More than half of the plays produced last year on Broadway and London's West End were adaptations. The art of dramatizing someone else's novel, memoir, collection of short stories, poems, or in some cases movies, has never been more commercially and critically popular. Once dismissed as a derivative practice, adaptation is now widely recognized as its own art form with its own history and craft technique. In this one-hour lecture and discussion, playwright and professor Matthew Spangler will talk about his many stage plays, a number of which are either adaptations of literature or dramatizations of historical events.