Indeed, after the show was announced in the Huntington’s season, a subscriber politely mailed back his tickets with a note suggesting that perhaps they could go to “a younger” patron. “I think Dunces is the classic book that people either love and just read it cover to cover, or-I have friends who have said they tried starting the book 10 times and couldn’t get past page 50,” DuBois said. But it has that combination of impassioned fans and selective appeal that is familiar from the world of niche art. It’s not quite right to call the original novel a cult classic, as it earned the most mainstream of literary honors, the Pulitzer Prize, after its publication in 1980.
(Spoiler alert: Attracting a TV star to play the lead didn’t hurt.) And its success or failure as an adaptation would be a key theme in reviews of the show, which became a very high-profile production for the theatre, attracting national attention (i.e., a review from The New York Times). The creative team’s response to this basic issue would dictate all elements of the show’s staging. There’s so much in the book, and the book is so episodic, that I was just concerned it was going to be these short, choppy scenes with a lot of audience address…more like story theatre.” “My concern was that it was going to play too episodically,” said Peter DuBois, the theatre’s artistic director, “and that it wasn’t necessarily going to cohere narratively. The Huntington, which owns a piece of the show and will continue to help shape it creatively, identified the issue when the play was first pitched by David Esbjornson, a director whose production of All My Sons was a hit for the theatre in 2010. The stakes were high for the show’s commercial producers, who were clear from the outset that their sights were set on targets beyond Boston: namely, London and Broadway. Through a more than two-year development process, from workshops in New Orleans and New York City to a world premiere at Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company last November, this challenge remained central. So how, exactly, do you translate all this into a play with a cohesive structure that works dramatically-while still maintaining the flavor of the book?
Reilly, a figure made indelible to readers by his unpleasantness to all around him. Toole piles character after character upon subplot after subplot.
John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is a novel whose chaotic, throw-everything-at-the-wall style is exactly what endears it to its devoted fans.
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