Jacqueline Hoang’s senior honors thesis quickly became more than a mere school project. Her theatrical adaptation of a John Keats poem became a personal mission in which she invested her time, a great deal of money and all of her effort.
“Lamia,” Hoang’s stage adaptation of Keats’ poem of the same name, is a Greek tragedy that follows the title character’s transformation from a magical snake-woman to a beautiful maiden, as she and others search for passion, lust and love. Hoang began work on the adaptation in spring 2009 and the production will finally be staged on April 23 and 24 at 7 p.m. at the Promenade Playhouse in Santa Monica.
As a capstone to her four years spent at UCLA in the English department, adapting “Lamia” involved both Hoang’s creative and analytic talents and interests.
“For me, adapting a romantic work in a creative way is really essential in how I learn more about Romanticism. It’s not just doing research, it’s actually doing theater writing this way (that) allows me to actively participate in the research more so than just going to the library and checking out books and such. That’s why I chose it,” Hoang said.
Hoang read the poem many times, trying to glean a deeper meaning and understanding from the text with every subsequent rereading. Keats’ poem has a strong, lyrical narrative, but no explicit dialogue between characters. Creating dialogue, defining the play’s characters, and conceiving the play’s form and structure were the first hurdles of adaptation.
Frederick Burwick, a UCLA English professor, served as Hoang’s faculty adviser for her senior honors thesis. Hoang worked closely with Burwick over the past year to get “Lamia” off the paper and onto the stage.
“(It) couldn’t be done better,” Burwick said. “Quite frankly, she has overcome the problems of dialogue. She had to move characters around a little bit. Because the poem has a narrator, she had to turn the narrator into a character. … The (poem’s) two-part structure didn’t really work for Jacqui, so she turned it into a three-act play.”
Although Hoang made these structural alterations to “Lamia,” she was able to retain the prosody and lexical complexity of Keats’ original work.
“She didn’t have to alter much of Keats’ poetic language, and that would have been a shame if she had to,” Burwick said. “As she takes over the language, she creates new dialogue, but she tries to match her dialogue to Keats’ rhythms and she tries to keep the best of the poetic utterance that is in the poem. She doesn’t lose much, She doesn’t sacrifice much.”
What Hoang did not sacrifice in adapting the play’s text, she made up for in personal sacrifice as she began to cast, stage and produce the play.
“I applied for the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program. I got the full amount, which was $5000,” Hoang said. “The problem for me is that I’m using all of it for the project.”
Because Hoang used all of her scholarship funds for the production, her normal living costs have had to come entirely out of pocket, a great burden exacerbated only by other burdens.
It took more than four rounds of casting and numerous campaigns on campus and Craigslist ads before Hoang finally had the cast of three males and one female needed for the play. Although Hoang planned to present “Lamia” in the winter, she pushed the whole production to spring quarter.
Production delays also made it difficult to find rehearsal sites and ultimately a performance venue. After evaluating on-campus venues and their attached costs and rehearsal restrictions, Hoang decided to look off-campus, eventually deciding on the Promenade Playhouse on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.
The cast members have had to make sacrifices as well. Lisa Douglass, a senior English student, plays the title role of Lamia. She recognizes that finding on-campus performance spaces is difficult for independent theater at UCLA.
“I think that has hurt us because I know from being over in the theater department … there are a lot of rooms that we could’ve used, that they didn’t let us use,” Douglass said.
Jordan Simkovic, who plays both Hermes and Lycius in the play, is a Northwestern University graduate who found out about “Lamia” via one of Hoang’s Craigslist posts. He explained how, as a director, Hoang was very flexible to her actors’ needs.
“Initially, I wasn’t sure if I was going to have the time to fit it into my schedule because I’m working at the same time. Jacqui worked around my schedule,” Simkovic said.
Despite everyone’s personal sacrifices, Hoang and the cast are excited about their upcoming performance.
“We’ve worked on this for months and I feel like everything she did was great and we’re all doing a great job too,” Douglass said.
“We had that moment of “˜Oh my God,’ we have a show in a week,” Hoang said. “At the same time, everyone worked through it and we’re just really excited right now for the play.”