Director's Note: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

by Scot Whitney

My introduction to Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was in the 4th grade. Monsters were big then, and Steve Buffington was the envy of the class. (Well, of the boys, anyway.) His mother let him stay up as late as he wanted, which resulted in a weekly campout on the couch on Saturday nights to watch Nightmare Theater! 

For my, this was a fantasy beyond imagination. I had to be in bed by 8:30. On Friday nights an exception was made so I could watch The Flintstones, but anything scary was strictly taboo. It seems that my older brother had been allowed to watch Invaders from Mars one night, which resulted in nightmares. Thus, the hammer came down. (I've never forgiven him. But don't tell him. He's sensitive.)

On Monday mornings, Steve had a rapt audience in Mrs. Miller's classroom as he detailed the outlandish horror he had witnessed first hand on his television screen. Mrs. Miller can attest to this. She's been a subscriber here for years and remembers well trying to pry the boys away from Steve Buffington's tales of terror.

Steve also had a complete collection of the Revell monster models, which he had assembled and painted beautifully. I can remember visiting his house and being transfixed by the graven images of Frankenstein, Dracula, the Creature, the Mummy, and yes, Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde! I felt as passionately about these monsters as I had about dinosaurs a few years earlier, and as I would about girls just a few months later. 

Imagine my disappointment when I finally saw the Frederic March film version as a teenager and discovered that it really wasn't a monster movie at all. What a let down. And I think that even at that age, I was frustrated by the simplistic "good & evil" aspect of Jekyll and Hyde. I already understood that the struggle in the mind was far more complex than that. 

In the 40 plus years since that first impression of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde,  I've seen numerous adaptations--both at the movies and in the theater--and have always experienced the same frustration: oversimplification = boring. I had, for all intents and purposes, written off the story as antiquated and of little interest.

Enter Jeffrey Hatcher. 

In January, 2009, actor Brian Claudio Smith tossed a play manuscript across a breakfast table and said, "You should read this." I asked him what it was, and he told me that it was a play he was auditioning for at ACT. "I think it'd be a great show for Harlequin. It's good. It's really good." I picked it up to glance through it and was hooked by page two.  

From it's initial moments, it is fiercely theatrical. It demands that everyone--director, actors, designers, technicians and audience--stretch their imaginations to bring its ferocious story to life. Gone is the black and white of absolute good and evil. Through the ingenious and unexpected device of providing a love interest, not for Jekyll, but for Hyde, Hatcher manages to smear the black and white together into a writhing, pulsating study in gray; a complex and gripping portrait of a man's desperate attempt to bring conflicting and extreme impulses into balance. Jekyll is a man of his Victorian age seeking his noble and best self while submerged in a secret world of long shadows and unsavory appetites. Hatcher's approach breaks the tale loose from it's morality-tale extremes and opens up its more complex ambiguities and ironic contradictions. 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to Robert Louis Stevenson in a dream and was written in a rush of inspiration. Jeffrey Hatcher's adaptation even more readily evokes the heightened experience of a fever dream with its terrors and sensual trances. He leads us, sprinting and stumbling, down a narrow alley through a man's soul, with only the memory of light to draw us forward. It's a chilling journey that reminds us that morality is found not in the triumph of good over evil, but in the distinctly human capacity to choose between the two... assuming he is able to distinguish one from the other.

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