How do you boil down a nearly 500-page novel teeming with characters and subplots to a two-act play? How do you capture onstage landscapes that range from the English countryside to 19th-century London, and from a manor house to a boat on the Thames? When Penny Metropulos and Linda Alper got together two years ago to adapt Great Expectations, they knew it would be a challenge. “We relied on our most important collaborator, Mr. Charles Dickens,” says Metropulos. “A huge challenge—and one that was important to both of us—was to be faithful to his great book.” 

The pair were experienced at compressing, culling and combining material to adapt it to the stage. Metropulos, the director, and Linda Alper, an actor with OSF for 24 seasons, have co-adapted The Three Musketeers (1999) and Tracy’s Tiger (2007). Metropulos also adapted The Comedy of Errors in 2008.

Back in 2013, Alper was in Taiwan on a Fulbright grant and Metropulos had started adapting a little-known Dickens short story, “The Haunted Man.” 

“It was an impossible story to adapt, but I thought I’d try it,” Metropulos says. “It had been a while since Linda and I had written an adaptation together, and I was just trying to put my fingers back in the pot to see what could happen.” 

After she told Artistic Director Bill Rauch what she was up to, he said, “We have to do Great Expectations.” Metropulos was game, but she wanted to collaborate with Alper.

Creating atmosphere

The two went to work. Originally the play was slated to run in the outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theatre. They had to solve an immediate challenge: The first scene takes place on a darkening afternoon of Christmas Eve. But when a production begins on the outdoor stage, it’s still light out.

“The book and the play start with this very frightening scene,” says Alper. “It’s from a child’s point of view, and it’s very atmospheric. So to create a sense of mystery outside when it’s bright Daylight required us to think about it in a nonvisual way, to create that atmosphere through language. 

But then Great Expectations was re-slotted to the Angus Bowmer Theatre, which meant that lighting effects could be used at curtain time. Ironically, the two adapters decided to keep the framework of narration. “What is required outside—the flow of action and easy transformations from one thing to another— was needed inside as well, because of the sweep and expanse of the story,” says Metropulos. “So we continued to use narration, although we found we needed less as we moved along. The new task became determining how much we need to hear from a narrator to give us a sense of place or time versus how much we see via set and lighting.” 

When the two had adapted their earlier works, they both lived in Ashland and could share ideas and work on scenes at the same time, in the same room. But because Alper had moved to Portland, where she’s a resident artist at Actors Repertory Theatre, the two developed a new system. At the beginning, they worked according to their schedules. One would do a draft and then send it to the other. And the drafts went back and forth that way over almost a year. 

Each collaborator brought different strengths. “I think Linda is really, really strong in structure,” says Metropulos. “She also has great comic sense, which I rely upon.”

For her part, Alper says Metropulos is good at the overall concept and the mechanics of how the story will actually live on stage. When they worked on The Three Musketeers, Alper says, laughing, “I wrote back-to-back scenes, and Penny would point out, ‘When do they change their clothes? How do we get that off the stage? Where does the dead body go and when did it get there?” 

She adds, “And Penny has great heart. She always finds the soul of the characters and remembers to capture that, no matter how much plot we need to cover.” Says Metropulos, “Obviously, we work well together. It’s very much back and forth, you know: ‘Why don’t you take this and I’ll take this.’ Or, ‘why don’t you do that because you really know how you’re thinking about that.’ ” 

The two always wanted to maintain the suspense that Dickens built into his story. “The novel is narrated in first person,” says Metropulos, “which works beautifully as you read it, but we felt if the hero narrates onstage we would lose the suspense of his journey; we would know everything is OK with him.” Narration is now divided up among the other actors. 

Dickens’ multifaceted characters

While Pip is the central character, he is surrounded by fascinating, indelible smaller characters. 

“When you have all these colorful characters,” Metropulos says, “your center, the hero, can become passive. So that is constantly a challenge, to make sure that Pip’s journey is the soul of the play.

“Dickens is capable of always letting you see every character from different angles,” she says, “so that you have a Mrs. Joe who’s funny and also very mean, and yet you somehow understand her. You think, ‘Oh, yeah, your folks died and you had to raise this kid. What happened to your life?’ I think it’s why it’s so luscious for actors to get their hands on these characters. No matter how briefly some of our small characters, like Spooney Mike, may appear, the actors can read Dickens’ description and know who Spooney Mike is and can bring all that information into that small moment. It’s really phenomenal to have that resource.” 

Like Shakespeare, says Alper, Dickens was a commercial writer. “This is not a highbrow novel, even though it’s incredibly metaphorical, and you could certainly write a doctoral thesis on it, but he wrote it to entertain people. I think to entertain people and to move people are the same thing, so we’re going to take people on the big journey that Pip goes on—that we all go on in some way—which is how do you become an authentic human being in a challenging world? How do you live with your dreams when they do not pan out? What about when your dreams are realized, but you lose touch with yourself? At various stages in our lives we see those dreams in different ways. For me, that’s the journey Pip takes, and it’s a thrilling ride; heartbreaking, funny and very, very theatrical.”