Syracuse Stage’s season-opening ‘The Turn of the Screw’ well-staged, well-acted

Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaption of the Henry James novella stresses the psychological over the supernatural, and atmosphere over dramatic conflict

By David Feldman
http://cnycafemomus.com/David_Feldman.html

How fitting that Syracuse Stage begins its 39th season by returning to the place where it was born, so to speak.  In 1974 the company welcomed its first audience with a stunning production of Waiting for Lefty.  The show’s director then was the company’s founding Producing Artistic Director, Arthur Storch.  The venue was the very same Experimental Theatre, now named for Storch, where current Producing Artistic Director Timothy Bond introduced the new season’s first offering, itself a stunning production of The Turn of the Screw, on a reconfigured stage.

The Storch has always been the more intimate of the two theatres in the Syracuse Stage/Drama Department complex, but it never was experimental by any definition of the word.  Up to now the Storch has been fairly conventional, with the audience space spread wide and facing the broad stage head on.  Genuinely experimental or not, there’s always been an intimacy about the theatre: The audience was close up to the action and performers couldn’t help but be aware of audience response to what they were doing.  Not so at the Archbold Theatre, home to Syracuse Stage now for decades.  It’s thoroughly conventional.  The hall is a deep rectangle with the seats going back, and back, and back some more, and then up to the balcony.  The audience faces a relatively narrow proscenium-style stage way down past the front rows. 

The newly reconfigured Storch retains the old horizontal seating but adds 75 seats both to the left and to the right of the stage, creating a thrust performance space with the audience seated three-quarters around it.  Still intimate, but 150 more seats.  And the stage itself has been lowered to floor-level.

The new arrangement is ideal for this Jeffrey Hatcher adaption of the Henry James novella.  Hatcher has turned the gothic, multi-character novella into a two-person stage piece.  And director Michael Barakiva takes every advantage of what the rearranged theatre has to offer.  

Shoko Kambara’s open, angled set has almost no scenery.  There’s one chair.  There’s a chandelier hanging over the front of the stage.  And there’s a three-frame window at the rear.  Everything else comes to us through costumes, lighting, sound and two performers ― one playing three different roles without ever changing costume.  These are tour de force performances by Kristen Sieh as the romantically inclined but sexually innocent governess who comes to a rambling old English estate, and by Curzon Dobell in the three roles.  

The First Dobell is the estate owner who never visits his property and who hires the governess to go there and take charge of his young niece and nephew (but never to bother him with what’s going on there).  Then, without change in costume, Dobell becomes the housekeeper who knows about the terrible past of two former servants in the place and how their erotic relationship had affected the two young children.  And Dobell plays the 10-year-old boy who arrives back at the estate after having been thrown out school for being "bad" in what seems to be unspeakable ways.  Oh . . . and he also is responsible for sound effects of creaking floors and muffled footsteps, and more.

The ambiguous undercurrent that propels the action centers on the question of whether these are really ghosts of the former governess and her lover, both of whom died rather gruesome deaths.  Do the children really see them?  Does The Governess?  Or are these apparitions simply manifestations of the sexually repressed governess ― or of the too-sexually-aware young children?  And what happened that caused the younger, a girl, to be unable to speak a word?

And will I answer any of these questions?  Of course not.  Not because I wouldn't want to give away the ending, but because beyond the standard ghost story touches of gothic setting ― innocent children put in danger (or is it not-so-innocent children putting others in danger?), creaking floors and gloomy lighting with variations of light and dark (terrific work by lighting designer Thomas C. Hase) ― there’s really not a lot in the script to send a chill up the spine or make anybody but those on stage cry out in fear of what will happen next.  Things are more psychological than supernatural here.

Barakiva makes wonderful use of set and stage, as actors pace the edges of the stage as if they were balancing on the edges of sanity.  They also talk to each other, to themselves and directly to us, and often address ghostly apparitions that may or may not be real.  These are not the kinds of things that would have worked well on the Archbold stage. Hatcher’s is a script that stresses language over plot, atmosphere over dramatic conflict. It doesn’t fully succeed in turning turn fiction into theater, though.

The script does however provide lots of opportunities for the two performers to do fine work.  Sieh is perky, piquant and sprightly ― her actions never entirely disguising her sexuality or the fact that she was romantically taken by the seductive estate owner.  For his part, Dobell uses the slightest changes in mannerism and tone to change himself from the uncle of the two children into the housekeeper.  Dobell simply sits, spreads the tails of his jacket over his knees and folds them across his lap, until it becomes a skirt that quite properly covers the housekeeper’s knees.  Then, in another effective change, he becomes a not-so-innocent 10-year-old boy.

Suzanne Chesney’s rich and elegant costumes not only seem correct for the period, but their grayish tones reinforce the fact that there is nothing either black or white, easily true or false, going on here.

The production is more atmospheric than dramatic, but it is replete with tour de force performances, enough hint of the supernatural to make us wonder what is false or terrifyingly true, plus enormously effective staging.  Call it less scary than a feast for the senses.

For its next production Syracuse Stage returns to the Archbold Theatre with The Boys Next Door while the Drama Department moves back into the Storch after using the Archbold for its production (opening Friday) of Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 The Cradle Will Rock, about unions and wicked industrialists.  

Details Box:
What: The Turn of the Screw, adapted from the Henry James novel by Jeffrey Hatcher, performed by Syracuse Stage.
Where: The Storch Theatre, 820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse.
When: Through October 16.
Length:  1 hour and 15 minutes, without intermission.
Tickets:  Adults, $28 to $50; 40 and under, $28; 18 and under, $18; student rush, $20 - 25 general public and 18 for students, subject to availability.  Call 315-443-3275, or www.SyracuseStage.org. 
Family guide:  Some adult themes and actions.