ow do you take words off a page and make them into a performance worth watching?

The job is hard enough when the text in question is straight fiction, furnished with characters and a plot. But to take an indefinable book such as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and try to make it live and breathe on stage requires bravery and, yes, a bit of brass. Derek Goldman has both.

"The books that I am always attracted to," he says, "are ones that first of all move me but that also feel like they demand the particular creation of a new style to make them come alive."

Goldman, assistant professor of performance studies, dramatizes words. Not just a book's story or character but the words themselves and his reaction to them. "Almost anything I read," he says, "the first time through, I'm already thinking, what would this be like read aloud? And, how would you stage this? What are the parts that I'm reading fast to get to?" He trusts his instincts and chooses what moves him.

Goldman began thinking this way in high school, when he and other students worked with the Brookline (Massachusetts) Educational Theater Company to create plays about issues such as drug abuse and freedom of speech. "We would work in groups with adults from the community, reading articles and adapting them into skits or scenes," Goldman says. Excited by that and other theater work, Goldman majored in performance studies at Northwestern University. Now, more than ten years after those first plays, Goldman teaches his students to find drama in everyday encounters with words, whether those words are in a novel, a menu, or instructions on a parking ticket. "I try to make them aware that they're always responding to text, that all texts have a potential to be made into a performance," he says.

oldman needed all his experience when he took on James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men this spring. With Agee's text and Evans' stark black-and-white photos, the book is the product of a month spent with three tenant-farming families in 1936 rural Alabama. Anything but a straightforward account, it does contain some scenes and dialogue but has an equal amount of essaylike rants, passages that verge on poetry, exhaustive descriptions of clothing worn and food eaten, even a page from a third grader's geography textbook.

Goldman adapted Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as the last show of the 2000-2001 season for StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance, the professional theater company that he founded in Chicago and brought with him to Chapel Hill in 1999. He directed a cast that included UNC-CH students, some local professional actors, and communication studies professor Paul Ferguson.

One thing that intrigues Goldman about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is how it "strives to represent other people in a way that will transcend the limits of what a book is usually able to do," he says. Agee talks "torturedly and obsessively" about the idea that it's impossible to fully do justice to these people's lives. To that end, Goldman didn't assign actors to particular parts. When characters do appear, they are never portrayed by the same actor twice.

"There's a kind of fluidity of identity that the ensemble ends up taking on," Goldman says. "In general, what we're not trying to do is what an actor typically does, which is represent the character of the Alabama tenant farmer in a way that's meant to suggest 'this is exactly what they were really like, this was the way they gestured, this was their accent, and I'm taking you inside their character, persona, or experience.' Agee's whole point was that it's impossible to do this."