Review: The Turn of the Screw by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw takes you into a dark place. A brief chapter sets the scene. On Christmas Eve in an old house in the countryside a group of bourgeois friends has just listened to a ghost story. Their host, Douglas, offers them another, but they have to wait for a manuscript to be dispatched from his residence in London.
That text -- "in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand" -- came from his sister's governess, twenty years dead. Her words as imagined by James constitute the entirety of the rest of the novella.
The unnamed woman is the well-read but lonely daughter of an impoverished country clergyman. At an interview in Harley Street, central London, she agrees to care for two orphaned children at a distant estate called Bly. Her new employer, the gallant but inveterate bachelor who is their guardian and uncle, admonishes her that she is never, ever to contact him. Of course, she is immediately infatuated with that gallant gentleman.
So there we are, inside her head.
Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has adapted other scary classics for the stage. The Bastrop Opera House is staging his Murder by Poe now, and both end on the weekend of November 9. His Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opened in Minnesota in early 2009.
Hatcher's stage solution to James' narrative structure is to provide us two actors only: the unnamed governess, played here by Jenny Gravenstein, and "the man" who becomes, in turn, the employer/uncle, Mrs Grose the housekeeper at Bly, and the bleak ten-year-old Miles, who has been expelled from boarding school for unrevealed reasons.
These characters mime their interactions with his eight-year-old sister Flora, who is invisible to us and whom playwright Hatcher for convenience's sake also makes mute. (Not so, James, who gives the governess the comment, "[Flora] showed [Bly to me] step by step and room by room and secret by secret, with droll, delightful, childish talk about it and with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming immense friends.")
You probably know the elements of the story, in which the ghosts of a man and a woman may (or may not) be seeking to entice and seize the children. James detested then-popular ghost stories, approximate equivalents of our "slasher" movies. His approach was different. Both in narrative structure and in narrative content James left us guessing whether this lady is gradually losing her mind or whether, in fact, those apparitions are real threats also visible to the children.
The Turn of the Screw was published in 1897. Sigmund Freud's early major works on dreams, sexuality and the unconscious were published and translated between 1900 and 1905. They prompted reinterpretations and debate about the story told by the governess.
Your take on this production will depend on two elements. First, your degree of fascination with neurasthenia, hushed, enigmatic evocations of haunting,and implied themes of violated innocence and adult manipulation of children. And, second, your reaction to Jenny Gravenstein.
ALT picked Gravenstein for "Applause" recognition for her role as the foolish sister in Age of Arousal at Austin Playhouse last April, and the B. Iden Payne committee gave her one of their five nominations for "Outstanding Featured Actress in a Comedy' for the same role. Gravenstein used some of that febrile, long-limbed exuberance with Austin Shakespeare when she portrayed the brothel keeper Mistress Overdone. In those roles she was foolishness gone to decadence, a survivor coming at life from its underside. She had a captivating physicality.
In The Turn of the Screw her nameless character is wrapped tightly in Edwardian garments and social restrictions. She is not the social equal of her perfumed and doubtless musk-scented employer. She relies on the housekeeper and has no real interest in exercising her titular authority at Bly. She seeks to see the good in those damaged children and desires to be their friend and companion. This governess functions in a world that is tightly controlled, and the spectres of the dead are threats of dissolution.
Jenny Gravenstein uses her face, especially those luminiscent eyes, her posture, and carefully controlled voice and hands to draw us into the pool of flickering light that is the governess's spirit. It's an extraordinary contrast with her previous characters and suggests a strength and charisma uncommon even among theatre folk here.
Ben Wolfe with his metamorphoses is a good pairing for her. He's another of my Austin favorites, a round-faced, mustached actor capable of standing, crooking an arm, adapting an accent and sing-song voice, and making us see a dutiful, worried, ageing housekeeper. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this extended exercise in shadowy menace is the flat, reticent courtesy with which he as ten-year-old Miles treats his governess.
The confined space of the Larry L. King stage at Austin Playhouse is the appropriate venue for this piece, for at all times in this inward-looking psychological piece these actors are almost within your reach. Lara Toner's direction is unobtrusive and uses to good advantage the lighting designed by Don Day. I'd have preferred for the Playhouse staff to exercise tighter control on the heating/air conditioning unit, which came gusting into noisy and inappropriate operation two or three times during the 75 minutes of these disturbing proceedings.
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com/austin, October 29
Review by Olin Meadows for AustinOnStage.com, October 26
EXTRA
Click to view program for The Turn of the Screw by Austin Playhouse
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The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher
Austin Playhouse
