Complete 4 page APA formatted essay: Discuss the strategy used by Edward Albee to adapt Carson McCullers's ballad of the sad cafe for the stage pay particular atte.Download file to see previous pages.

Complete 4 page APA formatted essay: Discuss the strategy used by Edward Albee to adapt Carson McCullers's ballad of the sad cafe for the stage pay particular atte.

The changes were essential because not only does the play need to be adjusted for the theater scene but also to portray the changes in the character of Miss Amelia much more convincingly for the audiences. The characters of Miss Amelia in both the novella and stage adaptation are similar in some terms. Her physical description is “a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like man. Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead, and there was about her sunburned face a tense, haggard quality” (McCullers 4). She also speaks in a manly way based on her choice of words in the stage play adaptation, e.g., when she was talking to the men who patronize her liquor: “I been thinking on some way to get some silence out of you. I been figuring up a nice batch of poison to stop your foolish mouth” (Albee and McCullers 8). The two portrayals show how Miss Amelia possesses a strong will and that she is somewhat asexual in a way that leans toward androgyny, having brute strength despite being female. Amelia is a person that many people look up to despite her looks and her attitude towards other people, especially when it comes to her skills in curing the sick through folk remedies, and that “she enjoyed doctoring and did a great deal of it” (McCullers 4). ...

In both the play and the original story, Miss Amelia has a soft spot for the young children whose illnesses she treats, and this kind of weakness became more apparent with the appearance of Cousin Lymon into her still. Her facial features somewhat brighten and at the same time express pain, perplexity and certain joy (23). The mixture of brute strength and emotional weakness was also shown during the climax when she physically exchanges blows with a man inside the cafe and later gradually accepts the loss of her beloved after losing the fight, dragging herself slowly into her office (67). It can be inferred that Albee made Miss Amelia faithful to the original character created by McCullers as much as possible by retaining some of her distinguishing traits such as her manly manners and attitude. In both the original story by McCullers and the adaptation by Albee, the general descriptions of Miss Amelia’s persona were very similar, but there were some changes that were made by Albee in order to suit the stage adaptation and dramatization of the story. One contrast is that the Miss Amelia in the story speaks fewer words in the original portrayal compared to the adaptation. This could be a reason why Albee decided to give additional lines to his interpretation of the main female protagonist in his stage adaptation. Also, his rendition of Miss Amelia in the theater was a bit harsher in her use of words, as compared to the Miss Amelia in the original McCullers’s story, and sounds much more coarse and manly, e.g.