An odd dynamic sparks when a book dramatized as a play—therefore open to detailed visualization—still requires audiences to apply their imaginations to it as they would a book.
The two-performer, multi-character Turn of the Screw, a tricky Halloween treat to pull off, is one such oddity. Interestingly executed by stars Katrina Larsen and Drew W. Yonemori, under T.J. Larsen's careful direction at Las Vegas Little Theatre, this is a stage adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher of Henry James' dark, psychodrama novella about a spooked governess in Victorian England.
With its spare style and minimalist approach in LVLT's cozy, secondary Fischer Blackbox Theatre, this is a work that knows psychological terror is about intellectual intimacy that insinuates dread with each and every theatergoer—when what's on stage demands you meet it halfway, pushing the human mind to color in the story with a richness no elaborate production could evoke.
The economy of staging (but maximizing of atmosphere) extends to the set (a wooden chair and table), costuming (both performers all in black with white trim), lighting (intimations of sunlight and foreboding shadow) and sound effects (owls, creaking doors, whistling wind, a clock's chimes, made by Yonemori).
Director Larsen even deploys pre-play head games, having actress Larsen, as the piece's severe-looking governess, seated on stage (well, less a stage than a floor, surrounded on four sides by chairs) as we enter; she gazes straight ahead, occasionally turning to eye the incoming crowd. Though an often annoying, pretentious tactic, leaving both performer and patrons squirming, here it works for precisely that reason: It lends the coming creep-show a peep-show discomfort, an effective mood-setter, and also gives the play the sense of being a living thing the moment you walk in.
Screw scares up the story of a governess who might be up against two ghostly spirits—or the demons of her mind—while caring for an orphaned brother and sister at Bly Mansion, a country estate in Essex in 1872. The versatile Yonemori, in a capacity asking our sizable suspension of disbelief, is the remainder of the cast: the narrator; the mysterious "master" and children's uncle who seduces the giddy, inexperienced governess into the job; sweet housekeeper Mrs Grose; and 10-year-old brother Miles (his 8-year-old sister, Flora, is unseen).
Though initially enchanted by her charges, Larsen's increasingly jittery governess journeys from bewildered and suspicious to frightened and convinced that Flora and Miles are possessed by the dead ex-governess, Miss Jessell, and her lover, the master's onetime valet, Peter Quint. She's determined to rescue them from their spectral captors, but by Screw's final face-off between her and the boy (or, she's sure, Quint), the rescuer may be more in need of rescuing.
Hatcher trims James' tale, the intermission-less 90 minutes attempting to build psychological momentum, but it overshoots its dramatic crescendo by going on a bit too long, mild lethargy dragging it down to a nearly anti-climactic climax. And unexpected humor is a distracting end run around the play's dark impulses.
In this intimate setting, it's difficult for actors to cheat on their performances, and Larsen and Yonemori never do. Larsen, a reliably riveting stage presence, brings authenticity to the sort of Victorian-era, stiff-Brit role that could easily lapse into caricature. Blending warmth with the children (even using only gestures to the unseen Flora), formality with the master and snappish neuroses as her sense of normalcy unravels, she convincingly walks at the water's edge of madness.
Yonemori's slim frame and unimposing physicality perfectly allow him to duck into and out of characters, even genders, from the master's insidious seductiveness to Miles' bashfulness (with hints of concealed evil) to, most charmingly, Mrs. Grose's kindly concern, which Yonemori invests with an accent faintly echoing Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire.
One actor playing multiple parts deepens the play's otherworldliness in that he's something of a ghost himself, inhabiting numerous bodies. Director T.J. Larsen smartly has Yonemori pace the sidelines when the action shifts to the governess, so we're always aware these characters are there—they/he hover over the production like stubborn, immovable spirits. Also, the show is intelligently blocked so no one on any of the audience sides should feel they're literally getting an actor's cold shoulder.
The Turn of the Screw transforms a traditionally passive experience into an intriguing mental exercise between actor and audience:
Performers on a stage engaging the theater in your mind.