The Adaptations of Augie March: A Novel, A Play, and a Production, Exercises of Theatre

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The Adaptations of Augie March: A Novel by Saul Bellow, A Play by David Auburn, A Production by Charles Newell, An Exhibit by Special Collections and Court Theatre April 29, 2019 through August 30, 2019

Exhibit Text

Exhibit Introductory Panel: In 1953, Saul Bellow published The Adventures of Augie March , the story of a young immigrant coming of age in Chicago and discovering his identity as a writer. The novel launched Bellow’s reputation and established the future Nobel Laureate's literary renown.

In 2015, Court Theatre Artistic Director Charles Newell commissioned the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Auburn, AB ‘91, to adapt The Adventures of Augie March for Court’s stage. The same year, the Special Collections Research Center began processing and cataloguing Saul Bellow’s papers for use by scholars, students, and researchers.

The Adaptations of Augie March examines the successive transformations of Bellow's original text in the hands of playwright Auburn and his collaborator Newell as they worked closely with a team of theatre artists—including a set designer, costume designer, choreographer and dialect coach—to bring the May 2019 world premiere of The Adventures of Augie March to life at Court Theatre.

Among the manuscripts and artifacts on display here are early handwritten drafts of Bellow’s novel and his later revisions; original drafts of David Auburn’s play; Charles Newell’s artistic notes and plans for establishing the world of the play; costume designer Sally Dolembo’s drawings and sketches; the mind-bending work of shadow puppetry collective Manual Cinema, commissioned by Court to generate the play’s special effects; and John Culbert’s minimalist, non-literal design for a set capable of evoking places as disparate as Depression-era Chicago, the mountains of Mexico, post- WWII Italy, and a lifeboat on the open ocean.

The exhibit invites visitors to step into the world of Augie March—as Bellow imagined it, as Auburn adapted it, and as Newell envisioned it for the stage. The Adaptations of Augie March illuminates how writers and theatre artists work together to create and build the world of a play, and how they bring that world to full realization using the tools and elements of live performance.

Dramaturgical Essay FIRST TO KNOCK, FIRST ADMITTED:

The Adventures of Saul Bellow

Immigrant Saul Bellow arrived with his family in Chicago on July 4, 1924, smuggled by bootleggers across the border from Canada. He was nine years old. He would remain an “illegal alien”—we would now say, “undocumented immigrant”—until the age of 27.

Bellow was born in 1915 in Lachine, Quebec. His parents were Russian Jews. They had originally come to Canada to flee anti-Semitic violence and political persecution in their home city of St. Petersburg, Russia.

The Bellow family arrived on American soil two short months after the U. S. Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, a drastic and sweeping revision of federal immigration policy. The new law slammed the door on a mass of humanity that had been flowing to America since the late 19th-century, ending the greatest era of unrestricted migration to the United States in its history. From 1880 to 1924, waves of newcomers, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe. powered the rapid growth of Chicago. The city’s population quadrupled in thirty years’ time, growing from 500,000 residents in 1880 to over 2 million in 1910. By 1924, when Bellow took up residence with his family in the Russian Jewish enclave of Humboldt Park, 70% of Chicago residents were foreign- born or the children of foreign-born parents.

His whole life, Bellow retained a vivid impression of the first day he spent in America: July 4, 1924. He recalled his nine-year-old self thinking the fireworks, flags, bunting and parades of Independence Day were for him, meant to hail the promise of his new life in America.

But the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act told a less welcoming story. The law was informed by the burgeoning eugenics movement, which maintained that peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa were genetically inferior to those from Northern and Western Europe. The 1924 Act accordingly slashed immigration rates from targeted nations by 98%, barring admission to Russian Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks, Mexicans, Chinese, Turks, Armenians, Lithuanians and Africans, among many others. Conspicuously, the 1924 Act left the door open to migrants from Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Norway.

Eugenicists celebrated the 1924 Act as a measure that would “preserve the purity of American stock” by welcoming immigrants only “of higher intelligence,” who thus presented “the best material for American citizenship”. The now-excluded categories of people, it was believed, had “made an excessive contribution to our insane, criminal and other socially inadequate classes.” A related federal act prohibited entry to “epileptics and insane persons; paupers; professional beggars; persons likely to become a public charge; persons afflicted with a loathsome or dangerous disease; and persons who have committed a felony or other crime involving moral turpitude.” Polygamists, prostitutes and those with “mental or physical defects which might affect their ability to earn a living” were also banned.

A natural reading of The Adventures of Augie March views it as Bellow’s artistic response to the contradictions inherent in the historical moment of his arrival in this country. The story Bellow scrawled, beginning in 1947, in a succession of battered notebooks—notebooks now housed in the Special Collections Research Center—charts the coming of age of a young undocumented immigrant amidst the foreign-born multitudes of Chicago. Augie, Bellow’s narrator, struggles amongst the plenty and poverty of the city toward self-knowledge. He achieves it at last in discovering his identity as an American writer.

Bellow’s novel offers a rejoinder to the premise that a person’s country of origin, physical form or natural endowments determine their fitness for American life. The characters peopling The Adventures of Augie March hail from the countries of origin marked for exclusion by the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act: they are Russian Jews, they are Mexican, they are Hungarian and

The cast of characters populating Augie’s street-level world are compared to gods and heroes of Greek mythology, or heroes from the annals of world history.

Simon, Augie’s body-building older brother, is afflicted with bouts of insanity like his mythological correlate, Hercules. The orating, wheelchair-using real estate broker William Einhorn is at once equated with Hephaestus, the blacksmith God of Invention, and President Franklin Roosevelt. Grandma Lausch, physically infirm but ruthlessly tyrannical, is compared to Emperor Timur, the 14th-century conqueror of Asia and heir to Genghis Khan. Rebecca March, Augie’s blind, incapacitated mother stands with the many mortal women in Greek mythology who, seduced and abandoned by Zeus, give birth to demigods. Augie himself is likened to Alcibiades, legendary orator of 5th-century B.C.E. Athens, beloved by the gods for his charisma and gift of self-expression. Bellow suggests gods and geniuses walk the streets of Chicago, reincarnated as immigrants and workers. With immigrants from the “old world” no longer free to enter America, this promise is forestalled. Bellow begins the novel with a quote from Heraclitus, the 5th-century B.C.E. philosopher: Heraclitus says that “a man’s character is his fate”— not race, ethnicity or physical endowments.

The publication of The Adventures of Augie March in 1953, when he was 38 years old, launched Saul Bellow’s reputation as a novelist and established the future Nobel Laureate’s literary renown. Congress, meanwhile, would not end the exclusionary quota system imposed by the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act until 1965. The opening lines of Augie March -- I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent— stand as Bellow’s testament to the liberating potential of the American immigrant experience.

--Nora Titone

Exhibit Acknowledgements The Curators—Moyo Abiona, Patti Gibbons, Emily Lynch, Daniel Meyer, and Nora Titone—wish to thank the College Center for Research and Fellowships, and the following people for their kind contributions to the exhibit: Stephen J. Albert David Auburn Janis Freedman Bellow Leigh Bienen John Boyer Traci Brant Christine Colburn John Culbert Zac Davis Drew Dir Sally Dolembo Brent Ervin-Eickoff Nichole Fazio Sarah Fornace

Barbara Gilbert Ashley Gosselar Diana Harper Abigail Henkin Lauren Kincaid-Filbey Zachary Leader Jonathan Lear Michael Litt Emily Lovett Joe Mazza Pascal Merighi Thusnelda Mercy Julia Miller Charles Newell

Carolyn Ownbey Jessica Seet Cecilia Smith Heidi Thompson Saunders Catherine Uecker

Sonya Wang Christopher Wild Angel Ysaguirre Susan Zellner

CASE: “I AM AN AMERICAN, CHICAGO BORN”

A young immigrant arrives in Chicago Nine-year-old Saul Bellow arrived in Chicago on July 4, 1924, when bootleggers smuggled the boy and members of his family across the border from Canada. He would remain an illegal alien in the United States until 1943, when he became a naturalized citizen. Saul Bellow was born in 1915 in Lachine, Quebec to Russian Jewish parents, Abraham and Lescha Bellow, who themselves came to Canada in 1913, fleeing anti-Semitic violence and political persecution in their home city of St. Petersburg, Russia. For the rest of his life, Bellow retained a vivid impression of the first day he spent in the city of Chicago. He remembered believing that the fireworks, flags, bunting and parades of the 1924 Independence Day celebrations were intended to welcome him, and to hail the promise of his new life in America.

A novel and a fictional character born from Bellow’s experiences in the city Bellow later said his childhood on the streets of Chicago supplied the electric charge of inspiration for The Adventures of Augie March. Bellow’s widow, Janis Freedman Bellow, connects the exuberance and brio of the novel’s language to the intoxicating freedom and creative energy Bellow first discovered as new arrival in this city. When Bellow set out to write the story of a young immigrant coming of age in Chicago, he adapted aspects of his own life when crafting the narrative. Augie March is neither Bellow’s alter ego nor his double, but rather, he is a character whose adventures— through the alchemy of the author’s literary imagination—distantly echo aspects of Bellow’s life, and whose impressions and substantive experiences at times are artful silhouettes of Bellow’s own. As Janis Freedman Bellow has remarked, “When pieces of [Bellow’s] life find their way into his work, there is always something magical about the manner in which they are lifted from the past or present, kneaded and shaped and subtly transformed into narrative. But this is not cutting and pasting of actual events: Saul wields a wand, not a scissors.”

The genesis of The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow began writing the novel when he was living in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship. One spring morning in 1949, he recalled, the sight of Parisian street sweepers releasing the valves on water hydrants to send a flood across the cobblestones suddenly unlocked his imagination: “I remember saying to myself, ‘Well, why not…have as much freedom of movement as this running water…I seem then to have gone back to childhood in my thoughts and remembered a pal of mine whose surname was August—a handsome, free-wheeling kid who used to yell out when we were playing checkers, ‘I got a scheme!’” Thinking of this childhood friend, and of the Chicago he had known growing up in the 1920s-1930s, Bellow conceived of the novel in an instant: “Subject and language appeared at the same moment. The language was immediately present—I can’t say how it happened, but I was suddenly enriched with words and phrases…I found myself with magical suddenness writing a first paragraph…It rushed out of me. I was turned on like a hydrant in summer.” The notebooks Bellow used to catch this flood of inspired language are found throughout this exhibit.

Photo, c. 1915 Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, in Culter’s Jews of Chicago F548.9.J5C870 1996 Gen Girls participate in a dance class at the Jewish Training School of Chicago, a thriving institution founded in 1888 to provide English lessons, vocational training and arts instruction to the children of Russian Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s West Side.

CASE: NOBEL

Day Planner Bellow’s day planner with Nobel Prize ceremony marked on December 10, 1976

[Reproduction] Newspaper Clipping United Press International December 11, 1976 Saul Bellow Papers

Booklet “Translation of the Speeches at the Nobel Festival 1976” Saul Bellow Papers

CASE: HOW CHICAGO SHAPED BELLOW AS A WRITER

The Viking Press published The Adventures of Augie March in 1953 to widespread acclaim. One of the novel’s achievements, Philip Roth observed, was raising “the language you spoke, the American argot you heard on the street,” to the level of high literature. Bellow’s Augie, like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, is the narrator of his own life story. Bellow said the shape of his novel was like “a widening spiral that begins in the ghetto and the slum and spreads into the greater world, and there Augie comes to the fore because of the multiplication of people around him and the greater difficulty of experience.” Though Augie travels far—his story leaps from Mexico to New York, Italy and a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—he begins in Chicago, and the language he uses to recount his adventures bears the unique and unmistakable stamp of his city of origin. Inflected with Yiddish rhythms, salted with slang and idiomatic speech, packed with interludes of heightened poetic phrasing and allusions to high and low culture, Augie’s narrative voice immerses readers in the colloquial lyricism of the Chicago streets. As the novel’s spiral widens, and Bellow’s protagonist gains in age and experience, Augie’s language keeps pace with the evolution of Chicago speech over three decades, evoking the vernacular of the Prohibition era, tracking the minor key changes heralded by the Great Depression, and finding the tonal shift that marked the years of the post-war economic boom.

As the manuscripts and oral history interviews displayed indicate, Bellow absorbed a rich inheritance as a writer in the years he spent coming of age in Chicago. Though his earliest spoken languages were Russian and Yiddish, he picked up English on the streets of Chicago’s West Side, where he played alongside the children of Poles, Italians, Swedes, Greeks, Hungarians, Czechs and Romanians. Bellow remembered his playmates being as eager as he was to ditch their native tongues and talk exclusively on American themes--“baseball, prizefights,

speakeasies, graft, jazz, crap games, gang wars.” The adolescent Bellow heard soapbox preachers on Division Street, tuned his ear to the cacophony of vendors hawking wares in the Maxwell Street Market, and drank in the words of orators, labor leaders and poets who assembled for debates in Bughouse Square, the tree-shaded park beside the Newberry Library. He haunted the stacks of multiple branches of the Chicago Public Library system, where classic texts of world literature were freely available to him, the son of a low-wage employee at the Imperial Bakery on Augusta Avenue. Later, as a student at Tuley High School in the 1930s, Bellow and his classmates toiled on the editorial boards of school literary magazines and newspapers, churning out ambitious works of original fiction, poetry and essays.

Bellow published two novels prior to Augie , The Dangling Man in 1944 and The Victim in 1947. The language of those early works in no way resembled what he achieved with Augie. Zachary Leader, Bellow’s biographer, explains that the novelist “knew that he was doing something new with The Adventures of Augie March. What he discovered with Augie , Bellow later told Philip Roth, was “that I could write whatever I wished, and that what I wished was to get into words the appearance of a gallery of personalities—characters like Grandma Lausch or Einhorn the fertile cripple, or Augie March himself. Years of notation ended in the discovery of a language that made everything possible.”

Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March New York: Viking, 1953 PS3503.E436A67 1953 c.7 Rare 616686217

[Reproduction, detail] Map Cram's City Guide Map of Chicago, c. 1926 G4104.C6 Regenstein Map Collection

Speech, 1972 “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View” Saul Bellow Papers These are the first two pages of a speech Saul Bellow gave at Chicago Public Library.

Holograph Draft, undated “How, In the City of Chicago does a Young Person Become a Writer” Saul Bellow Papers

[Reproduction] Photo, undated Bughouse Square Washington Square Park, Chicago Wikimedia Commons

iPad: Oral Histories

Saul Bellow Papers A portrait of Bellow appears on the front cover of the September 19, 1953 issue of The Saturday Review.

News Clippings Saul Bellow Papers

Scrapbook Saul Bellow Papers

CASE: TRANSLATIONS OF AUGIE MARCH

Contract Envelope Saul Bellow Papers

Books 50 th^ Anniversary Edition, from Janis Bellow, will add to ArcMon after exhibit PS3503.E4488A6613 1984 c.2 ArcMon, 61185697, Dobrodruž ství Augieho Marche / PS3503.E436A67155 1982 c.1 v. 2 ArcMon, 61126718, Augie March kalandjai :regé ny PS3503.E4488A6616 1981 v.1 ArcMon, 82235529, Ō gī mā chi no bōken PS3503.E4488A6616 1981 v.2 ArcMon, 82234966, Ō gī mā chi no bōken PS3503.E4488 A66169 2009 ArcMon, 100444556, As aventuras de Augie March PS3503.E436A6715 1977 ArcMon, 6127100, Die Abenteuer des Augie March PS3503.E436A67123 1955 ArcMon, 61126592, En ung Amerikaners eventyr PS3503.E436A67185 1953 c.2 ArcMon, 112246663, Augie Marchs aventyr PS3503.E436A67155 1982 v.1 ArcMon, 61126770, Augie March kalandjai :regé ny PS3503.E436A6715 2008 ArcMon, 82454268, Die Abenteuer des Augie March :Roman PS3503.E436A6714 1959 ArcMon, 61126650, Les Aventures d'Augie March :roman PS3503.E436A67173 1965 ArcMon, 61125624, Dož ivljaji Augie Marcha PS3503.E436A6715 1956 ArcMon, 61126523, Die Abenteuer des Augie March :Roman PS3503.E436A67135 1975 ArcMon, 61125566, Augie Marchin kiemurat PS3503.E436A6714 1977 v.2 ArcMon, 61126838, Les aventures d'Augie March :roman PS3503.E436A6714 1977 v.1 ArcMon, 61126845, Les aventures d'Augie March :roman PS3503.E436A67185 1975 ArcMon, 61126561, Augie Marchs ä ventyr PS3503.E4488A6618 1994 ArcMon, 81700385, Las aventuras de Augie March PS3503.E4488A6615 1966 ArcMon, 81700347, Die Abenteuer des Augie March :Roman PS3503.E436A67129 1990 ArcMon, 61127042, De avonturen van Augie March dis-PS3503.E436A67175 1961 ArcMon, 61125504, Dogodivš č ine Augieja Marcha :roman PS3503.E436A67 1970 ArcMon, 61126989, The adventures of Augie March

ANDO CASE: THE EAGLE

LIFE Magazine

July 4, 1949

On loan from Court Theatre

On a visit to Mexico in 1940, Saul Bellow met Daniel and Jule Mannix of Philadelphia, who were vacationing with their unusual pet, an American bald eagle named Aguila. The Mannixes were training Aguila to hunt the wild iguanas that roamed the forests and mountains surrounding Taxco, a popular tourist destination 100 miles southwest of Mexico City. Bellow drew from his vivid memories of the Mannixes and their eagle Aguila when he began writing The Adventures of Augie March in 1949; LIFE Magazine published this photo essay on the couple and their pet the same year.

Notebooks, “The Adventures of Augie March” Saul Bellow Papers These are the notebooks Bellow began writing in while residing in Paris during the spring of 1949, when the idea for The Adventures of Augie March first came to him. The words of the novel, he later said, “suddenly…rushed out of me. I was turned on like a hydrant in summer.” The cascade of Bellow’s inspiration may be perceived in the smooth, uninterrupted flow of the handwriting that fills most of these notebooks. The few passages of composition in Bellow’s Augie March notebooks that reveal a different pace of writing or that bear signs of heavy revision are those relating to his creation of the eagle, Caligula, who functions as a powerful and mutable metaphor within the world of the novel.

“The Adventures of Augie March Notebook 11” Saul Bellow Papers

“The Adventures of Augie March Notebook 12” Saul Bellow Papers

Typescript Saul Bellow Papers

Script The Adventures of Augie March On loan from David Auburn In the hands of playwright David Auburn, Bellow’s eagle is transformed. Caligula appears before Augie at the climax of Auburn’s play, and engages him in a final, revelatory conversation.

THE ART OF ADAPTING DAVID AUBURN’S EAGLE The task of designing the character of the eagle from the play The Adventures of Augie March was appealing to Manual Cinema because, in a lot of ways, it is an almost impossible task of adaptation. The eagle is a feature of a novel that was not originally intended to be put on stage. The actual mechanics of getting an eagle on stage, an eagle that the audience identifies with, and that contributes to the themes and motifs of the story, is a very tall order—and that challenge was attractive to us. Also, it is not like we are designing the animal puppet for Broadway’s King Kong : the eagle in David Auburn’s play is not there for pure spectacle. Rather, the eagle has a subtle, interesting way of interacting with Augie’s character, and the eagle shadows Augie’s journey in the story in deeply meaningful way. Auburn thoroughly digested the character of the eagle from the novel, and he deploys the eagle in his script in ways that work theatrically and metaphorically. So, in addition to bringing Bellow’s eagle to the stage, we knew we would be bringing Auburn’s eagle to

heightened, no longer a literal dramatic scene. These moments of shift occur when a character begins to speak the original narrative language from The Adventures of Augie March. These moments should feel like a welling up of self-knowledge, or of wisdom, coming from inside of Augie. And these heightened scenes are strung together throughout the play like pearls on a necklace, building toward this final scene, when an image of the eagle comes to Augie at his lowest point, and shares a conversation with him. For this climactic moment, the ensemble coalesces together and becomes one moving, shifting entity in the shape of an eagle. Together, they represent everything that Augie has experienced, all the people he has met, the full sum of what has happened to him throughout the play, and all the knowledge he has gained. —Drew Dir, Manual Cinema

[Reproduction, enlargement] Sketches Story board panels The Adventures of Augie March Manual Cinema

STAGING THE EAGLE’S HUNT FOR A GIANT IGUANA There was another iteration of the eagle we needed to bring to realization. This iteration is contained in an elaborate and pivotal scene in Bellow’s novel that Auburn included in his adaptation, where Caligula the Eagle is taken out for his first iguana hunt in the mountains of Mexico. In this scene, Caligula is supposed to hunt and capture a giant iguana on his own. This was the most challenging scene to bring to life because it requires an expansion of time and space that is really difficult to achieve in the theatre. What we have done is to create a cinematic projection space on stage where the actors use a combination of their own bodies, shadow puppets and two-dimensional miniature objects to create a little film, a brief nature documentary, of Caligula the Eagle trying and ultimately failing to capture his first iguana.

In our short eagle film, the story that is told is a bit of a tragedy. For this mood and emotion to come through, it is necessary for us to be in Caligula the Eagle’s point of view and, at the same time, to occupy the point of view of Augie and Thea, who are desperately hoping that all this goes well. There definitely is an element of suspense and drama involved, but also, by virtue of the media that we are using, there also is a dreamlike and hallucinatory quality to this interlude. Caligula’s failure to capture the iguana is really a turning point in Augie’s journey in the play. It is a moment in the play where we drop a big curtain across the stage to hold the shadow projections, and the audience will see imagery unlike anything they have seen up to that point in the play. So, this is a really heightened moment of theatrically and we want to put the audience in a completely new space. —Drew Dir, Manual Cinema

Bio MANUAL CINEMA Performance collective, design studio, and film/video production company, Manual Cinema, was founded in 2010 by UChicago alumni, Drew Dir and Sarah Fornace, in collaboration with Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller, and Kyle Vegter.

Manual Cinema combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive stories that transport audiences. Using vintage overhead projectors, multiple screens, puppets, actors, live feed cameras, multi-channel sound design, and a live music

ensemble, Manual Cinema transforms the experience of attending the cinema and imbues it with liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality. The resulting parade of images is fantastical and feels at once strange and familiar, new and old, real and dreamlike.

An integral part of the Manual Cinema experience is the combination of the backstage and on-stage spaces, which means that an audience can see, not only the projected images, but the means by which the actors create these images. Audience members can even interact with the actors and puppets after shows. The Chicago Tribune remarked that Manual Cinema’s open approach to storytelling shows that “you can still fall in love with a fictional character, a puppet, even when you see all the strings and learn how they are pulled.” For Manual Cinema, how you tell a story matters as much as the story itself.

Added the week of June 24, 2019:

3-D Caligula Eagle Puppet

Manual Cinema, 2019

Reeds, thermal plastics (Worbla and Shapelock), glass, synthetic fur, carbon fiber

The 3-D Caligula Eagle Puppet was worn and manipulated by Chaon Cross, the actor

portraying Thea in The Adventures of Augie March. Cross controlled the puppet by

placing her right arm into Caligula’s head and body, and her left arm into the leather

gauntlet that is Caligula’s perch and stabilizing base. Manual Cinema built the body of

the puppet from lightweight reeds, and used thermal plastic, synthetic fur and carbon

fiber to create the beak, talons and feathers.

2-D Eagle and Iguana Shadow Puppets

Manual Cinema, 2019

Foam core, acetate, fabric, sticks

These shadow puppets were designed to enact the Iguana Hunt in Act III of the play.

Manual Cinema drew the storyboard narrative of the hunt, then fashioned a series of

shadow puppets from foam core and fabric to replicate the action. They chose flexible

materials, foam core and fabric, that would allow actors to wiggle, bend, move and

manipulate the shadow puppets in ways that appeared fluid and organic in

performance.

CASE: DAVID AUBURN PULITZER

Telegram, 2001 Pulitzer Prize

of quotation from the novel are communicated on stage--whether it happens with one actor speaking or many actors speaking chorally, or with the lights changing—well, that’s Charlie’s problem to solve as the director. This is a device I’m excited about. I think it will help an audience feel the complexity of Bellow’s language while illuminating how Augie himself understands his circumstances.” – David Auburn

Saul Bellow Las aventuras de Augie March Buenos Aires: Editorial Guillermo Kraft, [1962] PS3503.E436A6718 1962 ArcMon 61126958

Photo David Auburn Photo by Joe Mazza, 2019

Bio David Auburn Playwright and screenwriter David Auburn’s credits include The Adventures of Augie March , based on the Bellow novel (Court Theatre, 2019); Lost Lake (Manhattan Theatre Club, 2014); The Columnist (Manhattan Theater Club/Broadway, 2012), and Proof.

Auburn won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Proof.

Auburn’s film credits include The Girl in the Park (writer/director), Georgetown , and The Lake House.

Auburn’s stage directing credits include Long Day's Journey into Night (Court Theatre); The Petrified Forest, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Anna Christie , A Delicate Balance , Period of Adjustment , and Sick (Berkshire Theatre Group); and the Off-Broadway world premiere of Michael Weller’s Side Effects (MCC).

Auburn is a graduate of the University of Chicago, AB ’91, a current Neubauer Collegium Fellow, and a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in New York City.

Quotes Auburn on the Art of Adaptation I had a number of impulses when I started adapting the novel. One was the feeling that it was overflowing with great roles for actors. There are hundreds of characters in the book, and the language with which they speak is realistic and earthy and magical and exaggerated. The idea of that language in actors’ mouths excited me. I also wanted audiences to have the same feeling seeing the play as reading the book, the feeling of overflowing energy and exuberance. I was fascinated to learn that writing this book had had an apparently liberating effect on Bellow as a writer, that he discovered an exuberance and a humor and a way of encompassing the world in this book that were new to him. When you read the book, you feel someone discovering how widely they can spread their arms. I wanted the play to feel like that.

Auburn on the Challenge of Adapting Bellow’s Novel for the Stage

One big problem was structure. I always knew that I would have to make a very careful selection of the hundreds of incidents and characters in the book. The three-hour play could only accommodate some of them, and I wanted to get enough of them in there to preserve a sense of an epic. The novel is a picaresque, a series of incidents that acquires meaning by virtue of the language that Augie uses to talk about his life. Augie, a kind of version of Bellow, is narrating his own life from early childhood, but even as a kid he is using incredibly elevated, allusive, cascading, emotional language. From the first page of the book, you ask the question, ‘How does a desperately poor, Humboldt Park immigrant Jewish kid learn to talk about his world in this way, and how does he become the person who would narrate this book you’re reading?’ That’s the plot of the novel, and that’s enough to keep you going until the last page. But theater operates differently, and it requires a different form. Figuring out a structure for the play that tells the audience, ‘This is what you’re going to see tonight, this is the shape of the journey you’re going to take tonight,’ became a really important thing.

Auburn on Using Text from Bellow’s Novel in the Script The other challenge was how to get Bellow’s language into the play. if you simply tell the story, if you just dramatize the incidents Augie is experiencing, how do you get the wonderful merit of his language into the play and on the stage. I knew I did not want to a script where actors were leaving the world of the play and turning to the audience and reciting chunks of the novel. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to keep it very active, and I think that we have found some really interesting ways of doing that.

CASE: CHARLES NEWELL

A DIRECTOR’S IMAGINATION

THE PROCESS OF BRINGING AUBURN’S PLAY TO LIFE

As Charles Newell explored the possibilities for staging Auburn’s script, he was drawn

to the visionary work of the pioneering German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch

(1940-2009). Bausch’s signature technique—forged in decades of practice and

experimentation with her legendary dance company, Tanztheater Wuppertal—fused

elements of theatre, dance and German expressionism into a new dramatic form.

Newell turned to Bausch’s techniques to unlock the performative possibilities of the

interludes of Bellow’s language—the “Bellow music,” as Newell would say—that

playwright Auburn placed throughout the play. These excerpts from the novel are

spoken by characters who otherwise are voiceless, or in some way lack power or

agency. Newell believed these rare moments of “Bellow music” should unfold in a

heightened theatrical way; consequently, Bausch’s theories of performance became one

of many useful tools Newell employed while devising the aesthetic of his production.

To fuel Newell’s creative process, Court Theatre Executive Director Angel Ysaguirre

invited two principal dancers from Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal to Chicago in

February 2019 to conduct a performance workshop with Newell and the actors in the

Photos Choreography workshop with Thusnelda Mercy and Pascal Merighi Photo by Joe Mazza, 2019

Photo Charles Newell Photo by Joe Mazza, 2019

Photo Charles Newell Photo by Joe Mazza, 2019

Bio The Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director of Court Theatre, Charles “Charlie” Newell, has been Artistic Director at Court Theatre since 1994, where he has directed over fifty productions. He made his Chicago directorial debut in 1993 with The Triumph of Love , which won the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Production. Newell has been nominated for sixteen Joseph Jefferson Director Awards, winning four times. Additionally, in 2018, Court Theatre received a special Joseph Jefferson Award for “extraordinary commitment to the Chicago theatre community for over fifty years.”

Newell won the Theatre Communications Group’s Alan Schneider Director Award in 1992, the League of Chicago Theatres’ Artistic Achievement Award in 2012, and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation awarded Newell with their Zelda Fichandler Award, which they give to honor “an outstanding director or choreographer who is transforming the regional arts landscape through singular creativity and artistry in theatre.”

Newell’s directorial highlights at Court include All My Sons , The Hard Problem , Man in the Ring ; One Man, Two Guvnors , Satchmo at the Waldorf , Agamemnon, The Secret Garden, Iphigenia in Aulis, M. Butterfly, The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, Proof , Angels in America, An Iliad , Porgy and Bess, Three Tall Women, Titus Andronicus , Arcadia, Uncle Vanya , Raisin, The Glass Menagerie, Travesties, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , The Invention of Love, and Hamlet. Charlie has also directed at Goodman Theatre, Guthrie Theater, Arena Stage, John Houseman’s The Acting Company, the California and Alabama Shakespeare Festivals, Juilliard, and New York University. His opera directing credits include Regina (Lyric Opera), Rigoletto (Opera Theatre of St. Louis), Don Giovanni and The Jewel Box (Chicago Opera Theater), and Carousel (Glimmerglass).

Newell has served on the Board of the Theatre Communications Group, as well as on several panels for the National Endowment for the Arts.

iPad: Dialect Dialect Samples A crucial step in the process of adapting The Adventures of Augie March for the stage was training 21st- century actors to speak with the rhythms and intonations of mid-20th-century characters. Court Theatre searched for a range of historic audio-recordings that would help members of the acting

company to recreate the vocal intonations and speech styles of people who came of age in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.

An excellent resource for this dialect coaching work was the archive of 1959-1961 audio-recordings created by television journalist and news commentator Mike Wallace. Housed at Syracuse University's Special Collections Research Center, the Mike Wallace Collection holds original tapes of Wallace’s on-screen interviews with hundreds of mid-century American writers, artists, athletes, politicians and other public figures. Audio-recordings from the Wallace Collection helped shape the dialects of numerous characters in The Adventures of Augie March.

The writers Ben Hecht and Meyer Levin, born in Chicago in the years 1893 and 1905 respectively, were a strong match for the character William Einhorn. Ben Hecht 0 to : Meyer Levin :37 to 1:

The actor Anthony Quinn, born in 1915 in Chihuahua, Mexico, offers a vocal cue for the character Padilla. Anthony Quinn 1:29-2:

Boxers Joe Louis and Tony Galento, each born before WWI, provide a basis for “Nails” Nagel’s dialect work. Joe Louis 2:15-2: Tony Galento 2:27 to 2:

The California-born, pioneering female aviator Jaqueline Cochran—she was the first woman to break the sound barrier—is a source of vocal inspiration for the character Mimi. Jaqueline Cochran 2:50-3:

CASE: JOHN CULBERT/SET DESIGN

Andreas Feininger Feininger’s Chicago, 1941 New York: Dover Publications, 1980 On loan from Court Theatre

“Andreas Feininger’s photographs of Chicago at mid-century were a source of inspiration for our set design process. As Augie described Chicago, and how he experienced Chicago, it is not necessarily a warm and friendly place. It is more like what Feininger captured here: the city has an industrial quality, a bustling quality, but it is also gritty. We were attracted to the high contrast in Feininger’s pictures, to the light and dark, to the shafts of light cutting through space, and to the industrial, active feel of the street scenes. In our final set design, the framing of the El train not only defines the edges of our space, but it also says ‘Chicago’ without being too overt. So, the set is able to convey that the frame of our story is indeed Chicago, just as the first lines of the novel tell us that Chicago is the frame.” –John Culbert

[Reproduction pages] Andreas Feininger