West Edge Opera: The Turn of the Screw

The West Edge Opera Festival is in full swing; as I did last year, I will be seeing each show twice, as I volunteer at the Saturday matinees & am a ticket holder for the Sunday matinees. I have now seen my two performances of Britten's The Turn of the Screw, based on the famous ghost story by Henry James as adapted by librettist Myfanwy Piper. Company music director Jonathan Khuner led a strong performance, with committed, exciting singing from the cast: Laura Bohn as the Governess, Alex Boyer as Peter Quint, Erin Neff as Mrs Grose, Aléxa Sessler as Miss Jessel; James Coniglio & Noah Hajduk alternate as Miles, & Siena Coniglio & Roya Agarwal as Flora (I saw both sets of children). Company head Mark Streshinsky directed a provocative but sometimes puzzling staging.

Plentiful use is made of projections & scrims. I know some people who are immediately put off by scrims on stage, but I am fine with them, especially for a work like this, in which they act as a physical representation of the haziness, the out-spreading ambiguities, of the story & the layers of memory & interpretation or misinterpretation through which that story unfolds. They also provide a useful screen for the plentiful projections, through which this production tells much of its tale; the ghosts, for example, are always projections, never appearing physically on stage until they take their bows. Those singers are sequestered in a discreet curtained booth way up in the auditorium & off to the side; I probably would not have noticed it but someone pointed it out to me & told me what it was. (There is enough weirdness in the Scottish Rite Temple so that this particular oddity didn't stand out.) The physical dislocation between the projected figures on stage & the sound of their voices helps create an otherworldly air about them (this is true also of the amplification of the children's singing, which lends, as amplification usually does, an odd, slightly flattened effect to their voices).

Some of what is shown on film, though, falls under the "puzzling" category I mentioned earlier. When the Governess meets the handsome, romantic guardian of the two children, with his somewhat odd injunction that whatever happens, she, a young & inexperienced woman, must deal with it on her own, without contacting him, the two of them are shown on the scrims in passionate physical embraces. The Governess looks disheveled & a bit distraught. This seems to be something that we are meant to understand is actually happening & not just a (literal as well as metaphorical) projection of the Governess's fantasies about this mysterious figure (he is literally masked, wearing a carnival black mask, which presumably also is meant to differentiate him from Peter Quint, as the same singer performs both roles). When I see moments like this, which I do fairly often in contemporary stagings of works from different, less accommodating times, I wonder if anyone these days knows what "sexual repression" really means. It doesn't mean being a bit discombobulated by a brief & unsatisfying affair; it means that even the notion of such a thing, when it inevitably starts creeping into the susceptible mind, is hurried out of sight, pushed down out of conscious thought, into the murky depths of longing that act as the hidden springs of our outward actions. This story is one that springs in that way from repression. I don't understand what is gained by making the Governess's barely acknowledged desires, or even just her romantic feelings towards the guardian, into actual physical embraces. It seems too crudely obvious.

We are also shown several times footage of Miles at school. He is cowering near a sink, obviously in a bathroom, being pelted by unseen but presumably fellow-student hands with wadded balls of paper. Miles has, of course, been expelled from school, for reasons that are never officially explained. In classic horror-story style, this allows our imaginations to float free, though they mostly head in the direction of some sort of sexual corruption. The footage here, as with that of the Governess & the guardian, is too explicit & also too trivial: this is the sort of thing that gets the perpetrators a stern talking-to, not expulsion. And it looks as if Miles is the victim, so why would he be expelled? I am assuming the boy we are shown is meant to be Miles; we are not shown his face, which he clutches in his hands, because of course we have two separate Miles (Mileses?) performing. It's not impossible that the unseen Miles is meant to be leading the victimization of another boy, but, again, what happens doesn't seem to warrant expulsion. The scene, whether Miles is victim (as I think he's meant to be) or perp, goes against everything we are told about him: that he is a boy who is very popular with other children & adored by adults. And if he were being bullied & ostracized in school, why would he be so eager to go back? Spelling things out is the enemy of a haunted atmosphere.

There are also many projections of the still-living Quint & Jessel in their time with the children. These are literally sunny & quite wholesome: Quint playing catch with Miles (using an American baseball glove, rather surprisingly), sitting with the children in church, teaching them to play the piano, gently touching the swollen middle of an apparently pregnant Miss Jessel. In many of these scenes, Quint is wearing a light tan sweater vest. No man can look insidious, corrupt & corrupting, in a sweater vest. This is simply a fact. I may not know much about fashion, but I know that.

During my second viewing of the production, it occurred to me that perhaps this was a deliberate move, a signal to us: Quint & Jessel are actually not, & were not while living, corrupting influences; they were, instead, positive role models of a healthy sexuality. I think what we have here are essentially two separate sets of ghosts: the wholesome ones &, later on, dressed in serving-man attire & more luridly lit, the evil influences of the Governess's fevered imagination.

I had to parse this out after seeing the show twice & reading the director's note in the program & thinking between my two performances about the implications of what we are shown. Some elements I haven't mentioned yet went into this, so I'll spell them out now. The Governess (who throughout wears a sort of odd ensemble of plaid skirt & white blouse, like an overaged Catholic schoolgirl back when such girls wore school uniforms) is disturbed by her encounter with the guardian. When she arrives at the lush estate of Bly, the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, who is apparently intended as a sort of Mrs Danvers figure, kisses her ("with your permission") full on the lips. This triggers the already emotionally vulnerable Governess, who picks up on Mrs Grose intense disgust at the former & now dead valet, Quint, & his relations with the former governess Miss Jessel. The Governess then projects her sense of sexual danger & corruption onto these two, hallucinating their appearance as ghosts who are still capable of corrupting Miles & Flora; in the later scenes, when this more threatening Quint appears, we see the Governess off to the side, mirroring his actions in a herky-jerky way (but which is the marionette & which the puppet master?). The Governess determines to protect the children, with increasing hysteria (yes, I know the origin of the word) & dire results.

At least, I think that's what we're supposed to see here. Questions are raised & there are no definite answers, which I suppose is only suitable for a work rooted in a story by Henry James.

I re-read the tale before going to the opera. It is, as any English major can tell you, a celebrated example of the potential ambiguities of a first-person narration: are the ghosts real, or are they a projection of a lonely, repressed young woman? (No other adult actually sees them, & we only have the Governess's word for it that the children do.) It occurred to me this time that there is a third way: the ghosts are indeed a corrupting influence, but what the Governess sees as the corruption of the Innocent is what Blake would have termed Innocence turning into Experience (in this light, Quint's longing appeal to Miles, comparing himself to a wild horse on the shore, is particularly telling). In other words, given what is usually read as the sexual nature of the ghosts' influence, the Governess is trying to keep them artificially innocent, out of adulthood, confined forever in the stylized innocence of the children's folk rhymes that form an important part of the score. The Governess actually succeeds in her aim, but with tragic results. This move from innocence into an adult consciousness expanded by the knowledge of how vicious people can be is certainly one of James's great themes; The Ambassadors & The Golden Bowl & The Wings of the Dove, that massive trio from late in his career, explore this theme with ever-expanding subtlety. How can the good not only remain good but become better exactly through confronting the evils of others?

The idea of Mrs Grose as a repressed lesbian is definitely not in James, but that's OK. It struck me as an intriguing possibility. In the novel, Mrs Grose, as her name indicates, is a sort of salt-of-the-earth, good-hearted but not particularly imaginative woman ("gross" in the sense of solid & not refined, not in the sense of "ooh, icky!"). She functions as the "normal" person who is mostly willing to go along with an educated young woman like the Governess. Interpreting her as a further turn of the Governess's screw ratchets up the general sense of perversity, which certainly works for this opera, but it also removes any sense of a "normal" world, outside of what we see of the living Quint & Jessel.

When I saw this production the first time, I felt the kiss came out of the blue & went nowhere. I did notice in my second viewing that there is a scene when Mrs Grose tentatively & briefly strokes the Governess's hair, but that still isn't a lot. The key mechanism here – the transference of Mrs Grose's obsessions to the Governess – did not occur to me until I read the director's note ("When the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, who has her own problems of obsession, expresses to the highly suggestible Governess her deep-seated anger toward the memory of the late valet, Peter Quint, we are launched into a perfect storm of psychosis."). I'm pretty sure I would not have picked this up from staging alone. I'm not wild about the Hitchcockian notion of the insidious lesbian, but I can see the possibilities here. (But if it's Mrs Grose's lesbian attraction that rouses the Governess, why is the latter so fixated on Miles & not on Flora?)

Perhaps we are meant to understand the source of the problem not as Mrs Grose's sexuality, but her repression. But "repression" doesn't really come across here. It's inherent in the original material, just because of when it's set. And it is very unclear when this production is meant to take place. I asked a number of people what they thought, & pick a decade from 1890 to the present day & someone suggested it, but no two people listed the same one. I think this matters because ideas of sexual corruption & therefore what should be repressed & therefore whether repression is "good" or "bad" have varied wildly over those years. Miss Jessel's out-of-wedlock pregnancy, as shown here, would be a life-destroying tragedy in one decade & a lovely occasion for a congratulatory party in another. There is no single standard. One thing that has not changed is horror at pedophilia, but honestly I never felt in this production that the ghosts posed any kind of sexual threat to the children; as I said, they seemed to be the only healthy role models they had. (I should mention that some people at the same performance disagreed with me about this.)

There are occasional hints of sexual confusion, or perhaps just gender play: when the children are introduced to the Governess, Flora bows & Miles gives a dainty curtsy, but this seems more like mischievous fun than any sort of "corruption". The libretto uses words that would have carried a subtextual weight when the opera premiered in 1954, a subtext which now comes across more as text: gay, which is used to describe the guardian (making his making-out with the Governess either more or less effective, depending on your point of view) & queer. What do those words mean in the context of whenever this production is set?

The lack of an identifiable time period also reduces the way class differences play out among the characters; again, in some decades the class distinctions are vital & in others not so much. One reason Mrs Grose defers to the Governess is the latter's higher class, & one reason she disapproves of Quint is that he aimed above his station: she asserts that Miss Jessel was a lady & therefore too good for him, but this sort of proto-D H Lawrence theme doesn't really come through here.

The Turn of the Screw is inherently a work (whether original tale or operatic adaptation) of radiating ambiguities. There were several points when I felt this production offered not ambiguity but confusion. I have seen the opera before, heard recordings, read the original story & other works by Henry James (not just in college but recently), read the program notes, & saw the West Edge production twice, & it was still sometimes unclear to me what we were supposed to be seeing, And I wonder how many others will see the opera twice, or have the other background I have just listed. I will speculate that this is a case in which the artists involved were so immersed in the material that what was crystalline to them is murky to those less immersed. But I'm not sure the oddities & confusions are altogether a bad thing. I have pondered this production far more thoroughly than I have more superficially pleasing shows; it led me down previously unexplored paths I would have otherwise missed.

When I started telling myself something in the staging was "wrong" I started wondering why I found it so, exploring different implications & suggestions, & I (mostly) ended up thinking that what I saw was not "wrong" so much as an alternative that I needed to consider. If some things don't quite fit in, & some things seem too obvious & others too vague, if  some confusion & uncertainty remain, that's not really unsuitable to a story like this. This is after all a ghost story, & wondering where the solid ground is & what just happened seem like the essence of a haunting.