An Interview on Adaptation

Melia Bensussen: Well, Jeffrey Hatcher, it’s a pleasure to see you. I’m so grateful for this adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Jeffrey Hatcher: You’re welcome. All for you, Melia.

MB: Yes. Well, we go way back, sir. Jeff, you originally wrote this adaptation 15 years ago, give or take. What inspired you to do this adaptation?

JH: Well, David Ira Goldstein, friend and former artistic director at Arizona Theatre asked me if I’d ever thought about adapting it. And once or twice over the last 40 years or so, I’ve thought, “Oh, what could I do with the Jekyll and Hyde story?”

A lot of adaptations of really well-known titles sometimes tend to be reactive – reactive not only to the original, but to all the other adaptations. You get used to the tropes and what all the other adapters have done. There are a couple of things that I didn’t want to do that many other adapters have done and done well. But I got very excited, thinking that I could pull off a few tricks that nobody else had.

 

 

MB: In your adaptation, what do you feel you are focused on thematically? Without giving spoilers!

JH: I don’t want to give away the fun because part of writing the piece was thinking it’ll be fun for the audience, fun for the actors and director!

There is a notion that when Dr. Jekyll takes the tincture, that he always becomes the same, Mr. Hyde – and I thought, when you take something that alters your consciousness, you are often different every time you take it, based on how much you take, or what you interact with (other drugs, etc.), based on your mood. There are different levels of inebriation, there are different ways that you can be stoned, or high, or what have you. And I thought, well, let’s look at Mr. Hyde in terms of variation and possibilities.

And the other was this notion that somehow if Mr. Hyde was so bad, Jekyll had to be so good. Even Stevenson in the original novella…

[Jeff takes out a copy of J&H]

MB: Let’s see the copy. It looks very much like a first edition. It looks very original.

 

 

JH: It’s 1886!

Even in the novella, Stevenson makes a reference to Jekyll as having had some darker or more complicated thoughts or instincts or inclinations when he was younger. So, I thought, rather than take the old fashioned view that Jekyll was great and Hyde was evil, now we take the view that Jekyll is a normal human being with mixes of good and bad, which means that, if we’re going for that negative, you know, like a photograph, if we’re going for that negative flash in Hyde, then Hyde is not going to be completely evil. There are going to be pieces of him that are, let’s call it, positive and that these things could shuffle during the course of the play.

MB: In reading Stevenson I realized how much Dr. Jekyll is struggling because he hates having to deal with his dark impulses. He’s trying to separate into this binary of good and evil. So that “good, Dr. Jekyll” doesn’t have to think about anything dark in his psyche. And I feel like Stevenson’s writing with a real sense of irony about how impossible that is to do.

JH: Oh yeah. In all these mad doctor stories (Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau) perfection is going to go awry. It’s an interesting view of science as seen by an artist. Because we believe in science these days (follow the science!) but we also know—RE: Robert Oppenheimer—that the science doesn’t always work out the way you’d like it to. You’ll get your results, but you’ll get more than that. So, I think Stevenson, if he were to twist it just slightly, it would be closer to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Because in a sense, both Dorian Gray and Jekyll and Hyde are stories of, middle class Englishmen, who go take a walk on the wild side. And the metaphor in Dorian Gray is, of course, homosexuality. But a lot of people would say that that’s the same thing in Jekyll and Hyde too. The things you couldn’t write about in the popular press or popular novels or plays, you find a metaphor. And in this case, it’s the drug and the other life.

MB: Right. And there’s something in both in your piece—in some of the language that you’ve crafted so wonderfully—but also in the Stevenson, that says Jekyll’s life was 90% effort. It’s really exhausting for Jekyll to be Jekyll! And there’s a freedom in not having to be Jekyll, which really links to, in a sense, why people turn to substances. It’s a sort of escape from the self, which we all long for in different ways, on some level.

JH: He’s a classic Victorian repressed character. He is suppressing emotions, suppressing behavior, and it’s what’s demanded of a man of his sort, a man of his class and position. He is a doctor at role. He’s not known for his bedside manner. I think we make it clear that Dr. Jekyll is a research clinician. He has a position that gives him a lot of moral authority. And moral authority is easily destroyed by one smear, smudge, scratch. And so, he spent his life trying to make sure none of that veneer cracks.

MB: So, where do Jekyll and Hyde fall on the spectrum of what we perceive as good?

JH: Well, that’s where the woman comes into it. But rather famously, I think in the novella, women are barely present.

MB: No women speak in the novella.

JH: No, there’s a maid who witnesses a murder.

MB: And faints!

JH: As I would, perhaps. I think women have the right idea about fainting. Just make sure that fainting couch is behind you.

I think it’s very interesting that the first adaptation to the stage of Jekyll and Hyde immediately introduced a female character, Jekyll’s fiancé. And for about the next hundred years, adapters have always stuck in a fiancé: a very nice, virginal, upper-class woman for Jekyll to be dating. And then there’s usually a prostitute, or a bar girl, or a singer who encounters Mr. Hyde. So, other adapters have, I think wisely, for commercial reasons, said, “Well, there’s got to be some romance to this!”

We have a woman in our version—Elizabeth—but we don’t have that virgin/whore dichotomy.

MB: Right, the good and the bad are embedded in each other, which is part of what is wonderful about this adaptation. You’re getting rid of all the binaries. It starts with this desire for a separation of good and evil, and then that human nature doesn’t allow that kind of separation.

A community member asked me if there was comic relief in this dark story. And I was able to attest to your sense of humor! I told her the story of how when you and I first worked on Turn of the Screw over 25 years ago, after our first preview, you looked at me somewhat distressed and said, “They missed all these jokes.” And I said, “But Jeff, we’ve set it up. It’s creepy.” And you said to me, and I never forgot it, and I really learned from it, “If they’re not laughing with us, they’re not with us.” And I’m really enjoying what you’ve planted into Jekyll and Hyde along those lines.

JH: I don’t know, a drama that doesn’t have a good few comedic moments. I mean, a really good production of Waiting for Godot or Death of a Salesman or No Man’s Land has a lot of laughs. King Lear has a lot of laughs. Some of it is basic, old-fashioned “let the audience release tension, let the audience know they have permission to laugh.” But it is also a way of aligning audiences with character.

MB: Yes! In rehearsals, we are so enjoying the humor in your adaptation and creating moments that align us with characters that, at first glance, you might not expect to connect with. There’s great wit in the piece. It’s also such a joy to work with you in real time, finding new moments of humor—and horror! Even though it’s a published play, you’re making changes to fit these actors and this thrust stage. It’s really a gift for us. We feel like we’re doing a new play because you Zoom in, you answer our questions, you’ll be visiting during technical rehearsals and preview performances. You’re really helping us make this play fit this theater at this time and with this cast.

JH: Well, I’m always open to changes on a play that’s been out there for a while. But usually, you don’t revisit a play that’s been out there for a long time. So, I figured why not revisit it? There’s always something that you’ll do.

MB: Thank you so much. This has really been a pleasure.