Also this issue:

Is There a Left Left?
Finding a place for liberalism in the new America.
-Sam Adams

Making the Video
Doug Aitken's work mixes film, art, social commentary and a dash of MTV.
-Robin Rice

More Than Words
-Sam Adams

Wares House
-Diane Eacret

History Lessons
-Elisa Ludwig

Sets and Lucia
-Steve Cohen

Carmen, and All the Rest!
-Howard Altman

Noir Gold
-David Anthony Fox

November 7-13, 2002

theater

Run and Hyde

by Toby Zinman

Rx: The Janus Drug.

•Description: invisible liquid. •Administration: injection with giant syringe, preferably by stabbing it into arm or leg from a great height.

Clinical pharmacology: radical systemic distortion of mind and body. Aberrant hair growth on hands. Symptoms depend entirely on audience's imagination, not actor's demonstration of same.

Adverse effects: murder, dismemberment, child trampling, rape, suicide.

Drug-drug interactions: do not take with laudanum.

Clinical studies: positive results on maze rat named Tiberius.

Dosage: five times every two hours of histrionics.

More potent than Viagra. Nastier than cocaine. This pharmaceutical wet dream, the Janus drug, is a concoction cooked up by Dr. Henry Jekyll that unleashes Mr. Hyde to make him feel alive. To feel hunger. To make him repeat these lines four thousand times. Loudly.

Robert Louis Stevenson's iconic novel of man's divided self, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is still a great read. It still has much to say to all of us who constantly negotiate between desire and restraint, between nature and civilization. Michael Carleton has adapted the book for the stage, although the adaptation is only partial, with free-floating hunks of narrative mingled in with the dialogue. Not to mention the dollops of Shakespeare and Blake, etc., thrown in as some pretentious get-the-allusion game.

Not only has Carleton done both genres -- fiction and drama -- a disservice, he has done Stevenson considerable harm by distorting the characters and their motives. The point of Jekyll is that he is an elegant, rich, ambitious overachiever; he values reputation and public opinion and thus keeps himself on a very short leash. When his Hyde comes "roaring out," he is young and strong and twisted from having been repressed so long. In this show, Carleton makes Jekyll a poor idealist in quest of purity, who wants to "banish the jackal from our souls." When he unleashes his bloodthirsty Hyde, Carleton really warms to the character, promoting Hyde at the end as some sort of Halloweenie hero, endorsing violence and self-indulgence.

Christopher P. Mullen plays all the characters; each one is a new occasion for overacting with bad accents, eye blinkings, body flingings and strutting, always nudging the audience to see his cleverness. All he lacks is a moustache to twirl. And all of this done in deadly earnest.

My prescription: take two aspirin and miss it.

--Toby Zinman