Dorfmann Turns Realist Play Into Musical Fairytale
By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter
It was a big challenge for Ariel Dorfmann, 65, celebrated Chilean playwright, to make a decision to adapt the original play of ``Forest Fire'' by the late Korean playwright Cha Bum-suk, into the musical version several years ago.
``It was difficult to put it into a musical,'' Dorfmann said in an interview with The Korea Times.
He said that he was strongly motivated to turn Cha's most distinguished realist play in modern Korean theater into the musical version titled ``Dancing Shadows'' because it looked impossible like ``a terrific challenge.''
So when he was offered to adapt it into the musical, he decided to say ``yes'' after reading the play and meeting Cha and composer Eric Woolfson.
Set during the Korean War (1950-1953), the play explores human desire and sadness, history, and various events surrounding two widows and an injured guerilla gunman named Gyu-bok, who finds himself in a widows' village located in the Sobaek Mountains.
He said that when he first read the play, he found similar problems with his play and novel ``Widows.''
``Widows,'' with a similar theme and situation, has been published in fifty languages and has been performed in thirty countries.
``The story about widows was important to many people around the world. I thought Cha's play is very different from `Widows,' but with similar problems, which is something close to my heart,'' he said.
Dorfmann, who is visiting Korea for the opening of ``Dancing Shadows,'' the musical adaptation of the original play on July 8, saw the original version last Friday.
He said that the first time he read the play he had not conceived the idea of doing the musical.
Now several years later, he has been through the process of saying ``goodbye'' to Mr. Cha's play and ``hello'' to his musical version.
``It's very different to watch the play and to read the play. It was a good opportunity for me to come to the play with `fresh eyes and fresh ears.' Now I came back to his musical. One surprise I found was how much humor there was in the play,'' he said.
He said that while seeing the play, it was very moving for him to feel Cha's presence; it was like communicating with his spirit. He realized that he both changed it as it needed to be changed and he kept it as it needed to be kept in his musical version.
Asked about the differences of the two versions, he said that he wanted to keep the central love story.
The musical touches off more romance revolving around the three lovers during the war, rather than a more realistic depiction in the original play.
Set in a war-stricken village where only widows live, the story revolves around a love triangle between the main characters _ Cinda, Nashtala and Solomon.
He explains that the love story occupies perhaps 60-70 percent of his musical, while the love story occupies only 20-30 percent of Cha's story.
``That is a very major shift. And, as I told Mr. Cha, I was going to have a lot of sex and a lot of humor in it,'' he said.
He wrote roughly 14 to 15 drafts and said that he began slowly finding the structure of it.
He was sure that there was a fairytale environment because every country has a legend and a fairytale.
``Now we live in a time of global warming and ecological disaster. (Concerning the forest,) I wanted to have the dimension of conflict. In other words, I took my obsessions and put them into the musical using Mr. Cha's original spirit,'' he said.
Concerning the matter of transforming the realist drama into the musical piece, he said that the musical is not realistic to begin with.
``To do a realistic version of this is to kill the musical. Mr. Cha was clear and I was clear about it. He liked the idea of making it into a fairytale. So it turns out my specialty as a writer is to take a realistic situation and put it into a dream-like atmosphere,'' he said.
He thinks if somebody followed the realist tradition and stuck to Mr. Cha's exact structure, it would make audiences miserable.
Instead of seeing realistic portrayals, he said that the first thing the audience hears is the ``forest singing.'' He said women pray for the forest to bring back their men.
``I am interested in how characters lead into song and how they need to sing at a particular moment and then they sing,'' he said.
He said that he doesn't think the musical should have a message; it should have a story. The audiences will draw their own conclusions about why there is a war and why there is a forest. ``There is no solution in musicals,'' he said.
He condensed the play as there are many songs and dances. He put three elder women who are important characters into one character and did the same with several other characters but the grandfather is the identical character. ``This is a long process. I have written this many times over to get it right,'' he said.