Like its infamous two-faced protagonist, Hartford Stage’s production of “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” has an intelligent, graceful, clever side and a creepy, gritty, sensational side. The erudite, psychological, often duller side dominates, but there are plenty of short sharp shocks to hold your attention.
The psychodrama, which opens the theater’s 61st season, runs through Nov. 3.
There’s something instantly creepy about Sara Brown’s scenic design, which has a metal drain in the middle of the dark-stained wooden stage floor and pop-up attractions like trap doors and lit-up cabinets of chemistry equipment.
These mood-changing effects are used in a modern theatrical way, not like old-fashioned flashy melodrama. Mostly it’s an efficient way of transitioning from a Hyde murder scene to the relatively calmer Jekyll-mode aftermath. It certainly helps Hyde out, since the character doesn’t have to bother disposing of bodies — they simply disappear.
There are genuine scares and surprises in this “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.” Not because anyone’s leaping out suddenly, or dumping buckets of blood, but because they aren’t. This is the kind of thriller that sneaks up on you, even if you completely know what it’s about. It also explains itself a lot. Regular visitors to the eminent, respected Dr. Jekyll’s home are constantly wondering why he’s downplaying or explaining away the grotesque behavior of this new wild-eyed cad in the community whom everybody’s talking about, Edward Hyde.
Nayib Felix (taking a turn as Edward Hyde) and Sarah Chalfie as Elizabeth Jelkes in “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” at Hartford Stage. (T. Charles Erickson)
Director Melia Bensussen and the six-person cast mostly play this material with deadly seriousness and an interesting degree of empathy for social transgressions. There’s plenty of humor, but mostly it comes from people saying amusing things. Nayib Felix and Omar Robinson as a couple of dapper gents with correspondingly lofty names, Sir Danvers Carew and Dr. Gabriel Utterson, have great comic rapport but nobody is playing over-the-top here, even as grisly murders are being committed.
This is Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic. The script has been around for 15 years or so, but Hatcher has been consulting on this new Hartford Stage production and has made a few changes.
Hartford Stage opens its season with a creepy, complex ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’
Like his popular adaptations of “Dial M for Murder” (done at Westport Country Playhouse last year), “Tuesdays With Morrie” (which Playhouse on Park staged in 2015) and “The Turn of the Screw” (which Bensussen directed the first New York production of in 1999), Hatcher brings a special dramatic instinct to “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.” He likes to find clean, economical formats that make the play as interesting to watch as it is to hear. He likes to strip down the original story to a single clear message, jettisoning subplots or minor characters, though he’s been known to pile on some fresh complications of his own.
He also likes to shake things up. Just as he changed the gender of a key character in “Dial M for Murder,” the ensemble he and Bensussen have created for “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” has two female actors in it, while Robert Louis Stevenson’s original novella has no prominent female characters at all and treats women only as victims. Some of the other productions of this script have had seven or eight actors and as many as three women. Each member of the cast, with one exception, plays one key character, a smaller role or two and also gets to step into Hyde’s shoes, or at least brandish his mighty walking stick. Nathan Darrow, who plays Dr. Jekyll, does so as an unreadable genteel scientist who seems to care more about covering up the crimes of his potion-induced alter ego than he does about actually becoming him. Darrow’s Jekyll is so upstanding, so learned, so smug and superior that he inevitably becomes pretty boring.
In this version, Jekyll becomes the straight man for a variety of more excitable and colorful characters who react much more strongly to the threat of a madman running about town. As portrayed variously by the ensemble, Hyde has different perspectives, strengths and persuasive powers. At different times he smolders, blusters, argues or just becomes a blunt instrument. The underlying meaning seems to be that we all have our own Hydes hiding within us. There’s also a clear sense of watching someone else go crazy in public, relating to their stress or anger and wondering what the limits should be of such reckless, violent behavior.
Hartford Stage’s “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” probes the medical and psychological consequences of personality-altering drugs. (T. Charles Erickson)
Robinson and Felix as Jekyll’s friends seem to have the best sense of the overall style, tone and pace that Bensussen is trying to achieve. The female ensemble members, Sarah Chalfie and Jennifer Rae Bareilles, are hampered by having to make the most extreme transformations from character to character. Peter Stray gets the more comical, more drunken, more stereotyped male characters.
For all its modern psychological add-ons and its generous sharing of villainous outbursts, Hatcher’s script also cheapens the Stevenson original. There are dumb jokes about how Scotsmen like to drink and how doctors have bad handwriting. Some of Jekyll’s excuses for Hyde’s sudden disappearances are ridiculous. There are too many murders, too similarly staged.
Yet when it’s really cooking, “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” has the same spooky Victorian splendor of Hartford Stage’s “A Christmas Carol” and the same fast-paced whodunnit appeal of last year’s season-opening mystery “The Mousetrap.” It is also really trying to add some intellectual heft and several fresh layers of interpretation to what can be a straightforward good/evil yarn. In the right hands, the question of “Where’s the playwright going with this” can be as compelling as “Who’s that monster gonna kill next?”
The timing is certainly right for a new look at “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde,” and not just because it’s Halloween. The play is a meditation on abuses of power, both by physicians like Jekyll and proponents of street rage like Hyde. It’s about how society deals with assaults on its rules and customs. It’s about unexpected and overwhelming scientific breakthroughs. It’s about how people act when they’re threatened or confronted and who they can turn to in times of crisis.
“Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” is a bracing choice for Halloween time, election season, the advent of AI and any day when work has gone badly. With this show, you don’t even have to take sides in a binary choice of good versus evil. Everybody’s got something to Hyde.
“Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” runs through Nov. 3 at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford. Performances are Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. with added matinees at 2 p.m. on Oct. 26, 30 and Nov. 2. $20-$105. hartfordstage.org.
