Chicago Beatdown…Talking to local ‘Mrs. Caliban’ playwright Frances Limoncelli

Story premises don’t get much stranger than ‘Mrs. Caliban,’ a 1982 short novel book by Rachel Ingalls about a lonely housewife in a loveless marriage who has an affair with a green, amphibious monster. Or maybe it’s all in her head. Strange as the story sounds, it has its avid supporters, hailed in the ’80s by a British book marketing association as one of the 20 greatest American novels since WWII. The book also had a fan in John Updike who proclaimed it to be “so deft and austere in its prose, so drolly casual in its fantasy.”

Another big fan is Lifeline Theatre ensemble member Frances Limoncelli, a transplant from the East Coast who began performing with the ensemble shortly after moving here in the mid-90s. From acting she turned to adapting stories for the stage – “Mrs. Caliban,” running now at Lifeline, is her seventh adaptation.

The night after its official debut, Chicago Beat interviewed Limoncelli, asking her why she was drawn to this story and its author, and how she aimed to honor the original work with her theatrical translation.

Chicago Beat: What attracted you to this story and to this author, Rachel Ingalls, in particular?

Frances Limoncelli: ‘Mrs. Caliban’ was a book in the bottom of a big box of books that the Lifeline ensemble had read. We’re a literary company, and we adapt novels for the stage, almost exclusively. We read dozens and dozens of books a year, every member of the ensemble, as we try to choose our season. So there’s always some box of books around or a shelf of books gathering dust where people  put things that they read or they were thinking about. And I happened to pick up ‘Mrs. Caliban,’ and I’m not exactly sure how it got in our box of books to begin with. I was told that one of our very early members, James Sie, who is still an emeritus member that lives in L.A., I was told that he put that book in the box years ago. And I just liked the cover and the description, and I read it, and I was completely enthralled. But that was 11 years ago. It took many, many years of Lifeline trying to obtain the rights for me before we got permission to do it. …

I just found the lead protagonist, Dorothy, to be absolutely compelling. I was drawn in to her story and into her fragile and sort of troubled, grief-stricken little psyche, and I just found her to be captivating. And to me its important, if I’m thinking about adapting a novel, it’s important to have characters that sort of seem to live and breathe a little bit off the page, or seem to sort of want somebody to walk around and act them out instead of just be words on a page. So that’s first and foremost.

But in addition to that, I’m always looking for women in stories and stories about women. As a woman it’s hard to relate to the majority of stories out there that have male protagonists; a lot of times human issues are really male issues, and often the woman’s side of the story or a woman’s side of telling a story doesn’t get told. So I’m always looking for stories by women or about women that move me. And in addition to that, for me the writing is absolutely unique. I just never come across a novel that was written quite this way. Rachel Ingalls’ style is so enigmatic and spare. It’s so deceptively simplistic in a lot of ways. Almost pedestrian in some ways on purpose, she’ll have a conversation that you could have over coffee every day, and it doesn’t sound very special if you take it out of context necessarily, but it is set in this sort of dreamy flow of very very spare, seeming to be painstakingly chosen, just perfect words. And I felt the style was so beautiful and restrained and enigmatic, that I felt reading after reading of the novel, I was never getting tired of it.

My previous adaptations, my previous four, were all novels by Dorothy L. Sayers who was an incredible writer who was incredibly verbose. And her language is very bubbly and frothy and just moving at incredible speeds and there are a lot of words in her books. And this was just the opposite. It was so restrained; it waited for the perfect word instead of having 20 words for what she wanted to say. So I keep thinking to myself the Dorothy L. Sayers novels, if they were more like poems, they’re more like sonnets. They have a strict structure, and they’re long form, and they really have a flow of lots of syllables, one after another. Rachel Ingalls to me is more like a haiku; it’s extremely restrained and requires spareness and specificity and only claims to try and capture a moment or two instead of the entire world in it. So that’s what I find really fascinating about it.

CB: Talk a little bit about adapting the story to the stage. It’s obvious that you’re in love with the source material, but it’s always tricky when you try to adapt something you love that you’re not only honest to the source material, but you’re able to convey what you love about it in the written form into an acting stage.

FL: That’s absolutely true. I seem to follow the same sort of process every time I adapt. It’s not on purpose, it’s just sort of the process I fall into or just seems to be natural fo me. My first draft is always extraordinarily true to the book, and although it might be technically a play, it isn’t really its own thing yet. It’s really the book in play form. And with each draft after that, I get just a little bit more courageous and a little bit more courageous until I’m at that point where I’m ready for it to become its own thing, where I’m ready to let go of some things that I love from the book because they’re not stage worthy or dramatic. So that sort of comes in baby steps to me but I really recognize as it’s happening because I’ve been through this process many times. I pick a book because it has properties I think are stage worthy, but I’m often in love with the literary things. It takes me a while, it takes me many, many drafts of the play, before I can let go of some of the literary things and create more dramatic things to fill it out. For me, that doesn’t happen until we’re in rehearsal. It isn’t until the parts that are playing well, where it starts to make sense in the actor’s mouths and on their bodies, that the parts that aren’t playing well really show up. And I go, ‘Of course, that’s not stage worthy,’ and I’m going to get rid of that whole thing and write something to replace it.

Brenda Barrie is Dorothy, a depressed housewife who falls for a dangerous monster (Peter Greenberg), in the world premiere theatrical adaptation of Rachel Ingalls' short novel "Mrs. Caliban."

CB: The premise of ‘Mrs. Caliban’ might raise a few eyebrows, but how did you make sure that people that see the play didn’t think it was just bizarre and would be enthralled in the story?

FL: That is always a challenge, and definitely this play had its own unique challenges. But my previous plays were very wordy and verbose and sort of boasted a sort of erudite manner. So there were a lot of people who couldn’t get into that. But there was a following and they ended up being popular and they were popular books. This one I knew was not well known, was not widely read. Just from my personal experience, people who read it, many of them seemed to fall in love with it and were more enthralled like myself, and many of them couldn’t get past the unconventional premise. So I knew that as a play it would be the same. I didn’t want to make it into something else; if I wanted to make some uniquely mine, I would write an original play. But for me, what I loved about the book I wanted to make stage-worthy and make a play. So the challenge was to have such a spare, economical writing style in a book and how to make that a play where its words spoken aloud. So it’s fine to have a passage of description, or to say that this character feels XYZ, but I have to somehow make characters express that in a dialogue. So that was really a challenge for me. I was excited and thrilled and terrified just about the whole time because it was the opposite of my last four plays. But it was a fantastic ride for me. I set myself to this challenge to do something very different and outside my comfort zone, and so whereas with my previous plays, I might decide to write a new scene and write pages and pages and pages, and keeping a third of them. In this case, I decided to write a new scene, and the words just came very carefully. I would end up writing all kinds of things and cutting it down, and instead of writing a whole new scene, I would end up with three more lines. But that’s all that I needed, because I had to get rid of this idea of writing pages and pages. That wasn’t what this book or this play requires. Often it requires a change of a word or a change of a line. So I had to be a more careful writer instead of a more copious writer.

CB: And what about trying to make sure this was believable on stage?

FL: Well, I guess this is the controversial part of this play. I never worried about believability once. … In plays we’re always pretending, so to me that wasn’t a big deal. And perhaps a lot of people might think I should worry about that more, but that’s never been my point of view. A play to me is always a symbol, always a representation of a human truth, and how we represent each one is imaginative and different every single time. I didn’t worry about realism, but I will say that with the director and the design team, they really heightened a feeling of non-reality. So the house has no walls and the light has no color in it. The whole set is white and everyone wears white or beige for part of the show. And so I think one of the most important questions in this book and in this play is what is real and why does it matter necessarily? I think those are the two most important questions, and I wanted the play to ask those same questions. What is real, and why are people hung up on what’s real? Clearly, even the things that seem real are deceptive. So I think the play is saying think about your life and what you think is real, because maybe its not.

CB: What do you hope people will take away from your play?

FL: Well I really do hope they’ll learn to question their world a little bit and their assumptions about their reality just a little bit the way the protagonist does in ‘Mrs. Caliban.’ And I hope also that they see a lot of the boundaries between us are artificial, whether they’re boundaries of species like between Dorothy and Larry, or boundaries of feeling detached or separated from your life or from the people that you are supposed to care about or love, that a lot of that estrangement is an illusion that we’re all a lot more the same than we are different.

“Mrs. Caliban” is being performed at Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood, through March 28. $25-30. Click here for the schedule and to purchase tickets.