Studio’s production of Invisible Man marks the first time the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Trust has authorized an adaptation of any of Ellison’s work. Literary Director Adrien-Alice Hansel spoke with John Callahan, Ellison’s Literary Executor, about his decision to allow Oren Jacoby to adapt this landmark novel, how the stage and literary versions differ, and his reflections on the relevance of Invisible Man 60 years after its publication.
When did you first meet Oren Jacoby? Why did you encourage him to pursue his adaptation of Invisible Man?
I met Oren in 1996, when we were collaborating on a movie project that ultimately didn’t go anywhere. Working together, I was impressed with his conscientiousness. He’s an easy-going guy who has very strong passions. In the course of our conversations I realized how much he loved Ellison’s work. At some point he broached it. Oren was serious about it, the book meant a great deal to him; he’d thought a great deal about it. I respected his work. There was a wariness, but ultimately we thought, ‘What the hell? We have approval rights, so let’s see what he can do.’
Oren’s put the script through any number of drafts since he’s started. I think the key point came when [director] Christopher McElroern got wind of it and got in touch with Oren, which is when we three met to see how we could work together.
Can you talk about the adaptation and staging process? What advice did you find yourself giving?
Ralph had two books over his desk in easy reach. The first was this great big Webster dictionary. The second was Shakespeare’s collected works.
It’s a tricky proposition, this novel, because it’s a novel of meditation as well as action. So when we were in the thick of it, I’d remember the books over Ellison’s desk. All of Shakespeare’s major characters, particularly Hamlet, melded soliloquies with action—sometimes violent and brutal action.
An adaptation has a lot to balance—there’s tracking Invisible Man’s journey towards his identity and capturing all the different styles the novel was written in, as well as respecting the book’s ironic quality. One thing that made it possible to do this—and do it well—is Ralph’s enormous skill at putting the oral tradition in the book. The book is a kind of call and response between Ralph Ellison and his readers. And within the book, a call and response between Invisible Man and the ensemble, the folk. These relationships with ordinary folks really drive Invisible Man—as a character, as a narrator, and as a person who’s coming into himself.
Has watching this script and production take shape given you insight into anything in the book?
I have known this novel—read it, written about it, taught it, and written about it again—for years. But I’ve always known it as a novel, as a literary piece of work. So I’ve learned a lot about the elasticity of drama and had a chance to loosen up a little along the way.
When I think about this journey, I’m left with gratitude for what I’ve learned—from [the adaptor] Oren, from [the director] Christopher, and from [the lead actor] Teagle. I learned a great bit about Invisible Man from Teagle, particularly about the character’s journey from a thinker to an actor, somebody who has an actual role in life, in history.
Why do you think, in its 60th year, Invisible Man has remained such an enduring classic of American literature?
One of the things that became very clear during the production at Court Theatre is that this book is alive. Ellison’s metaphor is being put through another guise at this moment, and it’s very, very exciting to have Studio produce this play now, in DC, during the re-election campaign of our first black president now.
The book pivots on Invisible Man’s insistence on the condition of invisibility, on how it can be both liberating and incredibly constricting for human beings. And it lives in conversation with Ellison’s belief in the principle—the American principle, the principle of freedom that has to be reflected by a commitment to equality.
I was in Oregon on election night in 2008, a night I never thought I would live to see. On my way home from a party something compelled me to drive through downtown Portland. As I got closer to Pioneer Square, I began to hear a hum. A block or two away I parked my car and walked. Gradually I realized that some ten to fifteen thousand people were holding candles and singing the national anthem, and thought, “My God, we have got ourselves a different country.”
I forgot about the boomerang of history in Ellison’s novel. I forgot about the stubbornness of invisibility. We now know that immediately a conversation started in Washington and around the country that the President was foreign, that there was something alien about him and everything he was doing. And I had to remember that history doesn’t move in a simple, straightforward way. As Ralph Ellison wrote in Invisible Man, history is more often a spiral.
In a way, Invisible Man feels more immediately relevant than it did maybe ten years ago. We’re in the crucible right now in this country, and Ellison’s novel gives us a way to think about it more clearly.
For me, this whole experience has given me a new way to see Invisible Man. You go along, you teach the book…I had forgotten the enormous appeal of Ellison’s novel, what he was trying to sort out about the American condition, being human in the United States. I was moved by how personally people connect to this, particularly when I heard that Invisible Man is the novel a young “Barry” Barack Obama turned to when he was trying to sort out who he was as a black American.