Adaptation as reception—or, Lady Bird as The Tempest

The idea that audiences are a crucial part of the adaptation process is widely acknowledged, and yet research exploring reception as an engine of adaptation remains scarce. This article considers what happens when an audience member experiences one work as an adaptation of another, even when there is no acknowledgement from the creative team that this is the case. Is such an occurrence simply a mistake in need of correction? Or is there a way in which such seeming misrecognitions can still produce meaningful adaptive relationships in their own right? This article puts forward a theory of reception as a form of adaptation, drawing on research into the phenomenology of adaptation and growing scholarly interest in unannounced, ambiguous, or unmarked adaptations. It then explores what this theory might look like in practice by probing the relationship between Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017) and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. At first glance, the only connection between the two works is the fact that the protagonist in Gerwig’s film is briefly involved in a production of the play at her school. Reading the two works in adaptive relation to one another, however, reveals shared preoccupations with parent–daughter relationships, frustrated female agency, and the complexities of forgiveness. While Lady Bird is by no means a conventional adaptation of The Tempest, this article argues that looking at each work through the lens of the other evolves the meaning of both.