Bringing children's books alive

Let's just get this out of the way: Playwright Y York, whose adaptation of Jerry Spinelli's children's novel Eggs opens at People's Light & Theatre Company tonight, really is named Y.

York, 61, says her parents gave her sister naming rights, "as long as she didn't hurt me." It's the kind of unique and somewhat unsettling detail that might show up in one of York's complex works for young people. She's written 17 so far, plus an additional dozen or so for adults.

Eggs, which follows the uneasy friendship between a motherless young boy and a fatherless adolescent girl, marks York's fourth production at People's Light and her third adaptation. But it's the first that has allowed her to work at the Malvern theater side-by-side with her husband of 27 years, Eggs' director, Mark Lutwak, 54. Lutwak and York met when he cast her in a role in a New York show - it was so long ago, he can't even recall its title - and have been close collaborators ever since. Lutwak has directed roughly 20 productions of York's plays, many at the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, Hawaii's only professional theater, where he was artistic director for the last nine years.

The couple's relationship with People's Light began because, York says, their longtime friend Russell Davis, a playwright and People's Light company member, "always urged us on them." Lutwak also says they share with People's Light artistic director Abigail Adams an "aesthetic about the importance of family theater. We've been at many conferences, and she was always the ally."

In 2000, Adams decided to produce Afternoon of the Elves, York's adaptation of Janet Taylor Lisle's Newbery Honor-winning book. That production was followed in 2003 by York's original play The Forgiving Harvest, and 2007's adaptation of Audrey Couloumbis' Newbery Honor-winner Getting Near to Baby.

In October, after a banner year for York's plays, Lutwak and York moved from Hawaii to Ohio, where Lutwak is now education director at Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Park. Though York says, "Hawaii was a magnificent place to be," they "weren't ready to give up theater," and constant trips to the mainland had left the couple - and their two dogs - feeling "unmoored." She says, "I kept having these refrigerator things happen, where I'd know there was food in the fridge, but it was from two cities ago."

Still, despite (or perhaps because of) her new anchorage in Ohio - where she still feels like the new kid, and where the winter cold had her typing scripts while wearing gloves - she says she's already written two new plays. "There's nothing else to do, no one else to talk to," she says, "but an artist has to ask, 'Are you going to be able to work and make the art happen here?' And I can."

York says she has rejected many offers of books to adapt for the stage, mostly because "a play will make hundreds of copies of books get sold, and if the book is bad, I don't want to be responsible for that." She recalls one in which "the message seemed to be that in order to get through life, you have to have a rich grandfather."

But she sought out the best-selling Spinelli, a Norristown-born resident of Wayne, having been a fan ever since Lutwak lent her his copy of the Newbery Honor-winning Wringer (his Maniac Magee won the Newbery Medal in 1991). While in the area working on The Forgiving Harvest, she sent Spinelli a note saying she hoped someday they'd be able to work together.

As it turned out, Wringer, like several of his other books, already was optioned to become a film. "Finally," she says, "he called about two years ago and said, 'I just wrote a book. I'm not giving it to the movies yet. What do you want to do?' "

For his part, Spinelli, 68, says he had "loved" her adaptation of Getting Near to Baby. But when they met to discuss the project, York worried Spinelli might not appreciate her approach to his material.

"I told him how I work, which is hard for some writers. There's no dialogue from the book in the play, and it's not wholesale the-play-to-the-stage, because it won't work - plays are different. . . . For many children's adaptors, it's much more chapter by chapter. It's very frightening for some people to take what is a revered piece of literature and harm it."

She needn't have worried. Spinelli told her, "The book is mine, the play is yours." And aside from a few helpful suggestions, and one visit to watch a rehearsal, he has mostly absented himself from the process.

"I'm really impressed," he says, "with the ability of a skilled playwright to condense and dramatize material that covers a couple of hundred pages in a book."

Most important, however, is a child's perspective on those changes, and what fascinates York time and again is children's reaction to her plays.

"If a kid read the book and loved it, then sees the play and loves it, they will say it's exactly the same. Because what's the same is the pleasure experience. Even if there's not a word the same, the pleasure" - of a good story told well - "is exactly the same."