Yet the visit provided an invaluable course in how acting can transform a play, whether by turning paper into flesh or poetry into leaden prose.
Once in college I learned to write because I needed the skills in order to develop a real grasp of how stories are told, how the design of a production is lifted from the pages of a script, and how to analyze the themes, the plot, the characters and demands needed to transform a play on paper into a production on a stage, or in a film.
The sub-souk in Old Town could hold community workshops, transform into a play area for kids as well as into a bus stop.
Shapiro shows how, in transforming an old play with a happy ending into The Tragedy of King Lear, Shakespeare not only articulated the perils of separation, but also conceived a new drama that reflected the teeming anxieties of post-Elizabethan England.
(The novel was later transformed into a play, which had its Broadway debut in 1958 and brought Jason Robards a best-actor Tony Award).
Like the original Scopes "monkey trial" or, more recently, the legal challenge to California's Proposition 8 — a case already transformed into a play — any hockey stick trial would be both well financed and extremely high-profile.
A new dental service has been set up, anti-social behaviour has reduced, a derelict area has been transformed into a play park and relations between tenants and the local housing association have got better.
Set in a Lincoln convertible, which was slowly dismantled as the action progressed, Lear was transformed into a play about a group of amoral young people in a materialist society who were just a little too anxious to take over their father's business.
Khemiri's novel was published to great acclaim and was subsequently transformed into a play (directed by Farnaz Arbabi) that toured Sweden with Riksteatern in 2013 and premiered in New York in January 2014.
Not only was their work in transforming a ropey, unpublished play, Everybody Comes To Rick's, given a political twist by a third screenwriter, Howard Koch, but changes were demanded from day to day, not least for the ending.
Nintendo is building a high-tech headquarters across town, but the old man is determined to keep the qualities that transformed a family-owned playing-card company founded in 1886 into an international game power.
