By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/24/23 – This afternoon at the Sierra Madre Playhouse, I was able to see their production of Jeffrey Hatchner’s stage version of the famous Henry James ghost story “The Turn of the Screw.” Based on the provocative tale of suspense, horror, and repressed sexuality, this adaptation gives the famous story yet another turn of its own. A young governess journeys to a lonely English manor house in Essex to care for two recently orphaned children, ten-year-old Miles, and four-year-old Flora. But she is not their first governess. Her predecessor, Miss Jessel, drowned herself when she became pregnant by the sadistic valet, Peter Quint, who was himself found dead soon after under mysterious circumstances. Now the new governess has begun to see the specters of Quint and Jessel haunting the children, and she must find a way to stop the fiends before it is too late. But one frightening question tortures the would-be heroine: Are the ghosts real, or are they the product of her own fevered imagination?
Directed by Jeremiah Peasy, the two actors work together to make this ambiguous and haunting tale pull us into its mystery. The play is performed with two actors. One portrays “The Woman” (the equivalent of the governess in the novella). While the other actor plays all the other characters. Shanya Gabielle plays the young governess hired to look after the two children at Bly House. Michael Mullen weaves in and out of various characters, including the governess’s bachelor employer in London, the estate caretaker Mrs. Grose, the narrator Douglas as well as the 10-year-old boy Miles who shows up after he is expelled from his boarding school and returns to Bly. Mullen’s highly animated portrayal of the boy Miles is especially convincing, even though he does it without any costume change whatsoever. Hatcher developed his adaptation with the Portland Stage Company as part of its Little Festival of the Unexpected program in 1995, and it debuted at the company’s home theater in Portland, Maine in 1996. In 1999, the play was staged Off-Broadway by the Primary Stages company. Director Melia Bensussen won an Obie Award for that production.
The play attempts to capture the experience of the governess in this eerie country estate by a lake. The relatively empty stage forces us to imagine the place with many rooms and windows on the upper floor with a view of the lake and a high tower where the governess first sees the ghostly figure of a man on the parapet. Gabielle’s portrayal of the governess is complex, as she seems at first a beguiling ingenue and later an unreliable narrator, who may be sexually repressed and prone to imagining things like ghosts. Are we to believe that she is sane, or has she slipped into madness? Miles never speaks of the reason for his expulsion from the boarding school, and the governess is hesitant to raise the issue. She fears there is some horrible secret behind the expulsion but is too charmed by the boy to want to press the issue. The charm of young Miles suggests that something unusual and unexplainable is happening with the governess that she finds Miles so interesting.
Soon after, around the grounds of the estate, the governess begins to see the figures of a man and woman whom she does not recognize. The figures come and go at will without being seen or challenged by other members of the household, and they seem to the governess to be supernatural. What exactly did the boy Miles know about that mysterious man Peter Quint? The governess learns from Mrs. Grose that her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and another employee, Peter Quint, had had a close relationship. Before their deaths, Jessel and Quint spent much of their time with Flora and Miles, and the governess becomes convinced that the two children are aware of the ghosts’ presence and influenced by them. Without permission, Flora leaves the house while Miles is playing music for the governess. The governess notices Flora’s absence and goes with Mrs. Grose in search of her. They find her on the shore of a nearby lake, and the governess is convinced that Flora has been talking to the ghost of Miss Jessel. The governess sees Miss Jessel and believes Flora sees her as well, but Mrs. Grose does not. Flora denies seeing Miss Jessel and begins to insist that she will not deal with the new governess any more.
In Henry James’ novella, the prologue is crucial to understanding what will be related later in journal form. The teller of the governess’s tale occurs at a Christmas Eve gathering. Douglas knew the governess, who had been his sister’s governess after her time at Bly, and may have been in love with her. He is the only one who has heard the tale, since the governess left him in charge of her manuscript after she died. Douglas does not share the written narrative until twenty years after the governess’ death not because it implicates the governess as a murderer, nor “Because the thing had been such a scare.” The story was kept a secret because most likely the governess was in love. This statement suggests the governess’ narrative is not a ghost story, but a love story, made beyond basic understanding because of the extraordinariness of romantic adult love for a child, as the tale will not reveal “in any literal vulgar way.”
The governess declares she had “the full repetition of what had already occurred. She [Mrs. Grose] saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that I had received.” In these lines, the governess thus becomes the literal embodiment of Peter Quint, an incident to exact to be accidental, in turn, revealing their inseparability, he as a figure of her. Furthermore, the governess also occupies Quint’s previous space as the one “in charge” at Bly. The governess’ hallucinations of Quint and Jessel reveal what the prologue directly says: This is indeed not a ghost story, for the ghosts do not seem to exist outside the space of the governess’ mind. Therefore, The Turn of the Screw seems rather to be a story about the governess’ literally undeclared love, which, much the governess herself, cannot be explicitly named.
The works of Henry James have generally proven difficult to dramatize, perhaps because the writing style of James is reflective of the challenging recesses of characters’ minds and the way that characters tend to hide more than they reveal. Of course, the stories of Henry James easily lend themselves to psychoanalytic readings because of the repressed sexual hysteria experienced by some of his characters. For some film viewers, recent adaptations of his masterpieces The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove seem flat despite the strong casting of actors. The Turn of the Screw has always been an intriguing exception to the rule. Notable adaptations of James’ seminal ghost story include an effective opera by Benjamin Britten and Jack Clayton’s 1961 film version with Deborah Kerr, The Innocents.
In writing “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), Henry James was influenced by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). Although the influence of the Gothic tradition in novels is apparent in Henry James’ novella, it is not necessarily a Gothic tale. James’ ghosts differ from those of traditional Gothic tales – frightening, often bound in chains – by appearing like their living selves. Author Stephen King described The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House (1959) as the only two great supernatural works of horror in a century. He argued that both contain “secrets best left untold and things left best unsaid,” calling that the basis of the horror genre.
This production of The Turn of the Screw is running about the Sierra Madre Playhouse July 14 through July 30. For tickets and more information, go to: www.SierraMadrePlayhouse.org or call 626.355.4318.
