The Turn of the Screw

Friday and Saturday, November 4 & 5, 2022 | 8 p.m.
Sunday, November 6 | 2:30 p.m.

Actors Collaborative Toledo (ACT) presents the area premiere of “The Turn of the Screw” adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from the novella by Henry James.

The play is directed by F. Scott Regan and features Joshua Keidan, last seen in ACT’s production of “Ben Hur,” and Sydney Breeding, who is making her ACT debut.

Based on the provocative tale of suspense, horror, and repressed sexuality, this adaptation is reimagined as a play for two actors. Breeding plays the young governess who journeys to a lonely English manor house to care for two recently orphaned children. The young governess has begun to see specters haunting the children, and she must find a way to stop the fiends before it too late. But one frightening question tortures the would-be heroine: Are the ghost real or are they the product of her own fevered imagination? Keidan plays all the other characters in this ghostly tale.

Much is left up to the audience imagination as the playwright has taken cues from James’ preface to the story: “Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough, and [their] own experience, imagination, sympathy, and horror will supply [them] quite sufficiently with all the particulars.”