Stage / Screen / Active development
Complete working draft / 38 scenes / July 2026
The Bostonians
Adapted for the stage and screen by Mark Elliot Lawler
Based on the novel by Henry James
A young woman steps onto a platform. Everyone who hears her begins deciding who her voice belongs to.
I first tried to read The Bostonians as a teenager and failed. I went back every few years. The novel kept waiting until I could hear the play inside it.
01 / The struggle
The gift is Verena's. The claims arrive immediately.
In post-Civil War Boston, Verena Tarrant discovers that she can move a public room. The story is often reduced to Olive Chancellor against Basil Ransom. Verena is actually standing inside an entire market of conviction, affection, money, reform, romance, and spectatorship.
Verena
A public gift becoming a self.
She can move a room before she knows what kind of life that power belongs to.
Olive
Recognition becomes a claim.
She educates and protects Verena, then begins treating the gift as property of the cause.
Basil
Possession calls itself love.
He offers rescue, marriage, and a private life on the condition that the public voice disappear.
The Tarrants
A daughter's gift becomes business.
Revelation, family identity, social opportunity, and income gather around the same child.
The audience
Attention develops an appetite.
The crowd helps create the public Verena, then becomes one more force demanding a performance.
Miss Birdseye
An older struggle hands something forward.
She opens another possibility: awaken a life, then let that life belong to itself.
02 / The comedy
Boston solemnity is half the joke.
Adeline Luna says Olive would reform the solar system if she could get hold of it. Basil jokes about arriving at dinner with a six-shooter. The movement contains mystics, reporters, donors, lecture managers, rivalries, outfits, ticket sales, and tremendous quantities of ice cream. James keeps making high principle rub against appetite, vanity, money, and social theater.
The comedy does not make Basil right or women's freedom foolish. It keeps earnestness from becoming innocence. Basil is dangerous partly because he is witty, lucid, and attractive. Olive can understand the structure of male power and still mistake protection for ownership. Verena can love the platform and fear what it asks of her. If the adaptation makes anyone morally tidy, it kills the play.
03 / The adaptation
A James sentence has to get up and cross the room.
The novel can tell us what a person thought about what someone said, revise that judgment inside another clause, and arrive somewhere different three pages later. Performance cannot footnote a face. An actor has to want something now; another actor has to hear it; the room has to change.
I have to decide what narration becomes action, where a letter becomes a scene, which conversations can be joined, what an actor can carry in a pause, and which beautiful sentence is dead weight. Forty-two chapters have become a 38-scene working draft. It remains recognizably James, but it cannot behave like a novel wearing screenplay margins.
Fidelity does not mean keeping everything. It means knowing what was changed, why it changed, and where the consequence travels.
04 / Stage and screen
The stage and the camera make different witnesses.
I am not using "stage and screen" as two labels for the same PDF. I am testing what each form can know.
The live room
The audience becomes part of Boston.
Verena speaks to the people in the play and the people sitting a few feet away. Olive can feel a crowd turn. Basil's interruption has distance, direction, and physical cost. Persuasion and possession happen within reach.
The camera
The private claim leaves a trace.
A camera can remain on the face after the brilliant sentence ends. A cut can move sympathy without a word. Boston drawing rooms, public platforms, trains, streets, and the shore can keep changing the scale between public argument and private pressure.
The current draft is the shared dramatic spine. One-act, two-act, episodic, and filmed-theater forms remain active questions, not announced productions.
05 / The unfinished problem
I can inherit Verena.
That sentence does not mean becoming her or claiming a nineteenth-century woman's experience as my own. It means accepting responsibility for the dramatic problem James leaves unfinished.
He makes Verena's voice powerful enough to reorder rooms, then carries her away from public speech under Basil's claim and predicts her tears. The July draft reaches that ending. The revision now works there. I am testing a final movement in which Verena speaks—not to make history nicer, or to pretend every claim on her has vanished, but to let her act as author of what happens next.
Miss Birdseye matters here. An older struggle can hand forward an obligation without possessing the person who receives it. The question is whether protection can awaken a self and then let it go.
06 / On the desk
The work is complete enough to resist me properly.
Completion gave me a whole work to argue with. It did not give me a reason to stop.
- Current draft
- 38 scenes, dated July 2026, in Fountain and PDF.
- Active revision
- Verena's agency, the ending, Birdseye's inheritance, and the form for stage and screen.
- Working instrument
- Chronos keeps the source, cast, attribution, decisions, and screenplay close without confusing the tool for the work.
- Public status
- The draft is request-only. No cast or production is announced here.
07 / Ways in
Come to the work with a point of view.
I am interested in responses from actors, directors, dramaturgs, producers, theaters, and people thinking seriously about performance made for a room, a camera, or both. Tell me what you do, what you want to engage, and why this particular work brought you here.