Princess Eboli (Amanda Ruggerio) hugs Queen Elizabeth of Spain (Georgia Cohen) while the Duchess of Olivarez (Joan Batting) watches during Wednesday’s evening rehearsal of Don Carlos, at the Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

When Pawtucket’s Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre decided to open its season with 18th-century poet-philosopher-playwright Friedrich Schiller’s monumental Don Carlos, it went looking for a workable translation, one that would make deep cuts in the six-hour play.

Gamm artistic director Tony Estrella came across a recent translation that would have been fine, but the rights were not available. So Estrella, who is directing the production that opens Thursday, sat down at the beginning of the year and began working on his own adaptation, one that comes in at a little more than two hours and makes “substantial changes to the original.”

In doing so, Estrella rewrote every line of this rarely performed play and produced a much leaner version.

“You’re taking more than half the play away,” said Estrella, “and in doing that you’re going to excise so much that the restitching is going to get clunky. So you sort of say to yourself, it’s going to take a complete revision.

“I wouldn’t call the results an original work, but you are doing a lot more original writing to make sense of the material you’re going to take out.”

Estrella likened the process he went through to turning a novel into a screenplay. Some characters were dropped and others took different dramatic arcs, he said.

“I don’t think the spirit of the story has changed,” he said, “but it is substantially different from the original.”

One reason Estrella went with his own adaptation was that he wanted a version that would play well to Gamm audiences, one that would be fast-paced and emphasize the political intrigues of the play.

The Don Carlos story, better known as an 1867 opera by Verdi, deals with an idealistic son challenging the regime of his tyrannical father, King Philip II of Spain. Estrella feels there are parallels between the play and contemporary American politics, which is about to witness its own form of regime change come January.

“What we’ve created is our own version that’s more resonant with American audiences,” said Estrella.

Estrella, who worked from an early 1847 English translation of the German epic, not only rewrote the play, but did so in blank verse, or iambic pentameter, like the original. Schiller, who lived from 1759 to 1805, was emulating the style of Shakespeare when he wrote Don Carlos.

Estrella tried to capture that style in his adaptation. He has appeared in and directed many Shakespeare plays and taught Shakespeare’s works for the past 10 years.

“I wouldn’t have attempted it without being constantly in touch with Shakespeare. Most of what I have taught is how to use verse, the mechanics of it. Living in that world for so long, being immersed in it on an almost daily basis, gave me confidence.”

Estrella said he thought about doing a prose version of the play, but feels writing in verse gave the language a “heightened power.”

The more formal language of verse helps transport audiences to the world of 16th-century Spain, where the action takes place. He tried writing the first act in a freer form of verse, not pentameter, and found that the actors were not as free as when they were speaking in strict verse.

“It seemed to deaden that world a little bit,” he said.

Schiller, who is perhaps best known as the author of the Ode to Joy used in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, worked on Don Carlos for years. It contains more than 6,000 verses and runs more than six hours in its original form.

It is at once a political thriller and a rambling discourse on 18th-century values. In the character of Rodrigo, the marquis of Posa, Schiller created a man who sacrifices himself to the ideals of the time, to the notions of democracy, freedom and reason, all things that would have been alien to the court of Philip.

Posa is the best friend of Don Carlos, the weak but idealistic son of Philip and heir to the throne. When Carlos goes to his father with an offer to quell the uprising in the Spanish-controlled Netherlands, the king, a true despot, dismisses him and says his strong-armed general, the Duke of Alva, will take care of matters. Carlos, who is well liked in the Netherlands, proposes a peaceful solution. Philip wants to break the rebels. You don’t negotiate with terrorists, he says.

In the end, Posa sacrifices himself so that Carlos, who in the Gamm production will be played by Steve Kidd, can go to Flanders and oppose his father. Posa has hopes that Carlos will take over the kingdom and that he can bring about change.

One stroke of his pen could do more good than 1,000 soldiers, he says.

But it is at this point that the real power behind the throne, the 90-year-old blind head of the Spanish Inquisition, steps in, and any hope of a regime change fades.

You see the Grand Inquisitor, played by Sam Babbitt, treating Philip like a boy, said Estrella, the way Philip (Richard Donelly) treats Carlos.

The play is about the need for reason to prevail, for it to form the underpinnings of government.

“When we see public policy governed by anything that has to do with the supernatural,” said Estrella, “whether it’s a suicide bomber or a president saying this is a crusade and God told me I should do this, we are removing the human element and not making an intelligent decision.”

But the play is also about the way ideals tend to fade when confronted by the real world.

A priest in the play rants about Carlos putting the people before the divine order of the church. Carlos thinks reason is going to help the country, said the priest, while the only thing it’s going to do is put the priest out of a job.

But Alva, the pragmatist, fires back that ideals have a way of dissolving when a person aspires to the throne, or, say, the presidency. And that is something Estrella thinks resonates with today’s audience. What kind of compromises is a candidate such as Barack Obama, for example, willing to make on his way to the election and possibly the White House?

“We want Obama to be a good man,” Estrella said, “so we don’t want to hear all the compromises he’s going to have to make to become a good politician.”

Some of Posa’s speeches about his philosophical beliefs go on for pages, said Estrella, adding that the writing is lovely but doesn’t work dramatically. Instead, Estrella has tried to move the play along, to make it a page-turner.

He said it’s also nice to do something that has the feel of Shakespeare but is a story nobody knows and that they are encountering for the first time.

“It’s kind of like doing Shakespeare without exhausting the 10 Shakespeare plays that always get done,” said Estrella.

“Except for those in the audience that have had a graduate literature course, it’s going to be a new play.”

Don Carlos opens Thursday in previews and runs through Oct. 5 at the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, 172 Exchange St., Pawtucket. Tickets are $24 for previews, Sept. 4-7, and $24-$39 for all other performances. Call (401) 723-4266.

cgray@projo.com