"The Yellow Wall-paper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman's chilling indictment of 19th-century medicine, was published in 1891 in New England Magazine. It had been refused earlier by the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, whose editor at the time, H. E. Scudder, declared in his brief rejection letter, "I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!" "Rediscovered" during the Feminist Movement of the 1970s, the story has since been widely reprinted as "The Yellow Wallpaper" (notably in The Experience of the American Woman, edited by Barbara H. Solomon, where its inclusion led to this production). By the 1990s scholars had come to acknowledge it, not only as an admirable piece of "women's writing," but as a brilliant gem of American literature.

Gilman's story has been adapted in several dramatic versions--often embellished with subtext, altered by modern viewpoints, or expanded using added text and characters--as well as translated to dance (ballet and modern) and opera. This unique production of The Yellow Wallpaper, premiered in New Jersey by The East Lynne Theater Company, takes a more straightforward approach. By faithfully grounding Gilman's actual text in its social and historical context, collaborators Warren Kliewer (director) and Michèle LaRue (actress) have breathtakingly dramatized the horror of Gilman's most famous work.

AUDIENCE APPEAL:

While The Yellow Wallpaper is intended for adult audiences, it has been successfully performed for students as young as sixteen who have been given classroom preparation. It appeals particularly to women's groups and to audiences interested in American history, literature, or Victoriana; academic conferences, colleges and universities (women's and gender studies programs; theatre departments; medical and psychiatric history, American literature, sociology, and family/marriage courses). It is effective, as well, with general theatre audiences, whether for a multi-performance run, as part of a play festival, or as a "dark night" presentation.

The Yellow Wallpaper

PERFORMANCE SITES AND SPONSORS:

NEW YORK CITY

Harold Clurman Theatre, Off-Broadway (2 performances)

Lincoln Center Library and Museum of the Performing Arts (3 performances)

Donnell Public Library

Womenkind Festival III, Off-Off-Broadway

Double Helix Theatre Company One Fest, Off-Broadway (3 performances)

ILLINOIS

Barrington Area Cultural Council

Harper College, Palatine

DuPage College, Glen Ellyn

Lewis University, Romeo

Illinois College, Jacksonville

INDIANA

Indiana University-Purdue University, Ft. Wayne

Indiana University at South Bend

IOWA

Luther College, Decorah (2 engagements)

Cornell College, Mount Vernon

KANSAS

The University of Kansas, Lawrence

Bethel College, North Newton

MAINE

Fourth Annual International Conference of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society, Portland

MASSACHUSETTS

Williams College, Williamstown

Clark University, Worcester

MINNESOTA

Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter (2 engagements)

Jackson Art Guild, Jackson

NEW JERSEY

William Carlos Williams Center for the Performing Arts, Rutherford

Harrison High School

The East Lynne Company, Cape May (3 performances)

Public Library, Jersey City (2 performances)

Public Library, Secaucus

Public Library, Bayonne

Public Library, Weehawken

Morristown Museum of Arts and Sciences, Morristown

Rutgers University, Newark

Kean University, Union

Ocean County College, Tom's River

SoloFest '07, Garage Theatre Group, Teaneck (2 performances)

NEW YORK STATE

Mohonk Mountain House, New Paltz (2 engagements)

Iona College, New Rochelle (2 engagements)

SUNY New Paltz, New York

Hamilton College, Clinton, New York

Sullivan County Community College, Loch Sheldrake

Russell Sage College, Troy

St. Bonaventure University

NORTH CAROLINA

East Carolina University, Greenville

Elon College, Elon

OKLAHOMA

The University of Tulsa

The University of Oklahoma, Norman

PENNSYLVANIA

Women's Resource Center, Wayne

Delaware County Community College, Media (2 engagements)

Montgomery County Community College, Blue Bell

West Chester State University, West Chester

Thiel College, Greenville

Bucknell University, Lewisburg

WASHINGTON, D.C.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

(2 engagements, 5 performances)

-- June 2007

(69 performances)

The Yellow Wallpaper

REVIEWS:

"Your performance of The Yellow Wallpaper was a rich and grueling portrayal... a powerful and persuasive presentation of one of Gilman's major works.... thank you for bringing this marvelous piece of fiction so vividly to life."

--Mary A. Hill, author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist;

Presidential Professor of History and Women's Studies, Bucknell University, Pennsylvania

"Your portrayal of that ingenious crazy woman is still with me.... You never let The Yellow Wallpaper become schematic or allegorical; our attention never wanders from this particular sufferer, our involvement in her desperation is constant. Afterwards, of course, we came to think of Woman, and all the people who are driven crazy by others' expectations of them."

--Ken Yellis, Curator of Education, National Portrait Gallery

Washington, D.C.

"You have been gracious and reliable, and it has been such a pleasure to work with you. Thank you so very much for the wonderful dramatization of The Yellow Wallpaper; you managed to convey both the story's humor and its pathos. Many audience members were Gilman scholars and quite familiar with the story, yet you breathed new life into it and brought several people close to tears with your moving and anguished portrayal."

--Jennifer S. Tuttle, Faculty Director, Maine Women Writers Collection

Conference Director, Fourth International Charlotte Perkins Gilman Conference

Portland, Maine

"Wonderful work! Your skillful and graceful performance was an inspiration to us all, and the high spot of the conference."

--Susan McHugh, Assistant Professor of English, University of New England

Planning Committee, Fourth International Charlotte Perkins Gilman Conference

Portland, Maine

"Thank you for the incredible work you did on our behalf. The performance proved so powerful that students even six weeks later continued to discuss it. You were master of the stage, and your professionalism and talent were ideal in helping us to initiate a new program of annual performances."

--Karen Robbins, Ph.D., Director of Women's Studies

St. Bonaventure University

New York State

"The Yellow Wallpaper is a powerfully provocative recollection of one woman's struggle to emerge; a forceful performance by Michèle LaRue with superb direction by Warren Kliewer.... the audience was held spellbound."

--Celeste Oranchak, Chairman, The Mayor's Council on the Arts, Bayonne, New Jersey.

"Students were excited to watch a literary work come to life with so much intensity and perceptiveness. The production was extraordinary, a haunting evocation of Gilman's trapped wife which intrigued students, and led to thought-provoking analysis in the classroom."

--Dr. Barbara H. Solomon, Professor of Women's Studies, Iona College

New Rochelle, New York

"It was a most outstanding performance.... Many were moved to tears by your strength and power and... impressed by the care and understanding you and Warren demonstrated in adapting Gilman's work."

--Deborah J. Ruth, Chair, Women in the Arts, Women's Resource Center

Wayne, Pennsylvania

"I want to commend The East Lynne Company, and particularly Michèle LaRue, on the stunning performance.... I would like to incorporate The Yellow Wallpaper in a pilot series of book discussion programs we are doing for senior citizens.... Having a program of such professionalism would add a great deal of texture to a series, bring the written word to pellucid life."

--Martha C. Allen, Project Director, New Jersey Committee for the Humanities

Full-length copies of reviews and comments are available, as are references.

COST:

$850 plus transportation for the actress, and lodging when necessary. The optional post-performance discussion is gratis.

The actress provides publicity and marketing materials, including photos and press release template; and a program ("playbill") master.

The Yellow Wallpaper

BIOGRAPHIES:

MICH&EGRAVELE LARUE, ACTRESS (AEA, SAG, AFTRA): works often with The East Lynne Company, Cape May, New Jersey; and is a member of New Jersey Repertory Company, Long Branch.

LaRue tours nationally with several one-woman plays--The Yellow Wallpaper (dramatized and directed by Warren Kliewer from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1890 feminist horror story), Someone Must Wash the Dishes: An Anti-Suffrage Monologue (Marie Jenney Howe's 1912 satire), Eve's Diary (Gayle Stahlhuth's adaptation of several Mark Twain stories), Places, Please, Act One, Kliewer's vibrant "poems around and about theatres," and a varied repertoire of American short stories written at the turn of the previous century. She has played over 200 performances of these productions in 12 states, from Maine to Oklahoma, Minnesota to Virginia.

LaRue also "plays well with others" and in New York City has performed at New Dramatists, The Actors Studio, the Harold Clurman Theatre, Theatre at St. Clements, The Lark Theatre Company, and others. Roles in Manhattan have ranged from Agatha, the free spirit who propels Jennifer Camp's new Key West; to Katherine, who struggles through Robert Anderson's poignant Silent Night, Lonely Night. Off-Off Broadway LaRue created Irene, a bereaved but feisty bag lady, in Michael Bruck's Encounters in Passaic; and, for Equity Library Theatre, Dinah, the bitter indentured servant in A New England Legend (adapted by Estelle Ritchie from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter).

In Pennsylvania theatre LaRue's credits range from Ellie May (Tobacco Road) at the Fulton Opera House, Lancaster; to Viola (Twelfth Night) at the Bucks County Playhouse; to both Polly Garter and Myfanwy Price (Under Milk Wood) at the Actors' Company of Pennsylvania. Her work with The East Lynne Company fostered a love for 19th-century American theatre and history, and has nurtured her passion for rich language. She has starred for The East Lynne Company in lost classics (William Dean Howells' Bride Roses), adaptations (Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle), and newly created works exploring our past (Bruce Cutler's two-character verse drama A Brave Man's Part). Most recently in New Jersey, she created the role of agoraphobic Inga in a brand-new play: Centenary Stage Company's world premiere of Poetry of Pizza, by Deborah Brevoort.

A native of northern Illinois, LaRue graduated with a major in Acting from the University of Kansas, and subsequently moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she played Julia in G. B. Shaw's The Philanderer, at the University's Theatre Intime. Her first professional engagement--a two-person musical revue--played 230 performances in four months, at schools throughout Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

LaRue belongs to the three major actors' unions: Actors' Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild, and AFTRA; and to the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society. Offstage, she is a well-respected theatre writer and editor, and a member of Drama Desk, an organization of New York drama critics. She was married to and collaborated with Warren Kliewer, onstage and off, for more than 25 years.

WARREN KLIEWER, DIRECTOR: An actor (AEA, SAG), playwright (Dramatists Guild), and producer, as well as director (SSDC), Kliewer founded The East Lynne Company--"purveyors of American theatricals"--in 1980. Based in Cape May, New Jersey, today the East Lynne Theater Company remains uniquely dedicated to reviving American plays and literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Until his death in 1998, Kliewer produced all--and directed most--of The East Lynne Company's 46 productions. These included Bronson Howard's Old Love Letters, William Dean Howells' Bride Roses and A Counterfeit Presentment, John Howard Payne and Washington Irving's Charles II, Rip Van Winkle as performed by Joseph Jefferson III, David Belasco's Madame Butterfly, Rachel Crothers' He and She, and the world premiere of Samuel Low's 1788 The Politician Out-Witted.

In 1986, the Smithsonian Institution commissioned Kliewer's production of A Brave Man's Part, written by the late poet Bruce Cutler. Other Kliewer-directed, written and/or adapted productions have toured widely throughout the U.S.--among them, The Yellow Wallpaper(The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Lincoln Center, N.Y.), Hypocrites, Frauds, and Cheats (with William Roerick), and Kliewer's own one-man performance Uncle Dan's Financial Tips; or; Sunday Is Sunday, but the Other Six Days Are for Business.

From 1970 to 1974, Kliewer was Resident Director of the National Humanities Series, based in Princeton, New Jersey, and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Working with scholars and performers, he turned 35 original manuscripts into probing dramatic productions. These explorations in the humanities traveled to culturally isolated communities in 42 states. Kliewer's artistic histories of the project were published in Exchange: A Journal of Opinion for the Performing Arts and Performing Arts Review.

Kliewer's plays have been produced nationwide. Titles include The Two Marys, A Lean and Hungry Priest, and A Small Winter Crisis. He was an alumnus of New Dramatists, in New York City, which premiered, among others, his The Berserkers and The Booth Brothers. His published works include plays, essays, short stories, and three volumes of poetry: Liturgies, Games, Farewells; Moralities and Miracles; and Red Rose and Grey Cowl. His chapter on early "Directors and Direction" appeared posthumously in Volume Two of the Cambridge History of American Theatre.

As an actor, Kliewer performed for more than 30 years--in New York, on the college circuit, in summer stock and regional theatres, television, and film--in such disparate roles as Lieutenant. Commander Queeg (The Caine Mutiny Court Martial), Henry Peabody (Tobacco Road), and Reverend John Hale (The Crucible). A graduate of the universities of Minnesota (BA; MFA, playwriting) and Kansas (MA, English), he taught at several Midwestern colleges and universities before heading the National Humanities Series.

It was Kliewer's idea to dramatize "The Yellow Wall-paper," after rediscovering the story in Barbara H. Solomon's anthology The Experience of the American Woman (Mentor Books). This near-verbatim dramatization--its concept, choice of music and sound effects, and original staging--is his.

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, AUTHOR (1860-1935): Gilman's extraordinary imagination and physical energy made endurable a youth blighted by her father's desertion, her mother's bitterness and mistrust of love, her straitened family's constant household moves, and her own tumultuous girlhood friendships. She recorded it all--in diaries, poems, and short stories--writing ceaselessly until, at 24, marriage to Charles Stetson, a promising young painter, plunged her into despair. "Here was a charming home, a loving and devoted husband, an exquisite baby, healthy, intelligent, and good... and I lay all day on the lounge and cried."

Diagnosed a "neurasthenic," she was sent by her well-meaning husband and friends to S. Weir Mitchell, a Philadelphia doctor to whom upper-class women flocked for his famous "rest cure." Mitchell prescribed that Gilman "'Live as domestic a life as possible... Lie down for an hour after each meal... Have but two hours intellectual life a day... And never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live' I went home," recalled Gilman in her autobiography, "followed those directions rigidly for months, and came perilously close to losing my mind."

Ultimately she effected her own cure. After leaving her family, she resumed writing fiction and poetry and editing her own magazine, became a popular lecturer on human rights throughout her long life, and wrote a major volume of social history: Women and Economics. "The Yellow Wall-Paper," drawn from deep within her own personal experience, remains Gilman's best-known and most introspective work. Admirers of her fiction point to the skill and economy of her prose. But Gilman herself also found another kind of pleasure in the effect of her story. "The best result is this," she once explained. "Many years later I was told that [Weir Mitchell] had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading 'The Yellow Wall-Paper.'"

EAST LYNNE THEATER COMPANY: When The East Lynne Company was founded in 1980, as an Equity professional not-for-profit, it was the first in the country dedicated to the performance and promulgation of earlier American plays and theatrical tradition. Today known as the East Lynne Theater Company, it takes pride in providing theatre-goers, actors, and directors the experience of seeing and working on plays and literature written by or adapted from early American masters.

The name "East Lynne" derives from a famously popular American play that was performed throughout the country during the last half of the 1800s. The ELTC's wide-ranging production history includes more than seventy classic American plays, dating from as early as 1788's The Politician Out-witted (a world premiere), and has showcased writers ranging from Washington Irving to Rachel Crothers, Ira Aldridge to William Dean Howells.

East Lynne's artist-in-residence programs teach students acting, playwriting, and production, focusing primarily on American history and literature. The company gives voice to the current professional generation of playwrights by yearly producing a world- or New Jersey-premiere musical or play based on American theatre history or literature. Several ELTC premieres have gone on to other stages. More than 10,000 audience members annually attend shows during ELTC's Cape May, New Jersey, season, and on the road. In 1996, Ohio State University honored ELTC by offering to house the company's archives at The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:

STAGING INFORMATION AND TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

Script:

Two copies with cues will be provided on loan, upon signing of contract.

Stage Requirements:

The show can be performed in a large or small theatre, preferably proscenium or three-quarter thrust. The playing area approximates 25 feet wide by minimum 15 feet deep.

The stage floor must be extremely clean, as the actress will crawl over it in period costume.

Props and Set Decoration:

The story takes place in the early summer of 1885 on a country estate in New England--in an upstairs room. Furniture should be either of that period or earlier, and can be shabby and mismatched; as in Gilman's story, it has been found elsewhere in the house and brought upstairs. "No-period" furniture is an option. FYI: The actress's costume is salmon colored.

The sponsor is asked to provide: