'Chamber theatre is a method of adapting literary works to the stage using a maximal amount of the work's original text and often minimal and suggestive settings. In Chamber Theater, narration is included in the performed text and the narrator

Narrator

A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...

 might be played by multiple actors . Professor Robert S. Breen (1909-1991) introduced "Chamber Theater" to his Oral Interpretation Classes at Northwestern University

Northwestern University

Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

 in 1947. Northwestern’s Professor of Performance Studies Frank Galati

Frank Galati

Frank Galati is an American director, writer and actor. He is a member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company, an associate director at Goodman Theatre, and a professor of performance at Northwestern University. In 2004, Galati was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame...

, who studied Chamber Theater with Dr. Breen, has directed highly acclaimed Chamber Theater Productions for the Goodman Theater and Steppenwolf Theater

Steppenwolf Theatre Company

Steppenwolf Theatre Company is a Tony Award-winning Chicago theatre company founded in 1974 by Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry in the basement of a church in Highland Park, Illinois. It has since relocated to Chicago's Halsted Street, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. Its name comes from...

 Companies in Chicago. Galati’s Chamber Theater adaptation of John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...

’s The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962....

 won two Tony Awards on Broadway. One of the most famous and elaborate examples of chamber theatre is David Edgar

David Edgar (playwright)

David Edgar is a British playwright and author who has had more than sixty of his plays published and performed on stage, radio and television around the world, making him one of the most prolific dramatists of the post-1960s generation in Great Britain.He was resident playwright at the Birmingham...

's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (play)

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby is an eight-hour stage play, presented over two performances, adapted from the Charles Dickens novel of the same name by David Edgar. Directed by John Caird and Trevor Nunn, it opened on 5 June 1980 at the Aldwych Theatre in London. The music and lyrics...

, in which Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

's characters narrate themselves in third person

Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...

. Set pieces are carried in and taken away during the performance, rather than between scenes, and objects may be represented in a mimetic

Mimetic

In mathematics, mimesis is the quality of a numerical method which imitates some properties of the continuum problem. The goal of numerical analysis is to approximate the continuum, so instead of solving a partial differential equation one aims to solve a discrete version of the continuum problem...

 manner. Another example is Matthew Spangler

Matthew Spangler

Matthew Spangler is an American playwright and director.-Body of Work:Matthew Spangler's plays have been performed by the San Jose Repertory Theatre, Arizona Theatre Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Cleveland Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse , the National Steinbeck Center, the Edinburgh Fringe...

's stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini , is an Afghan-born American novelist and physician of ethnic Tajik origin. He is a citizen of the United States where he has lived since he was fifteen years old. His 2003 debut novel, The Kite Runner, was an international bestseller, selling more than 12 million copies worldwide....

's novel The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner is a novel by Khaled Hosseini. Published in 2003 by Riverhead Books, it is Hosseini's first novel, and was adapted into a film of the same name in 2007....

.