Beloved novel takes center stage
Louis Sachar’s stage adaptation of his own crowd-pleasing, critically celebrated young adult novel Holes digs in at Baltimore Center Stage through May 10th, in a production directed by Baltimore-area director Johanna Gruenhut and featuring several locally based cast members.
Holes follows a diverse band of misfit youngsters thrown together willy-nilly under the punishing desert sun and the punishing gaze of some truly nasty adult overseers, all at the misleadingly named Camp Green Lake–which leans heavily towards the labor camp end of the camping spectrum. There our hero, 14-year-old Stanley Yelnats, finds himself suddenly sentenced to a stint by an unyielding, unsympathetic legal system; half-convinced, despite his innocence, that a generational family curse–and a notorious run of Bad Luck–has landed him there; but also determined to unravel the growing mystery of the holes the boys are forced to dig.
While trying to figure out what they’re hunting for in the empty spaces of the desert, Stanley and the others try to fill in other absences of all sorts, wrestle with rivalries and shifting allegiances, and struggle with the sometimes-cruel, always-looming stories that threaten to shape their identity and determine their paths.
Traveling and twisting across time and space, often simultaneously as on-stage action, the play focuses on young people but ultimately tells an intergenerational story: one of friendships tested and loyalty rewarded, of the families we make or find as well as those we’re born into, and of the ways that we can forge community in unexpected ways and places. Sachar’s stage adaptation aims to capture some of the same elements that have made the book an award-winning hit and a middle-school staple–in which a simple set of shoes, or digging into shifting sands, can unravel a search for larger truths, unleash imagination, and uncover the unknown.
Hear Gruenhut’s reflections on the story and the production here:
More information as well as days, times, and tickets are online here: http://www.centerstage.org
