The Practice and Purpose of Adaptation of Classical Texts

This paper focuses on two adaptations of classical texts: Off the Rails, Reinholz’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and AtGN, Howard’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, and examines the ways in which these plays both replicate the cycles created by the original texts and seek to break from them. Taking theater as an inherently repetitive practice, this paper pulls from many sources to develop a vocabulary for discussing theatrical adaptations, then applies it to these two case studies to demonstrate that each uses a variety of strategies to create a new narrative. Whether a theater-maker is building new meaning into the core tenets of the story or picking up the baton and running with it, adaptation creates a potential space, within which playwrights and other theater artists have the opportunity to work with or against the original text, interrogate and remake the story, pull lines of connection between histories and cultures, and add new voices to the conversation