Several years ago, at the Great Plains Theatre Conference, I summoned the guts to approach Romulus Linney (after a not-soft nudge from Wil Eno--magical night, that) and ask him about his approach to adapting novels for the stage. Linney had done this successfully several times over, and I had an inkling about a project I might like to undertake. He said, and I am paraphrasing, "When you adapt a novel for the stage, you're either in a marriage, or you're having an affair. You