A Novel Twist On ‘The Turn Of The Screw’

by Nelson Pressley

There is little light but much illumination in “Room Tone,” a tantalizing piece by the New York experimentalist troupe Elevator Repair Service, which appeared for two performances at Dance Place over the weekend. The show begins in a ghostly glow with a low-wattage bank of lights aimed at the audience; beyond is . . . what? A bed? And closer — is that a man?

It is a man, and soon he’s sitting with the audience in the near-dark, casually sharing his odd background, interviewing a potential governess to watch the niece and nephew he says he never sees. Yes, this is the uncle from Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” and this is the story of a governess who ends up in his country house, caring for the two peculiar children, straining at suspicious sounds, flailing at things she fears but can’t quite see.

It’s terribly clever, the way ERS (which created the show, directed by John Collins and Steve Bodow) eases you into this tale with a laconic pace and deadpan humor. It’s both amusing and disarming when Robert Cucuzza, as the uncle, apologetically squeezes through the crowd and down to the stage to let in the potential governess (Maggie McBrien), then ushers her into the audience to sit with him. When he asks her a routine question and gets a mystical, detailed answer about how she recalls the time and place “when my soul opened out to the infinite,” his dry response — something on the order of “Umm . . . yeah” — generates a laugh without diminishing the strangeness that’s gradually being built up.

That strangeness starts with the carefully pierced darkness of Collins’s lighting, and it’s augmented by the vague hiss and pulse in Michael Kraskin’s sound design. (That’s the “room tone,” the aural analogue of the “consciousness of a presence” referred to here and in James’s novella.) The sound oddities include bizarre effects with the kids — such as amplified slurping from young Flora’s little lobster toy as it plunges into her governess’s teacup, and massive scratching sounds as mischievous Miles scrawls on a notepad.

Rinne Groff plays the governess in the country house — remember that “The Turn of the Screw” featured two governesses — and though Groff is thoroughly reserved, the acting around her begins to get a little Gothic. Katherine Profeta, a grown woman who effectively portrays Flora without resorting to girlish mannerisms, spends a lot of her time wide-eyed and crouching behind a chair, as in an Edward Gorey cartoon. Susie Sokol looks like punk trouble as Miles, dressed by costume designer Colleen Werthmann in shorts, kneepads and a black leather hat.

“What’s your blood type?” the kids ask the governess. They follow up: “Least favorite type?” Miles sulkily participates in a priceless music session in which the prim and proper Groff can barely be heard telling him to concentrate on the spiritual side of the song — “which is not,” she is forced to declare, “about touching your teacher!”

Miraculously, the antics don’t compromise the tension; they add to a list of unexpected turns that finally erupts in passionate, anxious dance as the ghost story grows dangerous. Groff moves as if blind; Profeta and Sokol execute something like a demented hopscotch, and Sokol looks utterly menacing as she dances like a Motown backup singer gone psychotic. (“The T.A.M.I. Show” is cited as one of the show’s sources.) Kraskin’s accelerating music helps catapult the story to a fever pitch, after which a sober, pungent passage from “Varieties of Religious Experience,” by William James — Henry’s brother — puts the entire show in a sharp and troubling mystical light. The effect is pretty close to sublime.