Wild Pain

DAPTATION IS SO CONVENIENTLY LINKED WITH unoriginality—the idea of the adapter, lacking any compelling story of his own, taking advantage of someone else’s material—that we forget the audacity it often demands. When it comes to transposing an author like Toni Morrison to another medium, it goes without saying that finding one-to-one equivalents for her prose is almost surely a losing game for any artist. In fact, whether due to reservations Morrison might have had about her books being adapted or the systemic racism that leads producers and funders throughout the arts to disregard the stories of people of color, few have taken on the challenge of reinterpreting her work, a rather unusual fate for such a securely lionized (not to mention best-selling) American novelist. Besides Jonathan Demme’s 1998 film version of , there’s only been Richard Danielpour’s opera about the real-life woman who