Lynn Nottage: We don’t. No.

Lisa Kron: Maybe that’s it. It’s like why babies are cute, you know?

Marlon James: It’s like when I write books, I always remember how great it is to end a book. I never remember how terrible it is to begin one. I can’t believe I fell for this crap again.

Lynn Nottage: Well, it’s like childbirth. You don’t remember the pain. And if you did, you wouldn’t have babies. [Laughter.]

Just off what everyone said here, and you’ve probably heard me say this (indicating Lisa Kron), I tell my students that to be artists, we have to move between grandiosity and despair. And it’s really that balance. And that every day—particularly as an artist—is an act of resurrection. You’re like, “I’m dead and I revive myself.” And that’s how we get through it.

Joey Stocks: That and…Diet Coke?

Lisa Kron: Diet Dr. Pepper.

Audience Member #4: Speaking of the adaptation of Girl, Woman, Other, it seems particularly hard because there are so many stories and themes. So, are you rewriting it? Do you go back to the author? How do you manage it?

Lynn Nottage: Yeah, tell me about it. [Laughter.]

You know, it’s impossible because it tells a story of Black British women over the course of a hundred years. And there are many, many characters, all of them equally compelling. You can’t tell all the stories, so I decided to cherry-pick. I just chose the stories that I gravitate toward and pray that Bernardine doesn’t kill me.

Marlon James: She’s a sweetheart.

Joey Stocks: One more question all the way in the back.

Audience Member #5: When I read the libretti from famous operas, they look so boring on the page compared to, you know, how great they are when the music is [performed]. And so, for your process, did you interact along the way with the composer? What was that process?

Lynn Nottage: I think one of the problems with opera is that they continue to create operas the way they’ve done for hundreds of years even though everything’s evolved. Somehow that field hasn’t, and so we decided we were going to approach writing this opera differently. To be in dialogue from the very beginning and to write it the way you write a play in which you have multiple readings of the libretto and critique the work so that it feels more complete. I think that a lot of times what happens with opera is that the librettist writes the libretto, gives it to the composer and then [the production] goes up and they don’t have the kind of dialogue that I think is necessary to create a complete and beautiful and compelling dramatic piece of theatre. Because opera is theatre. So yeah, I was very much in dialogue with Ricky from the very beginning. And one thing that’s really fortunate is that he’s a brilliant dramaturg. If he didn’t feel like something was right to set, he’d say, “I feel like this isn’t right” or “I feel like in this moment we need recitative as opposed to an aria.”

Joey Stocks: I look forward to more work from all of you. I appreciate you all being here so much. I really do. Thank you.

Deep Water Literary Festival was founded in 2018, as a weekend of ideas, performance and community engagement held in the town of Narrowsburg, NY on the Delaware River. Combining author conversations, readings, and educational outreach, with multi-disciplinary arts programming, Deep Water goes beyond the standard model of a writers festival and invites the audience to engage in the world of books beyond the page. The next festival is June 19-22, 2026. deepwaterfestival.com