Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is a professor of Theatre Arts at Loyola Marymount University, a six-time Bram Stoker Award nominee, and the author or editor of over thirty books, including The Streaming of Hell House, a scholarly anthology about Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House.

In Shirley Jackson’s first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), the Desmonds, one of the families on Pepper Street, plan to organize the children of the street to read Shakespeare:

“I think these young hoodlums around here ought to be thinking of something else than roughhouse and foolishness…What about all of them getting together to read Shakespeare? Not all the plays, of course,” he added before Mrs. Desmond could speak. “A few of the best, like Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar. Then at the end of the summer, maybe, we could give a performance. Invite all the parents.” (75)

Mr. Desmond warms to the idea, thinking A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Merchant of Venice would also make good choices. When Mrs. Desmond reminds him he would have to invite all of the children of the neighborhood, he initially agrees, claiming, “After all, Shakespeare is for everyone” (76). After some consideration, however, Mrs. Desmond suggests that the Jewish neighbor girl, Marilyn, might be embarrassed by The Merchant of Venice, and suggests he consider another writer. “No sense in it unless we read Shakespeare,” he responds (77). Ultimately, they realize there is no Shakespeare play with the right number of roles for the neighborhood children, and the project does not move forward.

This brief sequence in the novel illustrates and satirizes the prejudices, casual cruelties, and attitudes of its postwar suburban California characters. It also establishes a theme not merely in Jackson’s work but also Jackson’s life: that theatre is predominantly and primarily “for everyone,” but especially for the kids. Despite being a life-long aficionado of commedia-dell-arte[1], Jackson, when she thought about or represented performance, saw it first and foremost as an activity for children and adolescents. In The Road through the Wall, Marylin and her only friend Harriet evoke the characters of commedia in an escapist fantasy, imagining a wagon full of them entering an idyllic community where they are welcomed by the people: “‘There’s Pantaloon, and Rhodomont, and Scaramouche, and Pierrot, and–’ She stopped again, ‘And Harlequin…’” (111). Even when evoking her favorite theatrical form, Jackson places it in the service of adolescent fantasy.

Shakespeare is a minor presence in Jackson’s life and work, but it is the Shakespeare of the English and not the Drama department, Shakespeare as text-to-be-read rather than as blueprint for performance in a theatre. Her focus is text, not performance. She read a great deal of plays looking for a quotation with which to open The Sundial, finally settling upon an epigraph from Dryden instead. “All that Shakespeare wasted,” she wrote Bernice Baumgarten (Hyman 330). In The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor’s refrain is “[j]ourneys end in lovers’ meeting,” and she quotes other lines from the song sung by Feste in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, such as “In delay there lies no plenty” (II, iii; 44, 49) (22). Eleanor, however, never cites her source, so to speak, and the use of Shakespeare here is indicative that for Jackson, Shakespeare’s plays are not blueprints for performance, as theatre folk state, but texts to be studied and cited. For Eleanor, Shakespeare’s texts are poetry to be remembered, not the script of a play, as witnessed by her quoting lines out of context, noy mentioning where they come from.  Shakespeare is the equivalent of any poet in Eleanor’s mind. Shakespeare was perhaps somewhat inescapable for Jackson as a writer and the wife of an English professor—indeed, Hyman taught Shakespeare in his introductory literature class (Franklin 338). As a Syracuse University undergrad, she supposedly talked Hyman into taking a Shakespeare class. But Jackson’s Shakespear is a text, not a performance, and lives on a shelf, not in the theatre–she never mension seeing the plays, only reading them.

Within her prolific output Jackson wrote only a single play, 1958’s The Bad Children: A Play in One Act for Bad Children, an adaptation of the Hansel and Gretel story for children to perform. Lenemaja Friedman reports that Jackson “enjoyed working with plays, intended to write more, but never had time to do so” (34). Her stories, however, have been adapted for the stage by many others. “The Summer People” (1950) has been adapted by Brainerd Duffield and performed by school and community groups. In particular, “The Lottery” has proven a popular stage presence for school and community groups in the decades since it was first adapted. Her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle have also been adapted more than once for stage performance. She took her children to school and amateur theatrics and commented upon doing so in her letters. In short, Jackson and her work have had a presence in the world of the theatre.

The relationship between Jackson’s work and the stage is underrepresented in Jackson studies. Since its publication in 1959, Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House has been adapted for other media at least seven times: two films, a Netflix series, a radio abridgement, and three stage versions. While filmed versions of the novel have been analyzed frequently, the stage versions have received scant attention. F. Andrew Leslie adapted the book for the stage in 1964. Subsequently, Paul Edwards adapted and directed The Haunting of Hill House for City Lit Theatre in Chicago in 2014, and Anthony Neilson wrote a new stage adaptation produced at the Everyman Playhouse in Liverpool in December 2015 through January 2016. 

Using Marvin Carlson’s theory of the “haunted stage,” the idea that the theatre itself is a kind of transmedial haunting in which the audience is reminded of other productions and other forms of the same narrative, I will examine the relationship between Jackson and the stage. Beginning with her own The Bad Children then moving to other adaptations of her work (“The Lottery” and “The Summer People”), this essay first examines adaptations of Jackson as theatre for young people. I then consider how the three Haunting of Hill House adaptions and multiple We Have Always Lived in the Castle adaptations render psychological, phenomenological works, told from Eleanor’s and Merricat’s respective perspectives, into theatrical experiences for adults. I argue that these adaptations leave behind Jackson’s own conception of theatre as an activity for young people, with particular attention to how the haunting itself in Hill House and the mystery of the murders in Castle is dramatized. I then conclude by considering how these plays inform how we might interpret and understand Jackson’s fiction. These two threads—theatre as activity for children within Jackson’s mind and work and stage adaptations of Jackson’s fiction—form parallel but unconnected lines in this study. I present them side-by-side in order to demonstrate Jackson’s own conception of the theatre and how those in the theatre have conceived and adapted Jackson’s work, the two threads together forming perhaps a larger picture of the intersection of the stage and Jackson. It seems that those who adapted and adapt Jackson conceive of her work theatrically in manners that she did not (or perhaps could not).

Pity the poor The Bad Children – Shirley Jackson’s only dramatic work does not even merit a mention in Ruth Franklin’s award-winning biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Jackson’s sole work for the stage, The Bad Children is “a variation on Hansel and Gretel written because Joanne [Jackson’s eldest daughter] needed a play for school” (Oppenheimer 222). Yet The Bad Children also fits very easily within the Jackson canon, as a humorous piece that uses fairy tale elements to satirize domestic life (or “domestic chaos” as some have termed it) and incorporates autobiographical elements, as does much of Jackson’s writing.

One of the reasons I suspect Jackson, despite expressing interest in writing drama, did not write more was the limited possibilities to present or even see performed plays in Bennington, VT, other than at the college. It was, in fact, a production at the college that sparked the idea for her only play, doing so through her aforementioned love of commedia-dell-arte. In a letter to her parents dated June 16, 1958, she writes:

we took the whole crew of them [her children] last night to a special college production, which was the most wonderful thing I have ever seen; the drama staff chose a harlequinade from sixteenth-century italian (sic) drama, and did it with fantastic sets and a lot of acrobatics and slapping people with wooden swords, and they opened it with the entire cast of fantastic creatures parading down the center aisle of the theatre banging a drum, and they run up onto the stage and put up their set, banging into each other and standing on each other’s shoulders to put up the curtain, and so on. stanley and I went to see it the first night, and were so delighted that we wanted to go again with the kids, and then found that we couldn’t get tickets. we got in touch with the head of the drama department, and told him our sad story, and he reserved the first four seats in the front row for us, so we had the best seats of all. (Hyman 381)

Jackson goes on to describe her favorite parts of the performance, as well as a few accidents the performers had that inadvertently affected or injured spectators. When the show was over, Jackson requested and received “pantaloon’s ornamental mask,” which she hung in her living room. “I am particularly delighted,” she informed her parents, “since the next thing they do at the college, next fall, may very well be my play” (Hyman 382).

One might note that the Bennington production of an Italian commedia play was “the most wonderful thing [Jackson had] ever seen” and inspired her to write something that delighted the children as much as the commedia had her. She observes later in the letter that, “the college people love to do big stage productions, with odd effects and wild sets and lighting” (Hyman 383). It was in this environment of “big stage productions and “odd effects” that Jackson wrote The Bad Children and in which she attempted to write at least two other plays (that we know of) The Bennington College Theatre program focused on production of classical texts with elaborate effects and with opportunities for cast to interact with the mise-en-scene and the audience to tell a non-naturalistic fantastical story. Shakespeare was not for the stage; commedia-dell-arte, fairy tales, and other “big” events (with an audience of all ages and thus must be suitable for children as well) was her model for theatre. She notes that faculty children were organized by a drama student “who wanted them to do a play” (shades of The Road Through the Wall), [A7] and they gave a “haphazard informal play, mostly ad-lib” (Hyman 382). Jackson’s response was that she would “write them a little play” and, in between novels, began to write a one act that could be performed by and for children, but with themes that resonated with college students and the parents of those children (Hyman 382).

Her instinct was to write a version of the Hansel and Gretel story in which the title characters were the villains—insufferable, entitled brats, “always mean and quarrelsome, and the witch won’t keep them and the parents won’t take them back” (Hyman 382). Her children circulated the script at their school, and the school then planned to perform the play in the fall. Another elementary school in Williamstown, having heard of the play, asked if they could stage it the following spring. Suddenly confronted with not one but two productions of the play, Jackson contacted Bill Alton, the head of drama at Bennington College who had been kind enough to seat the family in the front row of the commedia, for advice on the script, and he also inquired if Bennington might put the play on. Thus, Jackson found herself in demand as a dramatist before she had a fully complete text on her hands, with three educational institutions asking permission to perform her first play. The full, final title of the play is The Bad Children: A Musical in One Act for Bad Children, implying a bit of metatheatre in that the characters, performers, and audience are all “Bad Children.” The play is a celebration of childish wickedness and of being bad when one is young. Nothing too evil or harmful is ever done—the pleasure (and crime) comes from not listening, being mean and rude, especially to one’s elders, and refusing social and parental constraints.

“I had a wonderful time writing it,” Jackson later related in a lecture on writing, and no doubt, the play is silly, playful, and works on multiple levels for audiences of different ages (qtd. in Oppenheimer 222). The main characters are The Witch, The Enchanter (whose given name is “Fillybuster,” no doubt a joke aimed at the adults in the audience), Hansel and Gretel, their parents, and a Rabbit, along with Forest Animals “if desired” (Jackson, The Bad Children 3). The play opens with the Witch inviting the Enchanter for breakfast and transforming the Rabbit into butter for said breakfast. The Witch then speaks of how difficult it is to be a witch:

It used to be that they had witches who just got into the work by accident – nothing else they could find to do, or they got tired of being nice to people, or something. These days that’s all been changed. Now you’ve got to study, go to college, take special courses. Why, if I even began to tell you the things I had to take in college just to get to be a little old forest witch you’d be amazed.  You’d be amazed, I can tell you – things you probably never even heard of, I had to take. (9)

One might note the humor about the ridiculousness of college and the obscure subject matters one must study were meant to appeal to and be well received by the Bennington students. The complaint about needing to go to college in order to find work that did not require a degree before the war is also a frequent one from the period. Perhaps most interestingly, Jackson’s fascination with witches and proclamations to family and friends that she was a witch, perhaps with tongue in cheek, are well known and represented in her letters and by biographers.[2] The I-am-a-witch motif ran through much of her professional life, including her book on the [A10] Salem witch trials, The Witchcraft of Salem Village, which was written for young readers (begging the question, would the play about the Salem witch trials she had initially planned, like her other play, been for young audiences?). It is hard not to see this monologue as autobiographical, which further links the piece with Jackson’s other work, especially Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, in which the narrator is a slightly fictionalized version of Jackson. Given that, one might be forgiven for seeing The Enchanter as linked to “my husband” in the memoirs – the father of the “savages” who was a stand in for Stanley Edgar Hyman. This is borne out by the love-hate dynamic between the Witch and the Enchanter, both of whom have “magic” and both of whom believe theirs to be the more powerful.

The Witch and the Enchanter then argue who had it more difficult as they developed their powers and threaten one another with a magical contest, albeit one designed to appeal to a young audience in the late-1950s:

WITCH: I’ll change you into a guitar and play rock and roll on you.

ENCHANTER: I’ll change you into a comic book and tear out all your pages.

WITCH: [as they lean closer and closer to each other, until their faces almost

touch]. I’ll change you into a radio and run you all day long.

ENCHANTER: I’ll change you into a comb and break out all your teeth.

WITCH: I’ll change you into a vitamin pill and swallow you whole.

ENCHANTER: I’ll change you into a kite and fly you into a tree.

VOICE [under bench, supposedly from butter] Isn’t there anyone around here

who can change me back into a rabbit? (11)

While the threatened curses and transformations are topical and amusing, they are also specific to adolescents of the period, many, though not all, associated with juvenile delinquency: rock and roll music and the radio, combs (necessary for “greaser” hairstyles), and comic books; Jackson writes this only a few years after congressional hearings on comic books and Frederic Wertheim’s infamous 1954 volume Seduction of the Innocent. The exchange is playful but the supposed adult characters not only threaten to transform each other into common items, the items are linked specifically to juvenile delinquents, the postwar period’s “bad children.” Even the adult characters are threatening and childish. The exchange ends cynically with the butter asking to be turned back into a rabbit, not only a humorous callback to the earlier transformation, but a bit of absurdity that ends the exchange.

Mother and Father then enter and sing a song about how they have been “wonderful parents,” and all that they volunteer to do for the children: going to school functions, helping with science fair projects, serving as a scout leader, paying for prom, and other mundane duties of the parents of adolescent children (11-12). Hansel and Gretel enter and complain that they never get what they want, are never allowed to have any fun, never get to play, and that they hate their toys (14-15). The children are perfectly horrid, promptly ungrateful, and rude to their parents. This is the Jackson of Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, in which the put-upon narrator must deal with the antics of not-always-very-well-behaved children.

The children meet the Witch and are already aware of how the narrative is supposed to go. “I push you in an oven and you bake,” Hansel tells her, “Come on, let’s get started” (16-17).  The Witch, on the other hand, simply wishes to be left alone: “I don’t want anything to do with those children – I just want them to go home” (19). Once again, the witch may be seen as autobiographical. Eventually the parents arrive, and the Witch and the parents debate how to get the children to be good. Mother asks if the Witch has a spell to make them “nicer” (26). The Witch works a spell, but instead it turns the adults to stone. At first Hansel and Gretel are pleased the adults have turned to stone; but when it begins to grow dark, they become concerned. “Now I wish we had been better children,” Gretel confesses (32). The adults reanimate, and the Witch and the Enchanter begin to bicker again, which causes the children to castigate them and demand the adults behave more like them, like “good children” (34).

The problem demonstrated by the play is that the “Good Children” are even more insufferable than the bad children, and the parents beg the witch to undo the spell. The play ends with a song in which the Rabbit laments how the forest will no longer be worth living in, and it will probably rain soon. Jackson reported in an earlier draft the ending was different: by means of a magic spell Hansel and Gretel are transformed into “sweet dear good kind little kiddies,” but the children refused to perform that version – they wanted Hansel and Gretel to stay bratty through the end, and so they do by seeming to transform into the good kids, knowing it will equally drive their parents crazy (Oppenheimer 222). The entire piece is light and lively, something fun for children and teens to perform, but very much in keeping with Jackson’s milieu and regular themes of domestic chaos.

A second play was planned for performance at Bennington College. She writes tantalizingly of the planned production in a letter to her parents on December 15, 1958:

i have become fascinated with the idea of writing a play, and may very well try it next fall. i have two one-act plays, one for the kids which is off in new york being copyrighted, and one for the bennington drama department which they are putting on next spring. i have no trouble writing the dialogue but cannot understand how to move people around the stage. (Hyman 394)

Jackson’s mention of a second one-act play here is fascinating, as it does not seem to have been performed anywhere. She also appears to have thought a good deal about writing a full-length play, with Bennington’s Bill Alton promising a production at the college to try the script in front of an audience before Jackson would send it on to her agent to see if a professional production was possible. This was not the first time Jackson had thought about a three-act play. Four years earlier, in a letter to her agent Bernice Baumgarten on November 18, 1954, she reports work on a play “which I have been doing, to be presented at the college. I am using the Salem witchcraft material, although I will have to change all the names, since I am not sticking to facts” (271). Jackson’s deep abiding interest in Salem is well known, and she had already agreed to write The Witchcraft of Salem Village for Random House’s Landmark series because “I already have enough of a library on the subject to get the material easily” (234). Apparently, Jackson was planning a full-length fictionalized play based on Salem, one year after Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (perhaps the defining drama if not the defining text on the Salem Witch Trials in American popular culture) premiered in New York. It was to have been a collaborative project: “The idea is that I write the play, a faculty composer does the music, and the thing is produced by the combined drama and dance departments” (271). She reports that she had not finished the first act yet, but “everyone is terribly serious about it,” and jokingly asks Baumgarten, “How many tickets do you want for the opening night?” (272). The project seemingly never came to fruition, but one can only wonder and be haunted by (if one might pardon that turn of phrase) what Jackson’s musical about the Salem witchcraft trials might have been.

Two of Jackson’s short stories were adapted for the stage, primarily for performance by school groups, which reinforces my contention that Jackson saw theatre as a form for young people. Film and stage actor Brainerd Duffield (1917-1979), best known for his work in Orson Welles’ film version of Macbeth (1948) found much more success as a writer, adapting a number of classic short stories and novels for the stage in the sixties and seventies, including Alice in Wonderland, W.W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw,” O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi,” and even a musical adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. He also adapted two of Jackson’s short stories for The Dramatic Publishing Company: “The Lottery” in 1953 and “The Summer People” in 1970, with the former obviously receiving many more productions than the latter, given how heavily it is anthologized in educational literary collections. While the Dramatic Publishing Company does work with professional theatres, much of its work is produced by school and community groups; again, Jackson’s theatre is a theatre for young people.

“The Lottery” is a very straightforward adaptation, faithful to the story with no significant changes. Duffield adds only a bit of dialogue at the beginning between “Tommy” and “Dickie” about filling their pockets with stones in place of Jackson’s description of Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix, the character of Mr. Graves the postmaster has been inexplicably removed, and the number of Hutchinson children is reduced from three to one (9-10). Otherwise, Duffield takes no liberties but presents the story on stage as it is in Jackson’s original, from the gathering of the villagers in the morning, through the small talk, Old Man Warner’s nostalgia for lotteries past, the actual lottery as it plays out, concluding in the stoning of Tessie Hutchinson as she cries out, “It isn’t fair!” (25).

Similarly, “The Summer People” remains very faithful to its source story, relating the story of Robert and Janice Allison, the eponymous “summer people” who decide to remain in their summer cottage on a lake in New England past the end of the season, rather than return to the city. The locals, in the form of the grocer Mr. Babcock and his sister (who in the original story was his aunt), the hardware store owner, the woman who runs the newspaper and sandwich shop, and the kerosene and ice delivery man, “whose name Mrs. Allison has never learned,” but whom Duffield names “Mr. Withers,” all first caution and then strongly warn the Allisons not to stay past Labor Day (14, 21, 25). When they do, they find themselves shunned, ignored and without supplies as a storm approaches. They realize their situation all too late. The final stage direction reads:

(The wind starts up again, echoing from afar, then stirring through the nearby trees. Then: the first sudden crash of violent thunder. It rumbles away into silence. In the gathering gloom, ROBERT reaches out to clasp his wife’s hand. The elderly couple sit side by side, as the stage lights fade gradually to blackness.) (30)

Duffield, while displaying strong fidelity to the text of Jackson’s story, in this final moment attempts to use the stagecraft—lights, sounds, the physically dilapidated set of the Allison’s sabotaged cottage—to capture the ambiguous, ominous end of Jackson’s story.

Fidelity to Jackson is obviously the goal for Duffield. He attempts to alter as little as possible when dramatizing Jackson’s stories. The key is not only faithful reproduction of people and events, but also the reproduction of thematic concerns and especially the tone or mood of the piece. Yet, as Linda Hutcheon observes, a transmedia adaptation that moves a story from one medium to another is both derivative of the original work but also an original work in and of itself (6-7). Fidelity, the original hobgoblin of evaluating an adaptation’s “success,” is not necessarily the goal or the measure of an effective adaptation. Perhaps it is easier to adapt Jackson’s short stories in a manner that is highly faithful to the original stories because there is less material to be transformed into stage business and because the educational theatre markets look for plays between twenty-five and forty minutes for performance. Duffield’s adaptations of Jackson suit the market and the need of those who produce them. They are easily produced and appeal to contemporary theatre-going audiences seeking well-done ghost stories.

Novels being adapted for professional performance have a different set of expectations and requirements, and fidelity to every aspect of a longer narrative is not possible in a two hour, three act play. Regardless, adaptations of Jackson’s novels remain “haunted” by her, carrying echoes and memories of other mediated forms of Jackson: the original novels and other media adaptations, as well as the challenge of presenting in stage space novels whose affect are mostly within the protagonist’s head.  Both The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) were dramatized for the stage within a few years of their publications, in 1964 and 1966, respectively. F. Andrew Leslie, president of Dramatists Play Service and adapter of several novels and screenplays for the stage wrote The Haunting of Hill House, while British novelist and screenwriter who would later achieve fame in the theatre for writing the book for Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street was invited to adapt We Have Always Lived in the Castle for an October 1966 production on Broadway. Both plays have been periodically revived in regional, community, and college theatres, with an exponential increase in production in the twenty-first century. Like Duffield’s adaptations of Jackson’s short stories, and in keeping with the naturalistic nature of midcentury American theatre, itself rooted in a kind of kitchen-sink realism (think Arthur Miller, William Inge, Tennessee Williams, etc.), these are faithful adaptations of the novels, naturalistically following plots and major events and keeping significant dialogue as close to Jackson as possible. Unlike Duffield’s versions, however, the adaptors had to meet the material needs of midcentury performance in terms of sets, costumes, and personnel required. Whereas Jackson, like all fiction authors, may change locale with ease, moving scenes through entire houses, neighborhoods, and towns, naturalistic sets limit the number of stage sets available to the show. Likewise, characters may be employed for a single moment in a novel, but since actors cost money, it is often easier to conflate or eliminate roles not vital to moving the main plot forward.

Leslie’s adaptation for the stage was written the year after Robert Wise’s film The Haunting was released. Thus, there was already a dramatized adaptation of Jackson’s novel present in the culture when the stage play was first mounted. Leslie stays very close to the book’s plot and characters, beginning the play with chapter two of the novel, but for the purposes of keeping production easy reduces the entire book down to two locations: the parlor of Hill House and Eleanor’s bedroom. All action is either transferred to one of these two locations or reported about in them. As in the novel, no ghosts are seen, but writing mysteriously appears, noises are heard, and we witness Eleanor’s breakdown directly in front of us, in stage time.

While the central four of Dr. Montague, Luke Sanderson, Theodora (“just Theodora”), and Eleanor Vance are all present and close to their characters in the novel, the Dudleys are reduced down to Mrs. Dudley with her husband spoken of but never seen (Jackson, Hill House 9). The comic presence of Mrs. Montague and Arthur arrive towards the end of act two, scene one. The play itself is divided into three acts of two scenes each, covering roughly the first day the group is in Hill House and then the first night in which haunting events begin to occur around Eleanor (act one), followed by a morning and evening several days later (act two), and the next evening and the morning after that (act three). During each scene in the script after the first, something horrific and supernatural seems to happen, but mostly it is Eleanor and the audience who experience it. The other characters grow suspicious of Eleanor. Given that the scope of the narrative is reduced to six scenes, the events of the novel become truncated and occur much more frequently.

The script thus employs a series of special effects, such as loud pounding around the room and the doorknob repeatedly turning on the first night in the house (act one, scene two), in which Eleanor and Theo are terrified. Significant scenes from the novel (highlighted in Wise’s film) are also reproduced faithfully in Leslie’s version (“You left me alone?…Then whose hand was I holding? Do you hear me? Whose hand was I holding?” (44).) On the other hand, because of the two sets in use – bedroom and parlor – Luke must tell the audience that written in large letters down the hall is “Help Eleanor / come home,” the audience does not see the writing with their own hands (40).

Given that Hill House is a highly ambiguous novel, in which the reader is never certain (and may decide for themselves) if Hill House is actually haunted or if Eleanor suffers a psychological break due to her own issues and experiences, one of the challenges in staging the piece is to figure out how to ambiguously haunt the play. When staging a disembodied spirit in a live performance, the production must attempt to make the immaterial and disembodied presence present. This is often done with a corporeal body (an actor), which both confirms the presence of a ghost but makes the ghost corporeal and material. As Steven Jay Schneider observes, it is the ambiguity of the supernatural and the psychological states of the characters in Jackson’s work, in what he terms the “calculated ambiguity of the source, cause, and meaning of the disturbances,” that is effective at chilling the audience without providing a specific experience of the supernatural or a specific answer on whether or not the ghosts are real (173).

An actor is a corporeal body, such as seen in plays such as Hamlet, Macbeth and A Christmas Carol, which place an actor portraying an ostensibly disincorporate spirit in physical costume and makeup to suggest a ghost. Missing is any sense of the uncanny—how does a body present the disembodied? Productions of The Haunting of Hill House must then employ something other than an actor to suggest haunting: sound, lighting, and the human character performers’ reactions to encountering the supernatural to create the potential reality of disembodied presences. In 2012 the Aux Dog Theatre of Albuquerque presented Leslie’s play for Halloween. One local review noted, “It’s a more genteel, refined, old-fashioned kind of scary, not like today’s gory, slash-a-minute horror movies” (Yannias). That same reviewer observed, “the stars of this production are sound designer John Hull, lighting designer John Aspholm, props designer Claudia Mathes, sound and light operator Sean Donovan, and the backstage crew…” (Yannias). Through sound design, especially placing noises throughout the space, and the use of lighting (or lack thereof), the audience is present in the haunted space. When the theatre is unable to use the power of liveness and suggestion, the production fails to raise the level of fear for the audience, to wit the productions at City Lit Theatre, Chicago, which “never gets the atmosphere at the Hill House eerie enough to get us to believe that poltergeists are inhabiting the place,” and Liverpool Playhouse, which despite being co-produced by Hammer was perceived to be a ghost of what it could have been (Williams; Clapp).

Part of the reason why some productions of the play fail to affect the audience in the manner the novel affected readers is because the production is haunted by the memory of the novel. Theatre theorist Marvin Carlson, after Derrida, observes that all texts are haunted by other texts, and all theatrical performances are haunted by the audience’s memories of previous performances. Carlson argues that “the reenactment of events already enacted, the reexperience of emotions already experienced …have always been central concerns of the theatre” (Carlson 3). The theatre uses actors’ bodies and material culture (sets, costumes, props, etc.) to re-enact and to make imagined events and people have a physical reality. Carlson’s observes the opening scene of Hamlet could serve as an extended metaphor for theatre-as-haunting: Horatio’s line, “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” (1.i.26) could apply to either a ghost or a theatrical performance (7). Carlson states the theatrical performance is thus “a ghostly tapestry” woven for the audience, “playing in various degrees and combinations with that audience’s collective and individual experiences with this play,” the performers (whom one may have seen in other roles), the space (which one may have seen in other configurations), and, if there is one, the source text and other iterations of the same story (Carlson 7). Leslie’s The Haunting of Hill House, were one to encounter it now, is haunted by Jackson’s novel, by the Robert Wise and Jan de Bont films, and the Mike Flanagan-helmed Netflix series, in addition to any previous stage versions one may have seen. The memory of these other “Hill Houses” reside within the mind of the audience member watching the play.

Carlson posits the theatre itself is a “memory machine,” both a kind of haunting (the past brought to life on stage), but also a constant reminder of the audience’s previous experiences with performed narratives in addition to the textual haunting. While Carlson’s focus is on actors’ performances – that performances in the present are haunted by the actor’s previous performances in other roles – plays are “haunted” by the viewers’ memories of previous productions of that text and previous iterations of the text. Wheeler’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is thus also haunted by the memory of Jackson’s novel, despite not being a ghost story itself. We Have Always Lived in the Castle previewed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway on October 17, 1966, directed by Garson Kanin and featuring Shirley Knight as Constance, Heather Menzies (who had just finished playing Louisa von Trapp in The Sound of Music) as Merricat, and Alan Webb as Uncle Julian.  The show ran for two previews and nine performances, closing on October 26, and, like the stage version of Hill House, has had a remarkable afterlife in the twenty-first century.

As with The Haunting of Hill House and in keeping with Broadway theatrical culture of the 1950s and 60 (at least for straight plays), Wheeler adapted We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a straightforward naturalistic drama. The Blackwood family is present—Mary Katharine, Constance, Uncle Julian and Charles—as is Jonas. In the novel, Jonas is Merricat’s cat, often seen as a kind of familiar for yet another witch-character of Jackson’s. Wheeler, in order to give Merricat someone to voice her thoughts to (always an issue in naturalism), changes Jonas into “a nine-year old colored boy adopted into the Blackwood family,” although after the Broadway production, when the script was published for community and school use, the script later notes “Jonas may also be played by a white boy” (2, 6).

The transformation of Jonas from cat to a Black child is arguably the biggest change. As already noted, the purpose is obvious—a child is easier to work with on stage than a cat and Merricat needs a character with whom she can speak her thoughts. Wheeler making the child Black also seems to serve three purposes: his ethnicity separates him from the others in the village, making him an outcast and different like the Blackwoods; his race forms a marker of difference between himself and the rest of his adopted family, making him an outsider to both village and family; and his perspective of seeing the events in the house as a “game” oddly allows him to be the one through whom the audience can enter the play. Yet it cannot be ignored that the suggestive link of domestic animal and Black child is particularly problematic. American history has frequently linked Black people with the animalistic, particularly beasts of burden, and equating Jonas the cat with Jonas the young Black child manifests yet another pertinent evocation of Carlson’s notion of the haunted stage. This transformation is haunted by American racial history and the off-stage Civil Rights movement occurring even as the play was performed. The novelty of a white family in New England adopting a Black child would be unusual, but not impossible in 1966. But the role that child plays is rooted in the dehumanization of people, and especially children, of color, and haunts the play in a manner unintended by Walker. It is a radical and interesting transformation, while problematic, does serve one purpose Walker intends: to give an actual person with whom the Blackwood sisters, Merricat in particular, can interact and speak.

The villagers themselves are reduced to two individuals: Miss Helen Clark and Mrs. Lucille Wright, who stand for all the other village characters in the novel. Again, given the naturalism of the period, and the need to keep costs low, it makes sense to have but two judgmental women, one younger, one older, stand for the whole of the village. The overall effect, however, is to make the story even smaller. The primary conflict is played out as a battle between the Blackwood sisters and two other women. The sense of being against a community (as seen in the novel and as more effectively carried out by Duffield in “The Lottery” and “The Summer People”) is perhaps reduced by the presence of only two. Given these constraints, the rest of the play follows the plot of the novel very closely. Its short run, however, would seem to indicate the play neither found an audience, nor acceptance among the theatregoers of New York.

In addition to subsequent productions of the Wheeler text, in 2010 Adam Bock and Todd Almond staged a musical version at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, directed by Anne Kauffman, which ran from September 23 to October 9. Once Bock and Almond approached Yale Rep about staging a musical version of Jackson, the theatre commissioned the piece as part of their “New Musicals” program (Meyers). Bock cites the musical Urinetown as being a driving force in perceiving non-traditional sources for musicals as fertile ground for source material (Meyers). Yale Rep described the musical’s plot as such:

Acquitted of a horrible crime six years ago, Constance Blackwood (Jenn Gambatese) lives with her devoted younger sister Merricat (Alexandra Socha) and their uncle Julian (Bill Buell) in what was once the home of the richest—and most envied—family in a small New England town. Constance tends to the house and garden while Merricat invents magical charms to protect the surviving Blackwoods from the townspeople’s prying eyes and vicious gossip. But talismans may not be powerful enough to keep the sisters together when their handsome cousin Charles (Sean Palmer) comes to visit. (Hetrick)

Once again, the novel’s plot is followed closely, but since the adaptation follows the form of a musical, not a naturalistic play, the creators were able to be both more metaphoric and expansive.  Musicals also allow for characters to voice inner thoughts that are not possible to express other than transforming them into dialogue in naturalism.

The cast consisted of “The Living Blackwoods” (Constance, Merricat, Uncle Julian and Charles) and “The Villagers and Blackwood Ancestors,” playing individuals from the village, a kind of chorus, and the ghostly ancestors of the Blackwoods. This separation of the cast, even in the program, serves to isolate the Blackwoods from the surrounding community, which the director also did through blocking—with villagers lurking in the background. In addition to the set of the house, the designers had a model of a small town that was employed to show the relationship between the expansive space in which the sisters live and the claustrophobia and smallness of the town which banished them—a literalization of Jackson’s themes.

The reception of the piece, however, was mixed at best. The New York Times review believed the problem with the adaptation was that Bock and Almond followed musical theatre conventions and tropes, and in doing so, removed the gothic aspect of the novel, making it lose the mood and atmosphere of Jackson’s original:

But in adapting Jackson’s unsettling book for the stage, the playwright Adam Bock and the composer Todd Almond have thrown open the shutters and let in the sunshine. Instead of finding a fresh, introspective musical form to express the haunting atmosphere of the book, which is told from the perspective of the younger and odder of the two sisters, Mr. Bock and Mr. Almond essentially try to make Jackson’s gothic tale conform to the generic norms of musical comedy. The show is about as spine-tingling as Broadway’s date with “The Addams Family,” and about as much fun. (Isherwood)

Likewise, the songs were “conventional” and did not suit the tone of the novel, according to Isherwood. The show ultimately did not continue on to Broadway. In short, the unique challenges of adapting Jackson to the stage and transforming interiority into the performable was made further difficult by the choice of the adaptors to foreground theatrical convention and trope to the expense of the material.

More recently, in the twenty-first century, revivals of the Leslie and Wheeler adaptations have found critical and popular success in regional and community theatre. Numerous productions of both plays have been mounted in the last two decades, growing more frequent since 2010. In addition, other adaptations of Jackson’s works are finding space on American stages—professional, academic and community. Just outside of Washington, D.C., in Maryland, the Port Tobacco Players Theatre presented The Haunting of Hill House in October of 2005, and, like the productions noted above, reviewers found that the language dated but the play was effective because of its technical elements: set, lighting, sound and effects (Thorne).

Anthony Neilson adapted The Haunting of Hill House for Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse, co-produced by the legendary Hammer Studios in 2015. This adaptation differs from Leslie’s, employing direct address of the audience and a good deal more sound, lighting, and special effects that seem to suggest more strongly that the house is haunted beyond Eleanor’s mind. Carlson’s theory seems borne out by the Guardian’s review: “The Haunting of Hill House is a play spooked by a ghost. That of the 1959 book on which Anthony Neilson’s adaptation is based,” in this case the reviewer finding that using direct address of the audience to voice the character’s thoughts and fears, while allowing the audience some of Jackson’s interiority, undercuts the actual horror as the performers narrate what they experience, rather than experiencing it in front of said audience (Clapp).

As previously noted, City Lit Theatre in Chicago has presented a number of Jackson’s works: We Have Always Lived in the Castle in 2012, The Haunting of Hill House in 2014, and The Sundial in 2017, all adapted and directed by Paul Edwards. Other recent productions of Leslie’s Hill House adaptation include ones at the Granite Theatre in Rhode Island in 2014, Olathe Civic Theatre in Olathe, Kansas in 2019, Curzon Theatre in Brighton, UK and Theatre Knoxville (Tennessee) both in 2021, at the University of Nebraska at Kearney in 2022, and both Theatre Longview in Texas and the Bluebird Theatre in South Carolina in October 2023, as well as dozens more. Perhaps in response to the Netflix series bringing attention to the story, or perhaps because Jackson is enjoying a stage renaissance, The Haunting of Hill House has been revived on professional, academic and community stages with greater frequency in the last few years.

Yet another version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle was adapted and mounted by the Bottle Alley Theatre Company at Austin’s historic Neill-Cochran House in 2022, a form of immersive theatre in which the audience is actually in a house as the events of the story play out. Directed by Marian Kansas, the audience literally followed first Merricat, then other family members as they move through the house relating the story. Constance was played as sweet and inviting, but Merricat was “unsettling” throughout the show (Thomas). Apparently what naturalism in a proscenium theatre and a musical approach could not do worked effectively in site-specific immersive theatre, as the production was seen as both “atmospheric” and conveying a genuine sense of the novel and its characters (Thomas).

One might argue that Jackson herself has been enjoying a renaissance, and recent publications (including the founding of this journal) seem to indicate so. What is unique about the stage productions is this sense of being haunted by the other versions, combined with an immersive live experience that attempts to capture what Jackson does in her narratives and with her characters. The shift into a new medium and understanding how these plays function in space, making the invisible visible (as in The Haunting of Hill House), or implying to an audience that which is only known internally (as in We Have Always Lived in the Castle), can give audiences new insights into Jackson’s fiction, translating her literary characters into flesh-and-blood actors occupying Hill House and “the castle.” With a play, we literally enter the worlds of the novels.

What is perhaps most fascinating is that Jackson herself, as I noted at the beginning of this essay, was a commedia devotee who considered theatre and the stage as an activity by and for young people—her fiction and letters certainly demonstrate this attitude. The Jackson renaissance, however, has, as I hope has been demonstrated here, delivered adaptations of Jackson for the stage that are by and for adults. Schools may occasionally still produce “The Lottery” (I could find no evidence of recent productions of The Bad Children: A Musical in One Act for Bad Children) but stage Jackson in the twenty-first century consists of her adult novels. Jackson might have perceived theatre as being for young people, but those who wish to stage her work do not share that attitude. There are unique difficulties with adapting Jackson’s fiction for the stage, which might also explain why she saw it as so separate from the rest of her work, and why she preferred a young audience for drama, as opposed to the more adult audience for her fiction. In other words, even had her life not predisposed to see drama as a children’s activity, her approach to fiction, primarily through interiority and access to characters’ thoughts and experiences made drama a less accessible medium for her. But since children’s theatre is entirely “exterior,” in that sense, her drama was youth oriented. When playwrights and directors, more familiar with the techniques of rendering the invisible visible and making interior exterior on stage approach Jackson’s work for adaptation, they have managed to find creative ways to bring her fiction to life despite (or because of) those same challenges. These stage adaptations, particularly in the last five years, must also now compete with the very different adaptations for streaming television and cinema. The recent series of The Haunting of Hill House and film of We Have Always Lived in the Castle also now haunt and frame stage productions. It seems fair to assert that the increase in stage productions of Jackson adaptations has been fueled or at least helped by the screen adaptations. Screen adaptations, however, are a different animal, and, if we are honest, we must note they have received the lion’s share of attention from scholarship. Staged adaptation of Jackson, however, offers something that cinematic ones cannot and that is liveness. One is in Hill House with the characters when the novel is adapted to the stage. The noises, the strange occurrences all happen in the same room as the viewer. It is this liveness that also creates a different experience than reading the novel—one loses the interiority but gains the experience of the story firsthand.

Jackson continues to shape the stage at Bennington and environs well into the twenty-first century. As of this writing, Drama at Bennington offered an adaptation of “The Lottery” by Muhammad Ammar entitled “The Harmony” in October 2023, set in the not-too-distant future and incorporating the internet, digital surveillance, and campus censorship into Jackson’s vision of a community willing to sacrifice its own to preserve a status quo (“Drama at Bennington Presents”). Just two years earlier, the Bennington Community Theatre staged F. Andrew Leslie’s adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House in October and November 2021. In the press release for the production, director Roger Ebert noted the novel was written in North Bennington and that local sites had inspired Jackson (“‘The Haunting of Hill House’ at BPAC”). Tyler Lederer’s subsequent review in the Bennington Banner seems to confirm my earlier contentions: “The star of the show, however, is the stagecraft. Practical effects abound. The door at center stage closes by itself. The doorknobs rattle, paintings shake, and the lights flicker. These are classic effects but they are well-executed and it is interesting to see the characters, highly aware of the story they are in, react to them with unironic fear” (Lederer). If productions such as these continue, it seems like the American theatre will remain haunted by Jackson for some time.

Works Cited

Abele, Robert. “Family mystery is strangely clueless,” Los Angeles Times (May 17, 2019): E9.

Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. The U of Michigan P, 2003.

Clapp, Susannah. “The Haunting of Hill House review – a spectre in search of a feast.” The Guardian, 20 Dec. 2015, https:www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/dec/20/haunting-of-hill-house-liverpool-playhouse-observer-review. Accessed October 22, 2018.

“Drama at Bennington Presents: The Harmony – Student Production,” n.d., https://www. bennington.edu/events/2023-10-14/drama-bennington-presents-harmony%E2%80%94student-production. Accessed September 10, 2023.

Duffield, Brainerd. The Lottery. Dramatic Publishing, 1953.

—. Shirley Jackson’s The Summer People. The Dramatic Publishing Company, 1970.

Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Liverright, 2016.

Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Twayne Publishing, 1975.

Hetrick, Adam. “Todd Almond-Adam Bock Musical We Have Always Lived in the Castle Opens at Yale Rep Sept. 23.” Playbill, 23 Sept. 2010, https://playbill.com/article/todd-almond-adam-bock-musical-we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle-opens-at-yale-rep-sept-23-com-172029. Accessed 15 Aug. 2023.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006.

Hyman, Laurence Jackson, editor. The Letters of Shirley Jackson. Random House, 2021.

Isherwood, Charles. “American Gothic Tale With a Ray of Sunshine,” The New York Times. 27 Sept. 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/theater/reviews/28wehave.html. Accessed 15 Aug. 2023.

Jackson, Shirley. The Bad Children. The Dramatic Publishing Company, 1957.

—. The Haunting of Hill House. Penguin, 1984.

—. The Road through the Wall. Penguin Books, 2013.

—. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Viking Press, 1962.

—. The Witchcraft of Salem Village. Landmark Books, 1956.

King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Berkeley Books, 1982.

Lederer, Tyler. “Bennington Community Theatre shows excellent stagecraft in ‘The Haunting of Hill House’.” Bennington Banner. 01 Nov. 2021, https://www.benningtonbanner.com/arts_and _culture/bennington-community-theatre-shows-excellent-stagecraft-in-the-haunting-of-hill-house/article_59f4f9da-1d2b-5134-a6a4-a0951095b5f9.html. Accessed 10 Sept. 2023.

Leslie, F. Andrew.  The Haunting of Hill House. Dramatists Play Service, 1959.

Mallatratt, Stephen. The Woman in Black. Samuel French, 1989.

Meyers, Joe. “‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ Bows at Yale Rep.” Connecticut Post, 21 Sept. 2010, http://www.ctpost.com/entertainment/article/We-Have-Always-Lived-in-the-Castle-bows-at-Yale-668099.php. Accessed 10 Sept. 2023.

Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1988.

Schneider, Stephen Jay. “Thrice Told Tales: The Haunting from Novel to Film,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 30, no. 3, 2002, pp. 166-76.  

“‘The Haunting of Hill House’ at BPAC.” Bennington Banner, 12 Oct. 2021, https://www. benningtonbanner.com/community-news/the-haunting-of-hill-house-at-bpac/article_016a0f50-2b7b-11ec-9a66-4f2745b6b846.html. Accessed 10 Sept. 2023.

Thomas, Courtney. “Theatre Review: Bottle Alley’s ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’.” Sightlines Magazine, 07 Nov. 2022, https://sighlinesmag.org/theatre-review-bottle-alleys-we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle. Accessed 23 Jun. 2023.

Thorne, Lynn Follmer. “’Haunting of Hill House’ Is Good but Holds No Horrors,” The Washington Post, 02 Oct. 2005, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/ 2005/10/02/haunting-of-hill-house-is-good-but-holds-no-horrors/8e875b13-ad00-44cc-bfee-982212fdf699/. Accessed 23 Jun. 2023.

Wheeler, Hugh. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Dramatists Play Service, 1967.

Williams, Tom. “The Haunting of Hill House,” Chicago Critic.com, 31 Mar. 2014, https://chicagocritic.com/haunting-hill-house/.  Accessed 22 Oct. 2018.

Yannias, Dean. “Regional Reviews: Albuquerque/Santa Fe: The Haunting of Hill House.” Talkin’ Broadway, n.d., https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/alb/alb118.html.  Accessed 22 Oct. 2018.

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[1] A letter to Hyman dated August 3, 1938 references commedia dell’arte. Laurence Jackson Hyman observes his mother’s “lifelong interest” in the commedia (29).  In a subsequent note from Hyman, he observes, “The commedia dell’arte and its elaborate costumes would remain a touchstone for Shirley throughout her life” (43).

[2] See: Franklin, Oppenheimer, and Hyman.

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