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WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE. By Adam Bock (book and lyrics) and Todd Almond (music and lyrics), adapted from the novel by Shirley Jackson. Directed by Anne Kauffman. Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT. 2 October 2010.
Shirley Jackson's work, recently anthologized by the Library of Congress in its American Gothic series (2009), often puts eerie and ominous forces into familiar settings. Such themes emerged in the musical adaptation of Jackson's novella We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which dramatized two forms of evil: the psychopathology of a child-murderer, and the vindictiveness of small-town gossips. Shifting the novel's first-person narrative from Merricat Blackwood, the sulky, malevolent 18-year-old who allegedly poisoned her family, to her older sister Constance, their long-lost cousin Charles, and the villagers, lyricist Adam Bock and composer Todd Almond lessened the intensity of residing inside the head of Merricat, arguably a paranoid schizophrenic. Even so, the musical successfully captured the cruelties and deep mistrust of others that characterize a small-town in New England, where the Blackwood family's elitism earns the ill will of the villagers. Articulating the hidden paranoia of suburban America, the production captured a xenophobia no less timely in the current climate of anti-immigration legislation than it was during the cold war, when Jackson wrote the story. Through the eccentricities of the lead character, scenery that was slightly askew, and a musical score that alternated between sunny and macabre, the production revealed the violence that lurks within an ordinary community.
In one of the most offbeat depictions of a precocious adolescent in literature, Jackson depicts Mary Katherine (Alexandra Socha), or Merricat, as a case study in psychopathology: spunky one moment and obsessively controlling the next. The production established a darkly comic tone in the opening number, "We Blackwoods," in which Merricat expressed her family's superior attitude toward the villagers and her own preoccupation...