Genuine “Maltese Falcon”
Found At Black Box Theatre

By Amy Bentley-Smith
Features Editor

Long Beach Shakespeare Company has got what hard-boiled private eye Sam Spade never could.

The real Maltese Falcon.

Friday, the theater group at the Black Box Theatre will present the world premiere of the stage adaptation of the seminal crime novel.

While Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” was made into one of best movies of all time with one of Hollywood’s most famous leading man, Humphrey Bogart, and became a popular serial radio show in the late 1940s and ’50s, it has never been made into a play.

“This is such a thrill,” said LBSC Artistic Director Helen Borgers. “For us, this really puts us on the map.”

Producing the first stage version of “The Maltese Falcon” is one thing; having the approval of the Hammett family and having one of your actor/directors be the one to write the adaptation is another.

Borgers said that Hammett’s granddaughter, Julie Rivett, was instrumental in LBSC getting the rights to adapt the book.

“I was talking with her about ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and I said I had always wanted to do it,” Borgers said of Rivett, who not only volunteers at Long Beach jazz radio station, KKJZ (88.1 FM), where Borgers is a DJ, but also attends most of LBSC’s productions at the Black Box Theatre.

Borgers couldn’t have made the suggestion at a better time. Turns out the Hammett family had been meeting with agents with the intention of having the book adapted to the stage in honor of the book’s 75th anniversary this year. But according to Borgers, most proposals coming the Hammetts’ way were more along the lines of “The Maltese Falcon: The Musical.”

“When we came to them with doing a straight adaptation, they were very supportive,” Borgers said.

To Borgers, the perfect person to write the adaptation was Martin Pope. The 35-year-old actor/director/playwright had penned an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Illustrious Client” as well as Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” for LBSC.

“I knew he could handle adapting from one to the other,” Borgers said. “I knew he would be true to the book.

“It’s tough to edit a book down to one-and-a-half hours and only use one set. He has condensed all the action and kept all the style and wit that Dashiell wrote. I’m very impressed with it.”

Pope said he was honored by the praise and confidence that he, an unseasoned playwright, could take on the first play adaptation of “The Maltese Falcon.” He said he was confident he could do it, too.

“I honestly felt up to the task,” said Pope, who wrote a few plays in high school, one of which the University of Missouri produced, but hadn’t written anything else until three years ago when he joined LBSC. “I have done a lot of things in my life, but I never intended to be a writerŠ. In the course of writing this play, I realized I have some kind of knack for it. I felt I had the potential. It was a nice, novel feeling.”

Pope began adapting Hammett’s gritty who-done-it featuring the tough, no-nonsense detective Spade last year. The first thing he did was read and re-read the book — a total of 10 times.

“I’d always been a fan of Dashiell Hammett’s work,” said Pope, who first read “The Maltese Falcon” when he was 15. “He was a remarkable writer. He writes with an incredible discipline, and the book is not only great for its genre but great literature too.”

After reading the book several times, Pope began to make notes and to break down the story to its rudimentary level. Those notes filled hundreds of note cards, which decorated the walls of his apartment for months.

“To my mind, it’s very hard work to write a play; I think an adaptation is harder,” Pope said. “The structure and form of a novel is not the same as a play’s structure.”

He said he left out scenes from the book but kept all the major plot points. What he didn’t do was let John Huston’s film version of the book — what most people likely think of first when they hear the title “The Maltese Falcon” — influence him.

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen the film,” Pope said. “I decided not to see it while doing the adaptation.”

Jeffrey Shonert made the same decision. Shonert plays neurotic villain Joel Cairo, the character Peter Lorre portrayed in the film.

“I wanted to see what I could come up with,” said Shonert, who got his start opposite Glenn Close (before she was famous) in a summer stock production of “Twelfth Night” and whose first Broadway production was in “The King and I” opposite Yul Brenner. “I wanted to follow my own impulses. I’m trying to put a touch of fun into the character.”

Shonert said he is particularly excited to play Cairo because he is considered an archetypal gay character.

“I don’t think it was that overt in the ’40s (when the film came out). This character, Joel Cairo, is the very first leading gay character in Hollywood. He enjoys being a queen. He enjoys having fun, but he’s batted around like a ping-pong ball. It’s the only way a gay character would have been acted — as an evil queen.”

Shonert, Pope (who is directing the production) and the rest of the cast have been hard at work for the last six weeks to bring Pope’s adaptation to life on the Black Box Theatre’s 16 1/2-foot square stage.

They find out if they got the real thing, or the lead falcon, Friday.

“The Maltese Falcon” runs April 29 through June 4 at the Black Box Theatre, 4250 1/2 Atlantic Ave.

For ticket information, call 997-1494.

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