Now comes the latest version for the stage, written by Jeffrey Hatcher and directed by David Ira Goldstein as a joint production of Arizona Theatre Company and San Jose Repertory Theater. Goldstein, artistic director for Arizona Theatre Company, conceived the idea as one-third of what he calls his “Victorian monster trilogy.”
“The three great Victorian monsters are Dracula, Jekyll/Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes – though Holmes is a monster of intellect, not a real monster,” Goldstein says.
“I feel that those three Victorian characters still resonate with us today.”
After a successful Sherlock Holmes adaptation two years ago, Goldstein decided it was time to grapple the tricky business of re-exploring good and evil.
“We did Sherlock Holmes in a fairly conventional interpretation. I wanted something different for Jekyll and Hyde.”
Goldstein turned to playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, a frequent collaborator who has scripted numerous projects for ATC, including Ella, last season’s take on the life and music of Ella Fitzgerald.
“When I mentioned Jekyll and Hyde to Jeffrey, his eyebrow went up,” Goldstein recalls.
“He said he’d always wanted to do the book for the stage.”
Goldstein envisioned what he calls a “Rashomon” version of the tale, referring to the famous film by Akira Kurosawa in which the same story is told from a number of perspectives, each of them contradicting aspects of the others. Hatcher deviated somewhat from that expectation, coming up instead with a script that drapes the certainty of “good vs. evil” in serious doubt.
“It didn’t turn out quite as I originally thought it would be, and that’s great, because you want the writer to bring his own view to the project. I’d say that, in the novella, one character wears the white hat, and the other one wears the black hat. In Jeffrey’s version we question whether Dr. Jekyll is really the good guy, and whether Mr. Hyde is really the villain.”
Hatcher’s script explodes the narrow story of one man’s split personality into a tale all about all of us. The playwright observes:
“Whenever you see a tabloid story about ‘Happy healthy father of five kills entire family and self,’ there’s always a group of people who say, ‘He was the nicest man in the world. I can’t imagine why he did this. Then there’s another group of people who say, ‘Anybody can crack, and when you crack something, what’s underneath comes out.’
“We’re dotted with Jekylls and Hydes all over the place.”
Hatcher, who has written both original plays and adaptations, says that adaptations are difficult because the sources come packed with preconceptions.
“It’s the expectations the audience has. Most people have an idea of what a Jekyll/Hyde persona is. It’s a matter of what you want to give them that’s expected, and what you want to give them that’s unexpected and surprising. You do a bit of a balancing act between those two,” Hatcher says.
The biggest surprise for many will be the respective natures of the title characters. Hatcher continues:
“It’s hard for me to believe there’s any such thing as a completely good person or a completely bad person. So we’ve shuffled the deck in terms of what Hyde does. There is a degree of ambiguity and complexity in those two characters who, after all, are part of the same thing.”
The Victorians may have had difficulty coming to grips with that last notion. The unsavory feel attached to the idea that good and evil could mix ambiguously in the same person drove the notion of the “doppelganger,” or ghostly double, a phenomenon, Goldstein points out, that obsessed the 19th century. The Romantic poet Shelley claimed to have seen his doppelganger shortly before he drowned, and in one famous mid-19th century incident, a French schoolteacher was followed around by her doppelganger – in full view of her students.
The idea remains in our culture, Goldstein adds, albeit in less spectacular form:
“The idea of the doppelganger is still with us, whether you’re talking about someone’s darker side, or having two sides to your character, or hypocrisy, or the hidden self versus the public self.”
People who know Jekyll and Hyde primarily through screen adaptations may think of the story as violent. In fact, Stevenson’s book describes only one act of violence – the trampling of a girl in the street -- leaving it to the reader to imagine other crimes Hyde might commit.
Goldstein and Hatcher both know that wouldn’t work in the theater.
“Some of the events in Jeffrey’s script are quite brutal,” Goldstein warns. “In a play, you have to put these things onstage. This is not a version for little kids. High school up, only.”
Hatcher sees Hyde’s acts as, in part, an expression of the era’s sexual repression.
“People always talk about the terrible things Hyde does in the middle of the night, every sort of depravity you can imagine. But Stevenson is never specific about these things. It’s impossible to imagine that these nighttime sojourns wouldn’t have something to do with sex. In fact, given Victorian attitudes, you would assume sex is at the top of the list.”
Stevenson’s novella has no major female characters, so Hatcher and Goldstein put one in “to see how that affects Hyde’s warped desires,” says the playwright, adding, “and a couple of his more romantic ones, too.”
All the actors in the production will play numerous roles, and each of the males will dress the same; a coat here or a hat there will be added to differentiate characters from each other. A red door is at the center of Hatcher’s scene descriptions. It moves from place to place onstage, becoming different doors the way the actors become different characters – and yet it is always the same, metaphorical door.
“A closed door is one of the sexiest things in this world,” says Hatcher, “because a closed door is something behind which secret things happen.”
Is Jekyll the closed door and Hyde the secret, hidden (as in “Hyde-in’) events? Perhaps. But such a direct metaphor is not enough to cover what Hatcher and Goldstein are after.
In the single greatest departure from standard dramatic adaptations of the story, each one of the small cast of actors, in addition to playing multiple characters, will at some point in the play portray Mr. Hyde. Hatcher explains:
“It’s always exciting when an audience sees a small company of actors playing numerous roles. It shows just how protean an actor can be. Also, we tend to think of Jekyll and Hyde as bifurcated – the good and the bad, the dark and the light. But in fact there are gradations of good and bad, just as there are gradations of inebriation or of drug use.
“Doesn’t it make sense, then, that sometimes Jekyll would swallow the tincture and come up with a vile version of Hyde, and other times he would swallow it and come up with a more silky version, or a more seductive version, or a more pathetic one? To clearly and cleanly and theatrically get that idea across, the best thing to do is have a number of different actors play all those different Hydes.”
To move audiences effectively around London from scene to scene, yet provide a single perspective, the set will be a unit construction that makes it appear everything is happening within the confines of an operating theater.
Everything in the production has been crafted to lend aspects of ambiguity, subjective judgment and mystery to a story some versions have conveyed as simply cut and dried. Goldstein summarizes:
“If there’s one thing I believe will strike audiences about this play, it’s that there’s a little bit of Jekyll and Hyde in all of us.”
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