in the play version. Marie - Marie is Eddie's wife. She does not get along with him and feels betrayed when he leaves her. Jean Korey played Marie in the play version. Crew Chief - The chief of the Black Caps crew that Gabriel works for. In the play he is given a name, Gizmo, and was played by Kareem Diallo Carpenter. Daisy Fried of the Philadelphia City Paper said that the play Gizmo has "an important, comic-sinister relationship" with Gabriel. O'Neill said that the central characters "redeemed" the novel despite that it had had some cliche minor characters. Stepp said that "Lopez specializes in paradox. His kids embody both ruthless bravado and baby-faced terror; the adults, both faith and despair. Villains are both monstrous and pathetic, wise-cracking street rogues and remorseless perverts." Yagoda argued that "[o]ne never shakes the feeling that" the "hard to credit" characters "are stand-ins for the author, notebook-wielding observers of a poor, crime-riddled neighborhood rather than real participants in its daily life" with Gabriel being the "worst" example. Toby Zinman of Philadelphia City Paper said that in the play version "the caricatures rather than characters pander to every prejudice in the audience; the Italians are ridiculous cartoons, the African Americans are either vicious or victims, and every crucial scene of emotional or moral crisis is broken by a laugh line, effectively trivializing the characters and their ordeals." Play adaptation The play adaptation of Third and Indiana was produced by the Arden Theatre Company in Philadelphia. The play ran from March 20 to May 4, 1997, at the Arcadia Stage, an Arden-operated theater in Old City, Philadelphia. The writer of the play, Aaron Posner, was the artistic director of the company. A teenager, Bernard Gray, assisted Posner with the street slang. The play had 12 actors, original music, panel discussions of the issues discussed by the play and original novel, and video footage. Posner characterized the production as expensive and large. Posner said "It's been a huge project that's really consumed me. While it's Steve's situations, Steve's characters, and it's wholly recognizable as Third and Indiana, the writing in the play is very much more original and different from the novel. It's much more like writing a new play than an adaptation." Steve Lopez said "I think something the play does that the book didn't do was to focus on kids" and that "Aaron has taken