'The Scarlet Letter'

Carol Gilligan has created a new adaptation for Shakespeare & Co.

By Jeffrey Borak

Lenox

When Shakespeare & Company's artistic director Tina Packer approached noted psychologist and author Carol Gilligan with the idea of adapting Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" for the stage, Gilligan jumped at the chance.

"How could I not?" she asked rhetorically during a recent interview at Shakespeare & Company's Founders' Theatre, where "The Scarlet Letter" officially opens Saturday evening at 7:30 after a series of previews. "When Tina asked me I jumped at the chance. My writing has been moving in this direction.

"When I did Company of Women [an all-female theater company she co-founded with Kristin Linklater], we wrote plays. I've been part of a fiction writers' workshop.

"If you're a writer, all you have is words on a printed page."

She also has written about "The Scarlet Letter," most recently in her new book, "The Birth of Pleasure," in which she explores what she sees as an intriguing dichotomy in Hawthorne's book about a woman who is branded -- literally and figuratively -- an adulteress by the Puritan community in which she lives.

By being placed outside the paternal framework of Puritanism, Gilligan reasons, Hester Pryne, the novel's heroine, is better able to see that framework.

"As Hester roams the forest on the edge of the settlement," Gilligan writes in "The Birth of Pleasure," "her mind runs free, and in the spirit of her age, she questions 'the whole system of ancient prejudice': the principles governing relationships between men and women, dividing her from Dimmesdale and Dimmesdale from himself, and also restricting her ability to cultivate in their daughter 'the germ and blossom of womanhood.'

"In the book, the 'A' [that Hester is made to wear on her clothing] is set as adultery. [Thematically], it is set as 'able.' The very thing that renders Hester able," Gilligan explained, "also sets her unable.

"The opposite of Puritanism is pleasure. Hawthorne is seen as a moralist and yet I think he was a visionary. He saw things so clearly.

"When I first read the book, I saw it as a novel about adultery. Later, when I was working with teenage girls and young women, I picked it up again and saw a novel I hadn't read before. Hawthorne was hearing a clarity and truthfulness in women. And in Hester's daughter, Pearl, you have the voice of a young girl who had not yet been trained not to see the framework.

"You will hear in the play lines that sound like contemporary feminist lines. They come directly from Hawthorne."

"When I read the section of 'The Birth of Pleasure' on 'The Scarlet Letter,' " said Packer, who is directing the play, "it seemed to me so obvious that our interests coincided.

"There is something about philosophers who are also good writers that makes them potentially good playwrights. Carol has an instinctive dramatic intelligence, a feel for what is being said underneath the words."

For Gilligan, adapting "The Scarlet Letter" has been a crash course in playwriting.

"I'm learning a lot from my friend, Tina," Gilligan said, glancing at Packer with a warm smile. "It's like having private playwriting lessons. I cannot overestimate how much I've learned."

Packer's husband, Dennis Krausnick, who has written most of Shakespeare & Company's stage adaptations of Edith Wharton's novels and short stories, also has been working with Gilligan. He spent several weeks in July working with her at the Martha's Vineyard vacation home the N.Y.U. professor shares with her husband, Jim.

"It was an invaluable experience," Gilligan said. "[Dennis] showed me, among other things, how to break up a sentence so it becomes more theatrical."

Gilligan has been working on "The Scarlet Letter" for over a year. The first half of the play was given a reading in last year's Studio Festival of Plays.

"That early version included the 'Customs House' section that begins the novel and material about Hawthorne and [his wife] Sophia," Packer said. "But feedback from the audience suggested that we go to a much simpler story.

"A lot of our work has been about cutting and rearranging and finding the dramatic line. Asking 'Where is the conflict in this?' "

"I was really caught by the cadences of Hawthorne's writing, his sentence structure," Gilligan said, "so when I came in with my first version of the script, it consisted of that or a page with characters' names. How do you keep the life of a novel you're adapting for the stage? It's like doing translations."

Gilligan has made some changes in the novel.

"We've re-written the election day sermon," Packer said, citing one example. "We say what Dimmesdale says but Hawthorne doesn't."

Also, said Gilligan, "I felt we had to see the love between Hester and Dimmesdale.

"Like Hester, everyone in the community assumed Hester's husband was dead so there was nothing to stand in the way of [Hester and Dimmesdale] being in love. The novel is about shifting framework."

Gilligan also has given Hester's daughter, Pearl, some prominence. Indeed, through an epilogue set several years after the main events of the play, Pearl's is the last voice heard as she reflects upon those events.

"I was so fascinated by Pearl in the novel," Gilligan said; "the new England, the new Pearl. Hawthorne heard Pearl's voice. I wanted to add an epilogue using Pearl's voice, to suggest continuity."

"The Scarlet Letter" project is part of Shakespeare & Company's increasing interest in examining the work of Berkshires writers other than Edith Wharton. It also is Packer's way of creating what she characterizes as a "life-enhancing structure" for the community of artists she has gathered at Shakespeare & Company's Kemble Street campus.

"How do you run things," Packer asked philosophically, "without doing in people's soul and spirit?

"If an arts organization is going to be truly creative, it must be so at all levels.

"I think writers come out of community. Artists come out of community."

'The Scarlet Letter' runs through Nov. 3 in Shakespeare & Company's Founders' Theatre, 70 Kemble St. in Lenox. Performances are Friday and Saturday evenings at 7:30 and Sunday afternoons at 2. Ticket information is available by phoning 637-3353 or online at www.shakespeare.org.