The Diving Bell and the Butterfly adapted & directed by Nolan Haims from the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby The Directors Company The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was created in a workshop at The Directors Company from the Jean-Dominique book of the same title. Bauby had been the editor of the French edition of Elle Magazine when, at age 41, he suffered a stroke and fell into a rare waking coma, a condition called Locked-in Syndrome. Fully conscious, yet able to blink only his right eye, Bauby eventually dictated word by word a series of his dreams, desires and remembrances. As his body shut down, his mind took flight like a butterfly. Though the book is written with tremendously poetic and moving language, it presented an inherent challenge: How to make dramatic and stageworthy the story of a man unable to move. By creating a highly theatrical style for the production with a bare minimum of settings, props and costumes (the set consisted of two white chairs), we were able to create the world that existed in Bauby’s highly charged mind. Intercut with scenes of his physical and present “detention” in the hospital were flashbacks to his childhood, lost loves, missed opportunities, fantasies of waltzing with princesses and being on the sets at the filmings of classic American movies. Over the course of a few months, my group of five actors and I experimented and workshopped the episodes from the book. Using my familiar structure for adaptation, I would write a scene at home and then bring it in to rehearsal for a “test of fire.” With the actors we would change lines, rewrite on the spot, cut and add. After rehearsal, I would go home and rewrite or edit the scenes based upon the work in rehearsal. This process would sometimes be repeated again and again in varying degrees with the newly edited scenes as the arc of the play developed.