Yes you are right Terminus, maybe I am a little obsessed by the visual side of the novel. The ocean is an important character of the story (the central figure in fact) and I do not think that we can remove him without distorting it considerably. It is what have made Soderbegh and I regret it, his movie does not much have to see any more with the novel, he made too many changes.
I think the important is not so that the ocean is present physically on the stage (he is too big for that) but that its presence is perceptible, through what make the human characters, of what they say themselves. It would not be necessary to use elements with a strong visual sense but only to suggest some things. In the novel, we witness some phenomena which arise near the station but the majority of the informations concerning the ocean are passed on to us by the documents which reads kelvin, the extracts of encyclopediae, reports and other articles.
There are many flashbacks in the novel, these are very important to understand the relation (long and complex) between the human beings and the ocean of Solaris. It would be good to keep them in the play. I imagine a scene with solaristes in full debate about the ocean. There is a passage which would be very well to be included in the play : it is the one during which Kelvin accompany children in a museum dedicated to the ocean of Solaris, arrived in a room where are exposed photos, models and videos of symetriades, a girl asks to him what is the purpose of all this, he does not know what to answer. Here is a good means to hint in the ocean and to the enigma which it represents, without having to use considerable visual means. In Tarkovski's movie, the testimony of Berton is very well made, even without any visual elements one understands perfectly the strangeness of the phenomena with which the pilot was confronted.
Naturally, we could - for certains scenes- use projections directly on the stage, on screens situated behind the windows of the station and showing the surface of the planet. When I spoke about Solaris the musical, it was only a joke but the means used in musicals are very ingenious and very effective. I saw The Phantom of the Opera some years ago and certains scenes are really impressives.
In all the manners, a play adapted from Solaris would definitively be not a ordinary play.
