Howard Miller takes a look at The Kite Runner at the Helen Hayes Theater:
Deconstructing a novel and reassembling it into a stage play is quite a challenge, laden with pitfalls and traps all along the way. When everything falls into place, you wind up with terrific plays like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Simon Stephens's adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel of the same title, or Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. Both work effectively in either format because the novelists were able to create compelling characters and situations, and the playwrights were able to reshape the works into something different, to be performed for an audience who may or may not be familiar with the source material. Now we've got The Kite Runner, adapted by Matthew Spangler from Khaled Hosseini bestselling novel about one man's search for redemption, opening tonight at the Helen Hayes Theatre in a compassionate if far too literary and literal transformation from novel to play. |
