My review of Saturday night’s performance of “Turn of the Screw” in Ventura just got published in ye olde NewsPress.
TURN, TURN, TURN
James’ classic ghost story chills
For many of us who have encountered Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” it most probably was in senior-year English.
And for many of us, it was plodding, full of long, long digressive sentences that feel like the main verb has upped and left, tired of waiting.
Yet, in many ways, the story’s influence continues to be felt a full century after its initial publication. Alejandro Amen‡bar’s film “The Others” kept the main elements, but remixed them into a modern ghost story. The two-player adaptation at the Rubicon Theatre reintroduces this tale of madness, sifting out the story from the prose. It leaves the ambiguity of the original intact even as it introduces several more levels of unanswered questions.
Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher’s tactic is to tell James’ story through the restrictions of two actors. Faline England (last seen here in “All My Sons”) plays “the Lady,” a young, excitable governess employed by a mysterious bachelor to look after his niece and nephew at a remote estate called Bly. James O’Neil (Rubicon’s artistic director) takes on three of the remaining roles: the hunched-over housekeeper, Mrs. Grose; the seductive bachelor; and the 10-year-old nephew, Miles. The mute niece, Flora, is indicated, assumed, and described. Being silent, she is more a manifestation of the Lady’s mind.
There are two additional characters, whom we also never see — the ghosts of the former governess, Miss Jessel, and her lover, Peter Quint. Victims of a doomed love affair, the Lady begins to understand they have returned to claim the souls of the two children.
The Lady compares Bly’s estate to Hamlet’s Elsinore, and so these ghostly visits have their classical antecedents. Depending on the interpretation, Hamlet similarly is given a mission that may look to outsiders like madness. So it is with the Lady, who must save the souls of the children. Only, we begin to wonder exactly who these children are and why the Lady’s love for them seems overzealous.
For the Freudians, there is much to sink your analyzing teeth into, and I suspect director Moni Yakim is one with the cigar-is-not-just-a-cigar crowd. The Lady’s repressed sexuality is apparent in her first scene, a seduction more than a job interview. She seems ready to bear children, not just look after them.
The bachelor sets the rules: no contact with him, no matter what happens. Yet, it’s not long after meeting Miles that the young charge is insisting that the Lady request the bachelor come visit. From the ghostly couple to the strange sibling relationship, not to mention the allusions to Adam and Eve in the garden (“all stories start in the garden,” the narrator says), the Lady is a character in need of a counterpart. But she has her own story to tell, one in which she is heroine and savior, selfless mother-substitute, fearful but righteous Christian. It’s not one in which a man takes a central role.
Yet by casting Mr. O’Neil to act opposite Ms. England, (besides playing three roles, he delivers sound effects and narration), Mr. Yakim keeps the troubling male energy in the Lady’s vision. Miles speaks beyond his years about topics he shouldn’t know things about. The Lady believes Peter Quint corrupted the child unspeakably before his death, but then again. . . .
An impressive sound design by David Beaudry delivers the chills and creates echoing, sepulchral space in the rather comfy confines of the Rubicon. Designed to deliver frights, the play sometimes resorts to “boo” scares — loud noises, screams — but keeps the cheap effects sparse. Tom Buderwitz’s minimal set design — a few Gothic arches and a series of trees that look very Gahan Wilson-esque — allows the actors free range.
It sometimes is a bit difficult to identify where they are in any particular scene, but we are never at a loss as to who they are. Both Ms. England and Mr. O’Neil are powerful forces, throwing themselves fully into their roles.
Rather than a cheap twist ending or a pat explanation, which we have come to expect from our ghostly entertainment these days, “The Turn of the Screw” ends with death, identity crisis, madness and unanswered questions that rise not out of bad plotting but perception and psychology.
(photo by NICK WEISSMAN)