For Ann-Marie MacDonald, a ‘Fall on Your Knees’ theatrical adaptation was inevitable

From its very inception, the smash bestseller “Fall on Your Knees” was destined for the stage.

To fans of the sprawling epic, that might come as a surprise. Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novel bursts at the seams with prosaic beauty, full of metaphor and hauntingly melancholic language. Set in Atlantic Canada at the turn of the 20th century, “Fall on Your Knees” searches through the rubble of the Piper family — secrets too dark ever to be uttered — and finds poetry in unlikely spots.

It’s a book with a devout following in Canada and abroad, shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 1996 and selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2002.

But according to MacDonald, there was never any doubt it would be onstage someday.

“I fully intended to write a play,” said MacDonald in an early morning Zoom interview. “I was writing a play. And I had seen images of these three sisters who appeared like martyred saints in a cathedral, each of them holding what I thought of as a prop, or a symbol of their martyrdom. There was a girl with a high-heeled red shoe and another with a severed braid, and another with a wooden crutch.

“And then there was this fourth figure, not in stained glass at all. She was in this … shimmering emerald dress, with flaming red hair. And that, of course, turned out to be Kathleen.”

(Kathleen: the eldest daughter of the Piper family, a gifted opera singer and a social outcast on Cape Breton Island. The object of her father’s affection — or is it obsession? Known for her blazing red hair. Moves to New York, where she meets Rose, for better or worse.)

“But soon I realized while writing this play that the stage directions were too long,” continued MacDonald. “And to my consternation, I realized I was writing prose fiction. And that was worrying, because I didn’t know how to do that. But I just kind of plunged in. I knew where the story was going and what it wanted to be right now.

“Yes, it’s been a theatrical piece from the beginning,” she mused. “And I always saw it as a performance, as a 3D experience for the reader. So it’s really exciting to see it fulfilling my original intention.”

It’s not MacDonald writing the script. That honour — and enormous responsibility — has been passed on to Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch, known for writing dark, humorous plays about women at either end of disparate power dynamics, not unlike the women of the Piper family.

Moscovitch couldn’t be more perfect for the job.

“I remember I was handed the script for a very unusual piece called ‘East of Berlin’ by (former Tarragon Theatre artistic director) Richard Rose,” said director Alisa Palmer in an interview. Besides mounting the theatrical adaptation of “Fall on Your Knees” and running much of the English side of the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, Palmer is MacDonald’s life partner.

“I was so taken by the writing,” she continued, speaking fondly of Moscovitch’s early days as a playwright. “And I remember thinking, ‘If the writer is anything like the script, I won’t be able to work with that person,’ because it was very challenging material. But she wasn’t like that at all … she was emerging as this brilliant, bright star.

“It was around that time I’d been thinking of doing an adaptation of ‘Fall on Your Knees’ and looking for a writer to partner with for that production. Ten years ago, I approached Hannah about it. And it was important to her, just like it’s important to so many people for their own reasons. And she took it on and we’ve been collaborating ever since,” Palmer added.

“It takes special gifts and a really particular sensitivity to how to lift what’s innately theatrical in the book into words that are so freeing for actors to work with,” she concluded. “And the actors feel that opportunity.”

Part of what’s so striking about MacDonald’s novel is its engagement with music: opera, piano, jazz. The melodies leap off the page. That, too, was a crucial point of consideration for the theatrical adaptation.

“In the book, Ann-Marie accesses the vocabularies of music, the sensualities of music,” said Palmer. “In the adaptation, we were looking for a way to capture the feeling people have when they read the book. It’s a translation of the book into theatrical form … so the music appears largely as it does in the book, with popular arias that exist just like they do in the book.

“But we also weave the music in through all the tissues of the piece. We lean into what music can offer that words can’t. When things are beyond words; when thoughts and feelings come from so deep within that a piece of dialogue can’t suffice.

“The play is drunk with music. It’s part of the fabric,” added Palmer.

“That’s absolutely true,” agreed MacDonald. “And when I attended the first music workshop this past summer, I sat at the back and I was really glad I did, because I was crying. I don’t like to admit that, but it’s 8:30 in the morning and it’s true. I was very moved. It was this combination of being touched, and laughing and crying.

“Music accesses feelings. Sure, there’s words and I’ve got lots of them. But the words come after, and the music and the feeling comes first,” she continued. “And it’s such a privilege to just sit in that … which is purely emotional, purely associative.

“That’s what theatre can give you.”

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