Welcome to Script Insights! Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of a playwright? In this series, you get a rare and exciting opportunity to hear directly from the authors themselves. Each article offers personal insights from the playwright, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process, character motivations, and thematic explorations that bring their scripts to life.
Below, you’ll find a downloadable blog post offering valuable insights directly from the author of Victory. The downloaded PDF also includes supplemental classroom activities to help you connect the play’s themes and characters with your students.
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Michael Landes
Adaptation is hard to define––how much can a story change before it becomes something else entirely? What’s the difference between a play that’s inspired by another, and a play adapted from another play? Some, like dramaturg Morgan Jenness who helped me develop this play, say all stories are adaptations of past stories in new forms, even if the writer doesn’t know it.
Almost all of Shakespeare’s existing plays are adapted from existing material, including Coriolanus. Despite loving Coriolanus and many of his plays, I don’t share the belief of many that he was singularly genius, beyond writers like Kalidasa, Wang Shifu, Sor Juana or Hroswitha. Many say that we continue to perform Shakespeare because his stories remain relevant to today, and I believe that that’s only partly true––I also think that we create this relevance by studying his plays, and if we read more plays by other authors, we might find relevance in them, too.
When I first read Coriolanus, I understood why it wasn’t as popular as Hamlet or Macbeth. It’s not an easy read––it’s one of his longest plays, with a famously dislikeable antihero and tons of obscure Roman political procedure. Despite all that, I wound up loving it. Many others have written much more intelligently about Coriolanus than me, so I’ll recommend the Folgers’ page on the play as well as the RSC (personally, I’m not against using Wikipedia either).
I wanted to focus my adaptation on bringing out the interpersonal drama, which meant cutting back on the politics of the original. I read Coriolanus as someone who’s both well-known and dislikes fame, who feels incredibly comfortable in one environment but becomes almost a different person in another. Brian Kulick calls this “stances”, meaning that one stance––”I like being popular”––can be true in one moment, while “I hate being popular” can be equally true in the next, something that happens a lot for both C and Coriolanus.
Lots of elements of Coriolanus carry over easily to the high school setting, like his relationship with his mother and exploration of his sexuality. Villainy and heroism in Coriolanus work a bit differently than in other tragedies; even though some characters are more likeable or dislikable than others, all are fundamentally trying to do the right thing for Rome or Coriol in their own ways. I wanted to preserve that in Roma High.
Lastly, play adaptations are unique, because scripts get adapted again into a live performance. This is the reason for my note on gender, race, sexuality and disability; excepting race, all of those topics come up explicitly in Coriolanus and, naturally, all of them come up in high schools too. I wanted my play to allow for room to think about and explore those topics, without imposing assumptions on how each production will be able to explore them.