The Turn of the Screw is essentially still a narrative, as the frame of Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of Henry James’s Gothic mystery indicates. Although the story is acted out in scenes occurring mainly over six days, there’s little actual drama. A readers or chamber theater production would beg the audience primarily to use imagination, whereas this version draws attention to how clever the actors are—or not. A narrator (The Man, Brian Owen) says how he was inspired to tell what he had learned from a sister who knew about a governess. He does so describing in six episodes what takes place in 1872 at a grand English country estate. A new governess (Deanna Wright’s The Woman) arrives after hire by its owner (Owen, a Victorian gentleman), who is fobbing his two charges, who “take up all the time,” off into her charge. He specifies no further contact with her, though he’s made a lasting impression. As the boy Miles, unwanted at school, arrives home almost simultaneously with the governess, he tries to ingratiate himself with her. Brian Owen’s toughest job is being the young Miles, as Owen is significantly older and quite large. He maintains well this identity—especially when Miles is overwrought—and others throughout, though he is most realistically believable as housekeeper Mrs. Grose. Soon the governess begins to see ghostly figures that she’ll i.d. as her predecessor Miss Jessip, who died by drowning, and Peter Quince, the worker, with whom she “did things” in which she involved Miles and his deaf/mute sister Flora. Flora appears only via her description by the others. It is notably weakly done by Deanna Wright (as the governess); she is unable to summon power in her speaking or emotional output and shows little learning from her near-brilliant stint as Shakespeare’s Beatrice last spring. I never felt any of the terror supposedly induced by the play. I missed Benjamin Britten’s operatic score and its libretto. I recalled a film and a TV show I preferred. Maybe the plot gets less interest in Hatcher’s pseudo-dramatic version, though I think it still makes one wonder if the ghosts are real or the product of the governess’s overwrought imagination or even sexual repression. Steven Kemp’s set follows the original descriptions: a closed-in room with a half-ascending stairway and a Victorian chair, here embellished with a stool that gets a clever work-out in several spots. Much depends on lighting, and Michael Pasquini’s design comes through, even sometimes with great darkened colorings. David Covach’s costumes are serviceable, but Wright is obviously wigged. Chris Clavelli’s direction basically keeps the characters from bumping into each other with no purpose. He uses a staircase with little effect. He has probably helped Owen achieve quick transformations of characters, which are the best reason to see this production.
