The Magic Influence of Fairy Tales

A shelf on one of the groaning bookcases in my home library is packed with hardcover books collecting fairy tales, folktales, myths, and legends from all over the world. There are also a number of fairy-tale paperbacks elsewhere as well as the three huge volumes that encompass L. Frank Baum's Oz stories. This collection of mine isn't more than ten years old, because I didn't start developing an interest in these types of fiction until I wrote my first produced fairy-tale stage play. After that, the floodgates were open, and I daresay this kind of writing as snuck into and influenced my own.

In the spring and summer of 2007, I was preparing a long-dreamed-of production called Macbeth: Life on the Heath, a farcical, 40-minute adaptation of Shakespeare's dark drama, to run at Greenbelt Arts Center exclusively on Labor Day Weekend. Because of the show's brevity, there would be a lot of time in the day left over for doing other things with the theater. So my producer, Gretchen Jacobs, an experienced director herself, decided to supplement my production with one of her own--some sort of children's show.

Despite the fact that I was deep into my planning, I asked if I could submit a script for her consideration, and she easily agreed. The first type of children's story that came to mind was a fairy tale, so I decided to find one online (remember, at that point, I didn't have any books of them). I really thought nothing of taking time away from my marketing-job workday to research this new project; I was already sneaking in the unpaid editorship of an entertainment website called Earth's Mightiest. Yes, I was busy, and I loved it.

A quick Google search took me to a site called SurLaLune, which collects the original, unsanitized versions of the classic fairy tales as well as alternative international versions. I was drawn to "Snow-white and Rose-red," thinking it would be another adventure of the famous Snow White, one that didn't involve dwarfs. In fact, this story was not about a motherless princess hated by her queen stepmother, but rather about two sisters who lived happily with their widowed mother in a modest little cottage. It was a charming tale of a talking bear, unfortunate (though funny) encounters with a mean dwarf, and a trip to the market, all climaxing with a nail-biting death threat and a surprise unveiling.

Without having to look at any other stories, I knew I had a good one for the show. But I wanted another event or two to pad out the girls' adventures, so I pulled up another story, this one about polar-opposite stepsisters who react differently to a lucrative meeting with a fairy-type person. I took a chunk from that tale and set it down in my script, making for some nice, satisfying story beats and a slightly longer show (about 25 minutes). Also, feeling like height-challenged people might find the evil dwarf offensive, I changed him into a bearded grasshopper. I've never gotten any blowback from the grasshopper community.

Gretchen quickly put my script into production. The Adventures of Rose Red and Snow White turned out to be such a terrific show, it knocked me out. A very skilled director, Gretchen had smoothed over the problems in my rushed stage-play, assembled a terrific little cast (including actual sisters), and presented something I was extremely proud to be a part of. That whetted my appetite for fairy-tale plays, and I started collecting and reading the originals.

While gathering books of the unexpurgated texts as well as the kid-friendly bowdlerized versions, I also picked up variants such as picture books and even adult adaptations like Anne Rice's erotic Sleeping Beauty trilogy, though I couldn't even get through the first volume. I also gained a renewed interest in Disney's fun though whitewashed movie musicals. That may be when I hit on the idea of writing my own FT play featuring songs, which I called Rapunzel! Rapunzel! The adaptation and the songwriting were a blast, and I proudly submitted it to Gretchen as something to continue her children's theater company with. She never did produce it--I think she found some technical difficulties in the staging--but I still sing one of the songs I wrote for it, and I may even return to it someday in order to expand the story.

Besides the prose versions of the tales, I got into a comic-book series called Fables, of which I'd had a vague but uninterested awareness for several years. The premise was that the characters of legend actually existed on the planets of another dimension, but, when they were driven out of their homelands by a usurping emperor, they fled to New York in our world. I loved it and eventually amassed all twenty two collected trade-paperbacks.

My taste for these types of stories led me to Baum's Wizard of Oz, initially in a children's book adaptation by the marvelous artist Lisbeth Zwerger. I had hated the 1939 movie musical when I saw it as a child--I found the scary witch-in-the-crystal-ball scene to be highly inappropriate--but I became quite engaged with the original tale. I adored the characters, the places, and all the quirkiness Baum put into it. Thus I started collecting the subsequent books, and I didn't even hesitate when Barnes & Noble offered three massive-but-convenient tomes at a bargain price.

I won't even attempt to examine why we find fairy tales and folktales so fascinating even today or the ways in which they've influenced world culture. But I will say that I've seen how much they are ingrained in our literature. Real people like Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed were transformed by creative scribes into larger-than-life folktale heroes whose stories followed the pattern of the Arabian Nights. Pulp fictioneer Edgar Rice Burroughs claimed that his John Carter of Mars was a science-fiction character, but his adventures played out like Greek myths or medieval stories. Stephen King may set most of his doorstopper horror novels in present day, but they still bear all the hallmarks of fairy tales and legends. And these are just three examples of a study that could go on for the length of a book.

My own non-fairy-tale writing is influenced by them. When I decided to pen a pulp-style epic about a meek poet forced to fight an alien legion in another dimension, the story that began developing was obviously in the Greek-myth tradition. The scripts for my proposed comic anthology Tome of Terror are the descendants of folktales and urban legends. Even the detective mysteries I've written or plotted are based on Sherlock Holmes, who can be considered a British folktale hero. My stories, whether they be police procedurals, suspense films, or humorous comic-strips, probably wouldn't exist if I'd never gotten into reading fairy tales, and I have no problem admitting that.

#fiction #drama