ABSTRACT
Film-to-stage adaptations rely on performative signifiers as much as, if not more than, narrativity to construct meaning. This is especially true of intermedial productions on the international festival circuit based on films by such directors as Bergman, Fassbinder, Pasolini, and Visconti—all of whom made substantial contributions to theatre. This has contributed to a widening of Adaptation Studies beyond textuality, and paradoxically, elevated the literary stature of the screenplay. In transposing the subject matter and/or aesthetic conventions of one medium into another, intermedial adaptations also render transparent the processes of remediation, whereby new media forms (e.g., intermedial theatre; live film) incorporate and transform the representational codes of older ones. These include mise-en-scène, manipulation of time-space continuums via the camera lens versus theatre architecture, and the registers associated with diverse acting styles. This study considers four adaptations of Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977): one film version and three stage productions. Depicting the struggles of an actress to “authentically” inhabit a character she finds unrelatable during rehearsals of a new play, Opening Night has proven to be a particularly fecund source for international artists. By grounding my analysis in remediation theory, I demonstrate how the alternation of mimetic, hypermediated, and ritualized performative codes can serve to resist narrative closure and instantiate a non-binary re-gendering of representational space.
