Cory Doctorow writes “Josh Costello has adapted my novel Little Brother for stage in San Francisco (this is new adaptation, unrelated to the production that ran in Chicago a few years back [see this article]). The show opens in January, 2012, and he’s just gone into production; he’s keeping running notes of his progress at a blog called Little Brother Live.”
The play is scheduled to run in January and February 2012 at The Custom Made Theatre Co., 1620 Gough Street, San Francisco, CA 94109. The Company’s full schedule and ticket ordering are available from this page.
Costello, a freelance stage director, says of the genesis of the project: “After I finished [reading] the novel, I couldn’t get it out of my head; it’s so smart and so much fun and it brought me right back to that utterly compelling feeling of teen rebelliousness that has been the motivating force for so much of my work in the theatre over the years.
“At some point, I realized that the first-person narrative structure of the novel would allow for a stage adaptation in which the lead actor could speak directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and two other actors could play all the other characters. I like this style of theatre—the point is not to fool the audience into forgetting that there are only three actors, it’s to encourage the audience to use their own imaginations to actively participate in the telling of the story. We know the same actor is playing Ange and Severe Haircut and Mom, and it’s a blast to watch her shift her physicality and rhythm and voice to make each character come to life. The narration similarly encourages the audience to imagine the various locations without our needing to slow down the show by rolling in big set pieces. When this is done well, the audience is much more engaged, much more involved in the story, than in plays that spend thousands and thousands of dollars to fully realize all of the sets and present everything as realistically as possible.
“That idea—that a stage version of Little Brother could work with three actors—was the key. I read through the novel again with this in mind, and discovered that almost all of the important scenes involve Marcus and just one or two other people. There are a few big exceptions to this, and I’ll write more about how I dealt with those in another post. But now the seed had been planted, and I was ready to get to work.”
Keep reading Little Brother Live for more.