Playwright: adapted by Lorelei. Sturm from the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. At: The Mill at the Chopin, 1543 W. Division St. Tickets: 773-764-8317; www.brownpapertickets.com; $20. Runs through: Sept. 14
You don't often hear the word "neurasthenia" invoked nowadays to describe a type of nervous breakdown—another archaic medical term—characterized by extreme enervation arising from no apparent source. In the 19th century, however, it was a very real malady, afflicting both men and women. The remedy was extended bed-rest surrounded by minimal activity, until such time as alleviation of stress ( or sheer boredom ) re-energized the sufferer. Thus it is that Charlotte Perkins Gilman's heroine finds herself confined within a house offering no sensory stimulus but its shabby interior and pastoral environment.
What we know from Gilman's nameless first-person narrator is that her husband is a doctor, and that following the birth of their first child, he rented this country residence and hired a nurse-housekeeper so that his wife could recover from what he feels is not quite a disease, but instead, a "nervous condition" calling for fresh air, long walks and wholesome food. Despite this regimen and her spouse's exhortation to resist her "foolish fancies," the new mother finds herself obsessing over her bedroom's peeling yellow wallpaper, her imagination conjuring forest landscapes from its fragmented patterns, leading to hallucinations of a shadowy lady who nightly crawls around the perimeter of what its occupant comes to regard as a cell.
Since Gilman wrote her story in 1892, it has become commonplace in academic circles to read it as a feminist criticism of the tyranny exercised by paternalistic males fearful of females adopting independent physical and intellectual pursuits—is not our distressed matron forbidden visitors and books, and must she not keep her journal a secret from the people she considers her "jailers?" On the other hand, the phenomenon of "post-partum depression" is well-documented in 2014, and with no way of ascertaining whether our informant is, in fact, batcrackers, her paranoia is likewise suspect. Our sympathy for her plight, after all, is not diminished by the level of credence we assign her terror.
Lorelei Sturm's adaptation wisely suspends judgment to focus on the psychological aspects of Gilman's semi-autobiographical account for The Mill performance ensemble. Eleanor Kahn's scenic design marks out the chamber's sinister walls with a web of crisscrossed ropes, so that when our invalid appears, shackled at one ankle by a bright yellow cord, and proceeds to create a cat's-cradle labyrinth as she roams her cloister, we accept director Jaclyn Biskup's visual metaphor immediately, even as we dread the moment when it will arrive at its tragic, but inevitable, conclusion.
