Chemical Imbalance: A Jekyll and Hyde Play

This freewheeling, frequently physical farce retells Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic Victorian-era tale of good and evil through a satirical lens.

Everyone knows the story: The educated, upper-crust Dr. Jekyll invents a mysterious elixir that transforms him into the brutish Mr. Hyde, who drinks and terrorizes the town. What gets lost in modern adaptations—but not in this play— is that Jekyll actually enjoys releasing himself from the inhibitions of polite society.

Stevenson’s 1886 novella was a parable of the Victorian age, when wealthy men were public paragons of virtue, but often led very different private lives. George Bernard Shaw dealt with this duality in his 1893 play Mrs. Warren’s Profession; the businesslike Mrs. Warren runs a brothel, which the prominent men of the community patronize, but pretend they don’t.

Humboldt County playwright Lauren Wilson (who also wrote The Golden State, a spoof of California’s multicultural society, staged last year by this company) does a comic burlesque of the Hollywood clichés that now surround this Victorian tale. But simultaneously, Wilson is skewering the British class system, and the notion that the Brits had noble intentions as they colonized the world. Wilson even works in a few plugs for Scottish nationalism—remember, Stevenson was a proud Scot, never entirely content in London.

Actor Paj Crank is relentlessly energetic as Jekyll and Hyde, contorting himself as the elixir does its work. Zachary Coles (who just played the moody, artistic Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night) goes to the opposite theatrical pole with a satirical, tongue-in-cheek performance here. Lisa Halko plays wealthy Lady Throckmortonshire, who drinks Jekyll’s potion by accident and immediately lusts after women. Young Jordan Hayakawa plays good-and-evil twins: One carries a Bible, the other kicks men in the balls. Duality abounds throughout this show.