“I see your adaptation of The Green Bird and that’s all well and good but I thought you were going to write a sequel to The Love of Three Oranges?” -People keep asking me, to my great confusion as The Green Bird IS a sequel to The Love of Three Oranges. I feel like we’ve covered this. But I’m still getting confused emails so I figure I’d lay it all out in one neat little blog post for handy Googling.
Carlo Gozzi wrote The Green Bird as a sequel to The Love of Three Oranges. It contains the same characters, references situations from the original as canon, and continues the storyline from the first play. The Love of Three Oranges was Gozzi’s very first play and he wrote The Green Bird about a decade later, intending for it to be his last play, to put a cap on his playwriting career. (He ended up writing one more play anyway but that was the plan.)
My adaptation of The Green Bird is also written as a sequel to my adaptation of The Love of Three Oranges. In fact, most of the changes I made in my version were the direct result of changes I made in Three Oranges that necessitated changing things in the sequel. Such as when I killed Queen Tartagliona in Three Oranges not knowing I needed her as the big bad in The Green Bird (though I’m pleased with how that worked out, overall).
The tricky part of The Green Bird, for me, as always been that I wanted it to work as both a sequel and a standalone play. This means throwing in enough references to the original and little easter eggs to appeal to anyone who’d performed my other adaptation but still making sure it stood alone for anyone who stumbled upon the play by itself. I didn’t want people to think they couldn’t perform Green Bird if they hadn’t done Oranges, because you totally can. Eventually, someone’s going to do them back to back with the same cast reprising their roles and it’s going to give me All The Joy.
However, as much as it being a sequel to Three Oranges was important to me, you’ll discover that The Green Bird (one-act version) is not really written to be a sequel. While the characters and the plot are mostly the same, one of the ways I cut that down to 1/4 of the length of the full play was to take out all the in-jokes and references to the other play. This has created the strangely ironic situation where someone could, in theory, perform The Love of Three Oranges one act and The Green Bird one act back to back in a double bill that would be the length of a full length play… but then all the references to it being a sequel are gone and people will have to make those connections themselves. It sort of makes me sad but I’m also really looking forward to that day I get to see both the short versions back to back because they are both so fast moving, it’s got to be a fun time.
So, yeah, for those of you that were still wondering when I was going to come out with the infamous sequel that Brighella eludes to at the end of Three Oranges, it’s already out and it’s called The Green Bird. But while that’s the end of Carlo Gozzi’s involvement with these characters, I’ve got one more trick up my sleeve called The Fourth Orange which will be available soon. While that’s not a straight sequel, it uses pieces of the source material that inspired Gozzi’s original project as well as some of the bits I added to the other plays and combines them into a brand new project that I think will appeal to fans of the other plays as well.
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
