Adaptation a collaborative process

Chicago-based Lifeline Theatre has never met a kind of novel they can't adapt to the stage. Classic and modern, high-brow and comic, detective, mystery, young adult and science fiction, they've done them all.

Now the folks at Lifeline have turned their sights on a classic horror-science fiction, H.G. Wells' "The Island of Dr. Moreau." The adaptation is being done by actor and writer Robert Kauzlaric, working with director Paul S. Holmquist. But as Holmquist readily admits, the Lifeline process is "very collaborative."

Kauzlaric and Holmquist have been hard at work since last November turning the novel -- about a mad scientist intent on creating a race of half-men, half-animals -- into a stage-worthy play.

"We had a reading of a draft of the adaptation back in January," Holmquist said, "and the whole Lifeline ensemble was there, making suggestions and comments.

"We did a lot of trimming and editing based on those comments. But we always felt we had the final artistic choice. We have the option always of saying, 'Thank you, we hear your note, but we are not going to follow it.' "

One of the big questions Kauzlaric and Holmquist faced early on was how to stage what is essentially a horror story on stage. Many of Dr. Moreau's experiments, as described by Wells, are quite cruel. He is especially fond of doing surgery on animals without the benefit of anesthesia, combining the limbs of one animal with the body of another.

"I am very squeamish," Holmquist said, "but we wanted the play to be very intense and troubling. So we decided to do the play without an intermission. We wanted it to be full immersion. The audience is in that world, the world of Dr. Moreau, for 90 minutes straight without a break."

Holmquist wanted the show to be gut-wrenching -- a kind of haunted house with a strong story line.

Holmquist is especially pleased with Kimberly G. Morris' costumes and masks.

"There is a character in the story -- Montgomery -- he is part bear, part ox and part hound. The actor wears hooves that make him 6 feet 11 (inches), and when he stands up on his hind legs, it really looks like there is a grizzly bear in the room," he said.

Holmquist is also pleased with his ensemble.

"We began doing movement workshops back in July," Holmquist said, "and fight choreography in August. We did that to make the violence more believable -- and this is a play full of violence. I want audiences to get caught up in the violence and stark reality of Dr. Moreau's island.

"This is the story of a man so obsessed by his ideology, by his desire to create new species of animals," Holmquist said, "that he cannot help but do violence to those around him. And once you do violence, that violence will spread."