A director's approach to Helen Edmundson's Anna Karenina.

Helen Edmundson’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is an engaging yet complicated script that presents a challenge to directors and designers alike. The play breaks down the eight hundred-page novel into an evening’s entertainment and forces the two main characters to encounter one another and together relive their stories. This thesis is a documentation of the director’s process in approaching, conceptualizing, analyzing, and staging Edmondson’s script at Baylor University in February of 2018. This thesis explores the difficulties in adapting a literary classic like Anna Karenina for the stage and relates specific adaptation choices to the theatrical style of the play.