It’s Time For Adventure

The cast of Ken Ludwig’s Sherwood: The Adventures of Robin Hood at Playmaker’s Rep

My three big adventure plays have all been commissions.

Around 2006, the Alley Theatre in Houston asked me to write a play that might appeal to families of all ages, and they ended up suggesting an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Shortly thereafter, the Bristol Old Vic in England commissioned me to write an adaptation of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. 

Then, about ten years later, I was at the Edinburgh Festival when my phone rang. The call came from 6,000 miles away, from my dear friend Barry Edelstein, the Artistic Director of The Old Globe Theater in San Diego. He wanted to commission me to write something light and fun for their upcoming summer season of 2017. In the works for that season already were two Shakespeare heavyweights: Barry’s own production of Hamlet, as well as Richard the Second. What would I like to write that might feel summery in contrast? Almost without taking a breath, I suggested a play about Robin Hood, one of my childhood heroes. He gulped, said yes, and thus was born Sherwood: The Adventures of Robin Hood.

But here’s the rub: my life as a playwright has largely been defined by classic comedies. Why would the artistic directors of three different theatres on two continents commission me to write adventure plays?

In fact, adventures and comedies have a great deal in common. Structurally, comedies and adventure stories depend on very specific plots that contain a number of precise climaxes centered on physical action. Dramatic works of course have climactic beats as well, but they tend to be climaxes of the mind.

For example: the roller coaster of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf works so magnificently because it’s structured around deeply emotional touch points; while the beats of, say, Lend Me A Tenor and Sherwood, are external rather than internal. Not that comedies and adventure plays aren’t driven by internal emotions as well, but they tend to manifest themselves in mistaken identity and zany deadlines (comedy) and deadly duels, lost jewelry, and pirate treasure (adventures).

If tragedies and dramas are the Henry James of playwriting, adventures and comedies are the Marvel comics.

And while it’s true that comedies and adventures tend to have different goals, their worldview is similar: comedies offer us a critical, yet fundamentally optimistic vision of humanity, and adventures enact that vision with an aspiration for a better world.