Fantasy league

If Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark starts previews on Broadway as promised next fall—a big if after multiple postponements and the loss of announced stars Alan Cumming and Evan Rachel Wood—it’ll epitomize a certain style of genre adaptation. Scored by Bono and the Edge, directed by The Lion King’s Julie Taymor and threatening to render its projected $40 million budget not just a theatrical record but hopelessly optimistic, Spider-Man would compete with the Hollywood blockbusters it resembles on their own turf.

This Spidey version may end in triumph. Or it could meet the derision that greeted a multimillion-dollar 2006 staging of Lord of the Rings in Toronto. As that production demonstrated, suspension of disbelief can be hampered by too elaborate an attempt to replicate the visual splendor of CGI.

Over the last decade, Chicago adapters have profited from a more lo-fi approach to science fiction and fantasy, supplementing slim budgets with appeals to the audience’s imagination. Lifeline Theatre’s Neverwhere, adapted by Robert Kauzlaric from Neil Gaiman’s novel and television series, joins earlier Lifeline versions of Tolkien and The Island of Doctor Moreau. According to Kauzlaric, Neverwhere, the story of a Londoner plunged into a shadow reality beneath his city, will unfold with theatrical panache.

“The novel’s Great Beast of London, a mythic creature battled near the climax,” he explains, “will be crazy puppet insanity: an enormous puppet in 12 pieces augmented by six actors. It’s very nonliteral, driven by sound and lights and motion.”

The real challenge lay not in conjuring the eldritch region of London Below but in representing hero Richard Mayhew’s workaday world. “I had thought that everyday London needed to be extremely realistic for contrast,” says Kauzlaric, 35, who also plays Mayhew. “But we couldn’t actually replicate an office cubicle or an apartment with furniture. So the above-ground stuff is as representational as London Below.”

Other adaptations similarly draw upon visual or auditory shorthand to convey supernatural events. City Lit’s Paul Edwards ingeniously used sunglasses to mark his pod people in The Body Snatchers, closing this week. An earlier Gaiman piece, Griffin Theatre Company’s 2005 Stardust, employed sound at a critical moment in which evil trees attack the main character, as adapter William Massolia tells it: “Initially we had actors in treelike outfits; they looked like a bunch of Gumbys. So we did it all with sound: trees moving, branches creaking. The performers believed it, so the audience did, too.”

Duluth, Minnesota, native Kauzlaric and his fellow adapters agree that stage adaptations add a collaborative dimension to fantasy and sci-fi stories not always found onscreen. “The movies are constrained by what they can realistically depict,” he says. “We can embrace the impossible.”

Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s Ed Rutherford, who penned the company’s 2009 version of The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle’s fantasy classic, points out that “the immediacy of the live action becomes even more meaningful because of your community with the other audience members.” Those audience members may well include genre devotees who don’t make a habit of theatergoing. Both Rutherford and Massolia report that fans traveled from out of state to see The Last Unicorn and Griffin’s Little Brother onstage.

For Kauzlaric, a fantasy aficionado since encountering The Hobbit as a third-grader, that fan audience offers a terrific resource, even if it might prove at times hard to please. “Part of the fun of the fan experience is arguing about how something should be done,” he says. He hopes to elicit the reaction that he himself had to Lifeline’s 2000 adaptation of Tolkien’s The Two Towers: “My main thought was, Oh my gosh, how exciting to be in a room with all these characters; the creators’ love for the characters was absolutely infectious. All we can do with Neverwhere is try to share our love of the material.”

Now in previews, Neverwhere opens Monday 10.

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