New Haven Independent

Certain works of literature lend themselves well to stage adaptation, works, for instance, such as those by Dostoyevsky and Dickens.

“Both those writers wrote scenes,” Long Wharf Theatre Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein pointed out.

From April 1 through April 26, the Long Wharf Theatre presents a world premiere adaptation by Long Wharf Theatre Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting and Craig Siebels of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The beloved, Pulitzer Prize-winning novella is one that Edelstein said doesn’t necessarily lend itself to theatrical production.

And Ting agrees.

“It is not an inherently dramatic story,” he said. “It is a sublime parable.”

“This book is more internal,” Edelstein offered, “(Ting) worked arduously to work it out.”

In a sense, Ting has been wrestling with The Old Man and the Sea for years.

“It was the first novel that my father ever gave me,” he said. Ting was between his junior and senior years of high school when father died.

The adaptation Ting is directing trains its attention on the relationship in Hemingway’s story between the old Cuban fisherman, Santiago, and the boy, Manolin, and not on the old man and the marlin he struggles to catch after 84 days of catching nothing.

The script was written by Ting and Siebels, the production’s set designer. Siebels, who splits his time between Los Angeles and Miami, where he works as the production designer on the television series Burn Notice, said training this adaptation’s focus on the relationship between the man and the boy was equally important to him.

The idea to adapt The Old Man and the Sea for the stage was one Ting and Siebels talked about several years ago. They’ve known each other for about 10 years, having met at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Siebels was teaching in the university’s graduate program, in which Ting was a student. The two first worked together on Ting and Amy Russell’s Je t’embrasse, Elvis, at the Avignon Festival Off, in 2000. Siebels was the set designer on that production. The Old Man and the Sea marks his first turn as a scriptwriter.

“This book has held up for me for 20 years,” said Siebels, whose father, like Ting’s has passed on.

In focusing on the relationship in The Old Man and the Sea between the old man and the boy, Siebels said he and Ting wanted a design that allowed them, and thus the audience, to feel the void and connection between the two when the old man is out to sea. While the ocean represents a barrier between the characters, the horizon ties them together. Although Ting and Siebels wanted to tell the story in a certain way, the writing process involved tossing the script back and forth a great deal. The two writers agreed and disagreed on much. And they gave themselves one hard and fast rule: a change to the script could not simply be undone and reversed.

Ting said he and Siebels gave themselves the exercise of deconstructing Hemingway’s text then figuring out how to use it as a framework for their adaptation. Audiences will recognize Hemingway’s voice, Ting said. Almost all the dialogue in the adaptation comes directly from the novella, as does a lot of the narration. Siebels said some of the dialogue is even repeated from different perspectives.

To Siebels, The Old Man and the Sea captures the spirit of a man being, but not feeling, defeated. In crafting the script, he and Ting kept in mind lessons from Icarus and Don Quixote. As a designer, Siebels said, you get trained to research things, and, as a writer, you want to research things that might be related even tangentially to what you’re working on.

The story of Icarus, Ting said, is about “either the folly of man to reach too high, or the great glory of man to reach too high.” Talking about the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, he said, “It’s virtually a mythic feat that he accomplishes,” though the consequence of Santiago’s ambition, of course, is that sharks are equally interested in the marlin he almost incredibly manages to catch.

For Ting, it was “absolutely essential” to cast actors who could convey the context of the Cuban culture.

“I know that I’m going to be relying heavily on actors who can speak from that context,” Ting said. Mateo Gomez and Yale School of Drama graduate Rey Lucas, both of whom have appeared on the big and small screens, in regional theater productions and on Broadway, have been cast as the old man and the boy, respectively.

Ting said he would love people of different generations to experience this adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea together.

Still, Siebels doesn’t want audiences to feel as though there’s a homework assignment to finish before seeing the piece. A lot of people, he said, have a vague recollection of the book, and that’s fine. He’d rather the play inspire them to read or reread it after seeing the performance.

For more information about Long Wharf Theatre’s production of The Old Man and the Sea, visit www.longwharf.org or call (203) 787-4282.

This story was originally published in The Arts Paper, a publication of the Arts
Council of Greater New Haven.