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http://www.omniture.com --> Sections Home Page Local News AP News Archives Business Classifieds Event Calendar Forums Life Opinion Obituaries Photo Gallery Readers Photo Gallery Sports Tempo Weather Special Coverage 2006 Britt Festivals --> Shop Our Valley AutoFinder HomeFinder JobFinder Search Our Valley Special Sections Homelife Magazine Joy Magazine Readers Choice 2006 Oregon Golf Info Oregon Wine Info Our Valley Other Publications Local Links Ashland News eSouthernOregon Newspapers In Education Personals Moving Here Movie Listings TV Listings Volunteer Customer Service Advertise With Us Media Kit Place Classified Ad Contact Us FAQ's Home Delivery Site Map --> Email Story to a Friend August 1, 2006 OSF play is not your father's Jekyll and Hyde When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" in 1885, Sigmund Freud was an unknown young neurologist, and the notion of an inner life pulsing beneath the level of waking consciousness was a blip on the horizon. Nearly a century later the English novelist John Fowles would call "Jekyll," with its dark repression and contorted sexuality, the truest picture of Victorian life. Like other British playwrights of the generation that came of age in the 1970s, David Edgar saw parallels between his flawed world and that of the Victorians, including moral hypocrisy, a sense of lassitude, persistent homelessness, immigration controversies, a large underclass thought to be beyond help, random killers on the streets, fears among the privileged of class and sex warfare and more. It comes as no surprise that Edgar's adaptation of Stevenson's novella, which opened Saturday night on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Angus Bowmer stage, directed by the OSF's Penny Metropulos, is not your father's "Jekyll and Hyde." Yet although it is a conscious updating, it is more engaged with the spirit of the original story than was the 1931 Rouben Mamoulian film and the inferior 1941 re-make, each of which was locked into the horror movie genre. Those films are the source of most people's knowledge of the story. Even if this production had no other virtues-- and other virtues it has, including the brisk direction by Metropulos — it would be worth seeing on two counts: James Newcomb's powerful performance as the doctor and his demented doppelgänger, and William Bloodgood's breathtaking set. Dr. E. Henry Jekyll (Newcomb) is a respected gentleman living in privileged bachelorhood in London, cared for by his faithful manservant Poole (Robert Sicular) and given to tsk-tsking over the social problems of the day with his friends Utterson (Richard Farrell) and Lanyon (David Kelly). The changes between Jekyll's study and the streets of London are accomplished by rotating the stage, causing Bloodgood's brooding, large-scale creations, built by Bruce Jennings and his crew, to appear and disappear with something like the weird energy of the changing cityscape of Alex Proyas' nightmarish town in the 1998 film "Dark City." This Jekyll has a sister, Katherine (Vilma Silva), from whom he acquires his father's notebooks, which outline his experiments to separate a lower, beastly self from the higher, civilized, social self. When Jekyll (here pronounced to rhyme with "heckle") resumes the experiments, the game's afoot. This Jekyll has no Miriam, his film fiancee, and there is no Ivy for his Hyde, as in the movies. Katherine, in addition to providing the notebooks, presents us with a picture of family life (she has two lively children) that contrasts with Jekyll's sterile bachelorhood. In addition, she carries a dark secret from the siblings' childhood that when it comes, seems to have prefigured what was to come. Neither Katherine nor Miriam nor Ivy is found in Stevenson's story. Nor is Annie Loder (Laura Morache), a serving maid who leaves Katherine's household to work for Jekyll, and who is the only character other than Jekyll with much of an arc. Newcomb plays Jekyll as a man who has lost his center. It is a fine picture of a man repressing something dark and scary. Newcomb gives him the cloying earnestness of an aging nerd, going so far as to endow him with a geezer's shuffling gait although Jekyll is only 50. No makeup is used in the transition (it's a psychological portrait, after all, not a monster show), and Newcomb doesn't need it. In Edgar's first version of the play in 1991, Jekyll and Hyde were portrayed by two actors. Scrapping that idea restored a great role to the stage. Newcomb-as-Hyde emerges like some primordial force bursting loose. He bounds around the stage venting his animal energy in chilling peals of pinched laughter. There is one scene with sex and one with violence, and each is central to the story. Hyde's rape of Annie is emblematic both of Jekyll's repressed urges and of Victorian treatment of women at a time when the age of consent was 13, and an estimated 100,000 prostitutes were working in London. Likewise, Hyde's brutal attack on Carew (David Kelly) is not simply Jekyll's repressed violence but an act of social insurrection against a social elite. Much of this is Edgar's extended meditation on the world of a privileged class of which Stevenson himself was a member, a class of men who all too frequently abused young women and cast them aside. But the more enduring impression is that of Jekyll as a void, a hollow man. Through a socially sanctioned pattern of denial and repression, he has become, no less than Hyde, a monster. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] . 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