Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar = Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz.

In conventional stage/screen adaptations of literary texts, the cast speaks only a fraction of the original words exactly as they appear on the page. The name of the non-dialogue game is usually translation, not transcription; an adaptation brings to visual life what a book describes.

But in both ERS’ six-hour, live-performed reading of The Great Gatsby, and in Wes’ Netflix short of Roald Dahl’s Henry Sugar, the actors deliver the entirety (for Gatz) and the vast majority (for Henry Sugar) of the original texts almost verbatim. Close your eyes, and they’d sound like audiobooks (with, at least for Henry Sugar, a Wesian cadre of the starriest voices).

But opening your eyes transforms them from mere relaying vehicles to full-blown visual adaptations, adding new layers of interpretative meaning.

And this more verbatim approach — a mainstay of solo-thespian shows based on books — correlates with Henry Sugar’s narrative structure, what with its written stories within written stories within narrated stories within transcribed stories. The whole short is performed at the pace you read/write, akin to the feeling of when you’re in a real flow, with the words washing straight through you.