On occasion, Henry James would turn out disheartening stage renditions of his best-know fictions. So it was that Daisy Miller - a charming and well-wrought character study - was recast as an obvious and obnoxious melodrama around 1882. Fortunately, James's other great novella, The Turn of the Screw, was completed over a decade after this particular flirtation with the theater. It would thus be spared similar treatment until the mid-1990s, when American playwright Jeffrey Hatcher penned a two-actor adaptation of James's artful, engrossing and none-too-adaptable ghost tale.
Beyond a few nicely controlled opening scenes, Hatcher has laid into his source with exactly the wrong combination of fidelity and experimentation. No amount of formal finesse can rescue veteran director Donald Hicken's recent staging of Hatcher's script.
Where James kept his material's sexual undercurrents tantalizingly submerged, this Turn of the Screw dredges up all the carnality it can. Unlike James's ornate prose, the Everyman's latest is completely approachable. And unlike the great novelist, Hatcher never even comes close to brilliance.
Most of the drama's action takes place at a country estate, where a na've young governess (Megan Anderson) has been sent to care for the niece and nephew of an egocentric gentleman (Bruce R. Nelson). These children, Miles (Nelson again) and Flora (invisible), seem normal at first. But the grounds have a troubled past, and the governess soon comes to believe that the ghosts of two former residents are trying to corrupt her charges.
With the help of an aging housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (more Nelson), she sets out to save the pair from perdition. All this is accompanied by a chain of unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, questions: Are the ghosts real? What is the specific nature of the evil that menaces Miles and Flora? Would it really have killed the theater's budget to hire a few more actors?
While James's long tale relates a manuscript "in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand," Hatcher has organized his action as a series of diary entries. This efficiently structures Hicken's show. Then again, it also highlights the difficulty of channeling a work that quietly toys with its own written medium onto the stage. What we're left with would seem like little more than a recording session for a book-on-tape, were it not for Colin Bills's masterfully eerie lighting and James Fouchard's labyrinthine set.
Oddly enough, in terms of sheer technical design, this is among the strongest productions in the Everyman's recent history. Riffing smartly on the seemingly disparate traditions of gothic horror and psychological realism that fed the original Turn of the Screw, Fouchard's environment could be either a haunted mansion or a twining externalization of the governess's rattled nervous system.
Sheer virtuosity, though, is seldom enough. Anderson, for instance, can prove an exquisite actress, capable of soaking the stage with emotion using little more than a gasp or a smile. A script that relies so heavily on declamation is ill-fitted to her quiet talents.
Nelson's work leaves a sharper impression - due, in part, to its nagging hit-or-miss quality. His uncle is at once leering and commanding, and his Miles, though a little monotone, is rendered with a firm dose of understanding.
The same can't be said of his Mrs. Grose. James's novels are filled with sympathetic and completely clueless elderly folk, including the housekeeper. But Nelson frequently plays her with the perpetual snit that yielded outrageous comedy in 2006's The School for Scandal. Here, it reduces the simplistic woman to a dull piece of plot machinery, or at best, a down-to-earth foil for Anderson's romantic protagonist.
At least for Everyman regulars, there should be a wry irony behind all this. As of late - with highbrow offerings like Opus and Sight Unseen - the company has made a concerted and generally successful effort to court the local intelligentsia.
However, Hatcher's The Turn of the Screw is engineered to entrance a much more substantial demographic - namely, people unfamiliar with the original. Such viewers would focus primarily on the twists in James's suspenseful storyline. Indeed, such a storyline just might suffice to deflect attention from Hatcher's cumbersome style.
So where exactly does the whole affair break down? For a while, Hicken's show is simply beset by minor nuisances - impromptu bird calls, Nelson's hasty personality shifts and a central character played by a pocket of thin air. The same spirit of innovation for innovation's sake led Hatcher to slap on an epilogue (something that James's text wisely omits), which consists of a couple stuffy punch lines and a witless allusion to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
Yet this Turn of the Screw jumps the shark several scenes earlier. The most embarrassing touch occurs right before the climax, in a sequence that finds Mrs. Grose pretending to swim across the stage to rescue the imaginary Flora from a nonexistent lake as the governess yells away in the background. It would be enough to inspire James - or at any rate, his ghost - to storm out of the theater.
The Turn of the Screw will be at the Everyman Theatre until Feb. 24. Call (410) 752-2208 or visit http://www.everymantheatre.org for more information.
