Our Town Remix - keep it simple and do it a hundred times

The idea of the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder is to portray average, daily life and to keep it simple. I think it would do well as a special on a streaming platform like Netflix or Amazon. To maintain the simplicity, it would be filmed in an empty black box theater, the cast would be dressed in normal, casual street clothes, and, to keep true to the original, the set wouldn’t be made up of much more than two tables with a few chairs.  

I would want to keep most of the script intact because...because I think it’s well-written, and some lines are just especially remarkable. But there are parts of it that could use a facelift. I don’t think a remix would need to complete modernize it, but I also don’t think keeping it set in 1901 would be the best choice for this adaptation. An ambiguous timeframe is just fine with me. We don’t have to figure out a way to include cell phones, but at least adjust it enough that the gender norms from the late ‘30s when Wilder originally wrote it are a little less cringe to a modern audience. For example, maybe the mothers could work, maybe one of the fathers is a homemaker, maybe it’s not just the women who go to choir rehearsal...

Now, what I would really love—and this is probably a terrible idea that would be a waste of funding and maybe no one would actually watch it—is if there were multiple renditions of the play. That it would be the same updated script, same theater, same costumes, but a different Director and cast, and perhaps even change the names of the characters. Maybe there’s an installment with a Timothy marrying a Jacob instead of an Emily marrying a George. (And maybe one version could go a little off-script and wouldn’t include a marriage in the second act but concludes that people don’t have to get married to have fulfilling lives.) It’s part indulgence for me, yes. I would love to see how different actors and directors interpret various scenes. I want to cast Neil Patrick Harris and Meryl Streep and Lin Manuel Miranda as the Stage Manager, and multiple versions means I CAN HAVE IT ALL. But I do also think this particular play lends itself well to that kind of redundancy.  

For me, one of the biggest parts of the play is that it’s meant to reflect the most basic and mundane aspects of our lives to highlight that there is good in that. And it's supposed to be representative of all of us. What better way to emphasize that than doing it over and over and over again. It would show the same message no matter the race, gender, sexuality, country of origin, or ability of the cast. That we’re all human. We’re born, we grow up, many fall in love, some have kids, a bunch of good stuff happens, a bunch of not-so-good stuff happens, and we die. And we’re all just trying to find ways to enjoy and appreciate the life we have before it ends

Keep the name, it's just too good!

Original text: The Great Gatsby

Although I know that The Great Gatsby had an adaptation come out not too long ago (in 2013 directed by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo Dicaprio), and had a quite iconic adaptation come out only a number of decades ago (in 1974 starring Robert Redford), neither of these adaptations did the coveted "great American novel" justice. For some reason when people have gone to adapt The Great Gatsby, they have focused too much on the distracting love story between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. While this adds a nice amount of fluff to the story and might sell to some viewers, what makes this novel great, and what would make it a particularly relevant adaptation of a film to come out now is its themes on the American Dream, gender relations, and class inequality. These themes are what make this novel intriguing, and done right, would make a wonderful film.

While debating the ideas of this adaption, I wondered if I should change the time of when it takes place. The Great Gatsby *is* the essence of America in the 1920s--lavish, excessive, and glamourous. However, as much as many traditionalists would possibly hate this idea, we are in the 20s yet again! Set this story in modern times, to make a stronger argument on how this novel's themes are still largely relevant. Plot-wise I think this story should largely follow the original novel (which focuses less on the love story than the films!) with modern alterations where necessary, of course. Put the financial struggles in modern settings to show that we still largely have the class struggle now as what was portrayed in the original novel.

The character of Jay Gatsby is quite an iconic one and maybe shouldn't be messed with since I'd likely ruffle so many people's feathers by modernizing the adaptation. Gatsby as a character would largely remain much of the same, while the other characters would have a similar essence with slight modern twists:

Daisy Buchanan is still married to a loaf and stuck in an unhappy marriage, but she does have a job to give her other satisfaction in life.
Nick Carraway is still largely naïve and optimistic at the beginning of the film, only to be slowly lost as he witnesses greed and hardship lose his faith in others--except maybe now he has more of a backbone and doesn't flirt with his cousin!
Tom Buchanan still sucks. He will always just be a womanizing control freak.

Leo was perfect casting for Gatsby... I'll give Baz Luhrmann that and that alone.