The story that I want to choose and adapt to the play is “A Wall of Fire Rising” from the book Krik Krak written by a Haitian writer Edwage Danticat. Krik Krak is a series of emotional short stories with separated plot yet interlinked knowledge. “A Wall of Fire Rising”, in particular, shows how a common Haitian family arduously keeps living in a hopeless place. Guy’s family, like most other Haitian families, lives in a insecure and poor life. They drink “drops of rainwater from a gasoline” and they sometimes “boiled clean sugarcane pulp” , “which is used to suppress gas and kill the vermin in the stomach that made poor children hungry”, as their food. Guy, as the main person who supports the whole family, does not have a formal job, and the only thing he can do is pray everyday that he can find a part-time job. Some will argue that everyone has an opportunity to have a better life as long as he or she is hardworking and has a heart that desires improvement. However, in Haiti during that time period, this is not that case.
Later, Guy is looking forward to work in a sugar mill, but finds out that even his position of cleaning the toilet is number seventy-eight on the permanent hire waiting list. The ending of the story is where the most dramatic and meaningful part. Guy sees the hot-air balloon on the field of the sugar mill and becomes obsessed by it. He keeps watching others “flying” the hot-air balloon and thinks that he could one day manage that balloon to fly away and seeks something new. He once tells his thoughts to his wife and is harshly criticized, reminding himself that he has at least a wife and son to look after. Yet, one day, Guy still sneaks into the hot-air balloon and actually manages to let the balloon lift-off. Sadly, when realizing that the balloon does not has the power of leading him to a new life, Guy jumps off the balloon and dies in front of his family.
Through the adaptation of this whole short story, I want to show the conflicts between love of the family and the pursuit of dream. There will be basically two kinds of setting of the scenes: the scenes happening in guy’s house and the scenes happening in the sugar mill. The play will start with the family trying to use bowl to get “drinking” water that is leaked from the roof and end with the part that Lily, the wife of Guy, covers little Guy’s eyes and little Guy reciting the lines from his play over Guy’s dead body, saying that “I call on everyone and anyone so that we shall all let out one piecing cry that we may either live freely or we should die”. Because many of the aspects that cannot be shown in the play, the rainy weather, the launch of the balloon and Guy’s fall in the the ground will be demonstrated by sound effects. The rising of balloon can be shown through Guy walking gradually upstairs and eventually jump-down with facial expression of despair.
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