Gay writer Craig Lucas, known for such previous stage and screen productions as Prelude To A Kiss and Longtime Companion, is a very busy and heralded man. His screenplay for the 2003 film The Secret Lives of Dentists was declared the best of that year by The New York Film Critics Society. Mr. Lucas both wrote and directed his latest movie, The Dying Gaul, starring Patricia Clarkson, Campbell Scott and Peter Sarsgaard and scheduled to open in the coming months. Lucas’s musical The Light In The Piazza, for which he wrote the book (Adam Guettel wrote the music and lyrics), just opened this week on Broadway. AfterElton.com: I want to begin by asking you to say something about the challenges and rewards of adapting work from another source for the stage.

So, I’ve done novels by very famous American writers where you realize it’s all smoke and mirrors and there’s nothing there. Nothing will expose the weakness of structure like drama. A novel can be baggy and contain a thousand things, and if you try to dramatize it and there’s no narrative there, you’ll find out quickly enough.

But the two times that I’ve adapted something strong, and that was this (The Light In The Piazza) and I did a Jane Smiley novella called The Age Of Grief, which we made into a movie (The Secret Lives Of Dentists), both times it was a thrill because the underlying material constantly rewarded me with new insights. In fact, we put a new scene into the musical yesterday, and I’ve been working on this for quite a few years, and we went back to the novella and there it was, exactly what I needed. Because Elizabeth (Spencer) is that kind of dense and rewarding writer and Jane Smiley is equally remarkable.

GS: Italy and romance seem to be linked in people’s minds. Would you agree that the two belong together?
CL: There’s a brilliant little sequence in the Spencer where she says, “No one with a dream should come to Italy. No matter how dead and buried you think it is. This is where Italy will get you.” It is that idea of the possibility that I think imbues the novel and hopefully imbues this piece. I think there has been much too much made in twentieth century fiction made about the differences in the English and American attitudes toward love and the possibility of love and family, and the Italian.

It stems originally from E.M. Forster’s I think somewhat (pauses) racist notions about Italians and it’s thread through (Tennessee Williams’s) The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Arthur Laurents’s play The Time Of The Cuckoo, and Three Coins In A Fountain. And I think it’s all hooey (laughs).

That notwithstanding, I felt that Spencer found something true at the heart of our interaction, at least when it comes to the post-war period, where Americans were being idealized by the Italians and the Italians were being romanticized by the Americans and we were, in a sense, failing to see one another. What I find moving about the Italians, at least the central Italians, is their devotion to history. They have not neglected what is precious. As Americans, we tear down anything that is older than fifty years because it embarrasses us. We don’t know what to make of it.

You can drive around Tuscany and actually see what that country looked like five hundred years ago, whereas you can’t find a building in Dallas that was built before 1911 because they’ve torn them all down.

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