What possible connection can there be between Shakespeare’s arch-fiend, Iago, and a banjo-plucking teller of American tall-tales about giant mosquitoes and hound-dogs that outrun the Cannonball Express?  And what does either have in common with a fretful Victorian governess, the angelic children put in her care, and the shadowy visitors who disrupt their lives?  Portland Stage Company challenges us to examine the relations among just such a diverse trio as we consider its schedule of productions for the first half of the 1995-96 season.
 
Opening with Othello, Portland Stage Company moves on to Banjo Dancing—a one-man show by story-teller, clog-dancer, and banjo-virtuoso Stephen Wade—and then greets the dark month of January with one of the most chilling ghost stories ever told, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, adapted for the stage by Jeffrey Hatcher.
 
As we imagine these three theatrical evenings taking stage successively at Portland Stage, we might want to bear in mind a line spoken by the Governess in the January ghost tale: “The best stories always begin in the garden. . . a man, a woman, a serpent.”  The greatest such story, as the Governess reminds us, is in Genesis, and it tells about the power of evil, the loss of innocence, and our expulsion from Eden.  Amont the very earliest stories in our tradition, this is a tale we have been telling ourselves in endless variations ever since—from the Gospels (in which the innocent Christ dies for sinful humanity), to Romantic poetry (in which the artist rejects corrupt society and embraces innocent nature), to radical politics (in which the innocent members of the working class are preyed upon by satanic capitalism).
 
Even in 1995, when public corruption and cynicism sometimes seem boundless, the drama of innocence violated retains a powerful hold on our imaginations.  Witness our shock at the movie Kids with its horrifying portrayal of an AIDS-carrying seducer of virgin girls; or the outrage that drove Calvin Klein’s kiddie-porn ads off the airwaves and out of newspapers and magazines.
 
And as we review Othello, Banjo Dancing, and The Turn of the Screw with the Governess’s observation in mind, it becomes clear that what ties these three very different evenings of theater together is a shared—though varied—focus on the endlessly recurring of confrontation between innocence and corruption.  To be sure, each treats this theme in a radically different way; but through the divergences runs a common thread.
 
When Othello arrives triumphantly in Cyprus and finds his beautiful young wife, Desdemona awaiting him at the dock, he utters an expression of transcendent bliss:

It gives me wonder great as my content
To see you here before me . . .
            . . . If if were now to die
Twere now to be most happy, for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute
That another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.

​At this moment Othello and Desdemona are virtually in Eden together, each providing the other’s paradise.  From their earliest encounters, they have been aware of the ways they complete one another, forming together a perfectly harmonious whole

She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.

Their wooing grows out of the spontaneous recognition of this complementarity, and develops with the inevitability of music, moving from attraction, to love, to marriage with flawless moral and emotional logic.
 
Thus, when confronted by Desdemona’s angry father, who is convinced his daughter has been snared into marriage by drugs or magic spells, Othello refuses to shrink from his accuser, declaring that, “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul/Shall manifest me rightly.”  That claim of perfection, audacious as it may be, is no more than a just assertion of his—and desdemona’s—utter innocence, and absolute fitness as lovers and mates.
 
Into this garden glides the serpent Iago, resentful of being passed over for promotion, suspicious of his wife’s relations with the Moor, and determined to destroy Othello.  What better way to poison his master’s life than by impugning the innocence of Desdemona?  The dictionary tells us that the name “Satan” is derived from a Hebrew verb meaning “to plot against,” and that is precisely what Iago does throughout the play:

 . . . Let me see now:
To get his place, and to  plume up my will
In double knavery.  How?  How?  Let’s see.

His knavery is made all the easier because he has such a credulous victim to work on.  We have seen that the name “Satan” means “plotter.”  But what does it mean to be plotted against, to be innocent?
 
According to the dictionary, it is mostly a negative quality.  To be innocent is to be without sin, guilt, moral wrong, taint; to be unmarked by cunning, artifice, harm, or guile.  It is to be unacquainted with evil.  The few qualities with which innocence is affirimatively associated are strangely vacuous: “silliness,” and “naivete.”   We may value innocence, then,  but it doesn’t seem like a particularly robust moral or emotional quality, one capable of sithstanding a determined assault.  It is precisely this vulnerability that Iago seizes on whenwhen he contemplates the innocence of Othello and Desdemona.  Of the former he notes, “The Moor is of a free and open nature,” stating a fact that seems like a compliment until we notice where he takes it: “And will as tenderly be led by the nose/ As asses are.”

Of the Moor’s wife he observes:
‘tis most easy
Th’inclining Desdemona to dubdue
To any honest suit; she’s framed as fruitful
As the free elements.

In other words, in her virtuous eagerness to help people, she is as accessible as the sun or the air, the free elements available to all.  Which, of course, also makes her the perfect patsy for any schemer looking to sandbag an unsuspecting mark.  In Desdemona’s case, the “honest suit” the trickster has in mind is Desdemona’s advocacy on behalf of the disgraced Michael Cassio, an ardent act of friendship that Iago will frame for the credulous Othello as evidence of adultery.
 
We all know what happens next.  Blinded by their innocence, the virtuous pushovers Othello and Desdemona are led by their noses along the plotter’s road to murder and suicide, with Iago rejoicing all the while in the cunning of his own wickedness.
 
“A guiltless death I die,” says Desdemona, dying nonetheless, her innocence insufficient armor against evil in this fallen world.  Too late, Emilia informs Othello that his wife was faithful.  He looks down on the blameless corpse and says:

Had she been true
If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I’d not have sold her for it.

Like Adam expelled from Eden, Othello is looking back to a vanished perfection.  Death has conferred on Desdemona the ultimate status in the economics of the heart: absolute scarcity.  And accordingly her value soars, exceeding in worth a full-scale replica of the world carved from a single, colossal, flawless precious stone.  This longing for a lost treasure is already a kind of nostalgia, a recurrent element in many stories of lost innocence. Recurrent because innocence, vulnerable as it is, is always passing out of the world, slipping from our grasp, becoming something briefly possessed and thereafter hungrily remembered.
 
We have come to associate nostalgia with a yearning  for the past.  In its root sense, however, nostalgia is closer to “homesickness,” the pain suffered by the exile or the immigrant over the loss of his native land.  In America, the land that is always changing and therefore always becoming lost to us,  we often experience nostalgia in both modes—as hunger for a place and a time that have vanished, for a home that history has taken from us.  We man even yearn for an America we have never in fact experienced.  Who remembers colonial New England or the Wild West?  Yet places like Old Sturbridge Village, or cultural icons like John Ford movies supply visions of a mythic “homeland” that elicit a nostalgia as powerful as many a real country could command.
 
In Banjo Dancing, Stephen Wade carries us into another such mythic zone, an earlier, more innocent America, a country of the mind that we all sometimes yearn for.  Ron Jenkins, author of Acrobats of the Soul, describes the world Wade creates as a “one-man hodgepodge of oral-archeological-historical-ethnomusicalogical folklore.”  Jenkins’s widely-admired study of contemporary comic performance notes that Wade has taken us to this imaginary place largely by means of the tall-tale, “a vital form of nineteenth-century American humor, mirroring the overinflated confidence of a nation in the process of conquering what seemed a limitless wilderness.”
 
Founded on exaggeration, tall-tales thrust us into the world as viewed by a credulous child for whom no challenge is too big, no adversary too strong, no situation too scary to confront.  In this world a determined dentist, wrestling with a recalcitrant tooth, enacts a child’s fantasy, and pulls his patient’s head off; and here also we find a mosquito so huge that its photograph alone weighs twelve pounds.  These are two details from among the many stories Wade tells, stories culled from sources as diverse as collections of nineteenth century street-literature, Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, the Federal Writer’s Project, and wade’s own experiences  at summer camp.
 
As we listen to each of these stories, we agree to set aside our adult demands for verisimilitude, and to revel in the pleasure of impossibility itself.  We return to an America of dazzling superlatives, a wacky Eden in the Wilderness, where the challenges facing our ancestors are matched only by their superhuman ability to overcome them.
 
These stories are punctuated by virtuoso banjo-playing, often on instruments that are themselves precious artifacts from the American past.  In one such interlude, Wade picks up a banjo that his teacher bought forty years earlier in a used furniture shop in Wisconsin.  The furniture dealer sold it without any sense of its background or value, but for Wade, the instrument is a conduit to history.  As Ron Jenkins writes, “Wade’s style of musical storytelling turns the banjo into something resembling a totemic object.  Tapping its links to America’s past, he communes with it as if it were a piece of history that could ut him in touch with the lives of our collective ancestors by revealing the lost rhythms of their stories, songs, and jokes.”
 
Tall-tale and banjo between them create an image of a more innocent America lost to us now—loss being always the fate of innocence.  Indeed, the drama of Wade’s performance arises out of the contrast between that distant happy world and the fallen country re really inhabit.  Tough we have never lived in the America Wade calls into existence, we nonetheless feel for it a real nostalgia, a sense that Wade’s world of sacred banjos and fabulous bugs, dogs, and dentists is as much a part of our forfeited legacy as Eden itself.
 
The ghost-tale, like the tall-tale, confronts us with a seeming impossibility, with a form of exaggeration, a sense of the world as containing too much—namely, in the ghost story, the superfluous and unwelcome presence of the dead.  In The Turn of the Screw there are two ghosts, and they appear—or do they?—to two children and the governess who is charged with their care.  Indeed, what turns the screw, in Henry James’s view, is the involvement of the innocent young with morally tainted visitors from beyond the grave.  “If [one] child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children,” one of the characters asks his eager audience.
 
As the story begins, the main narrator, a woman of twenty—who remains nameless throughout—is being interviewed by a handsome man of the world for a position as governess to his young niece and nephew, flora and Miles, who have been left parentless through an unhappy stroke of fate.  The woman accepts the job, and arrives at Bly, the country house where the children live.  Before long, the Governess begins to encounter strangers on the property: a man with red hair standing on a tower; a “pale and dreadful” woman who appears at the edge of a lake.  She describes these apparitions to Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper, who recognizes them as Peter Quint and Miss Jessel—the ltter the previous governess to Miles and flora, the former, valet to the children’s uncle, the Governess’s handsome employer.  And both, Mrs. Grose informs the Governess, are now dead.
 
What makes their return especially horrible is the undercurrent of sexual corruption that accompanies them.  Quint and Jessel have behaved scandalously with each other, and, even more revoltingly, have been “too free” with the children.  And it seems to be the children who draw Quint and Jessel back to the world of the living—as if the lascivious dead wish to claim Miles and Flora as partners in some nameless and eternal depravity.
 
The Governess has no doubt about her role in this drama of threatened innocence.  She will oppose Quint and Jessel with all the energy and resolve she can muster, protecting the children from their obscene clutches.  Unfortunately, the children seem not merely indifferent to her efforts, but positively attracted to the unclean spirits.  As the Governess views it, Flora and Miles feign unawareness of Quint and Jessel while scheming constantly to make contact with them.  Their innocence, in other words, is amere appearance.
 
As the tension between the Governess and the children increases, she determines to force them to acknowledge the lews apparitions.  Flora reacts with loathing toward the Governess, and demands to be taken away, while Miles, left alone with his caretaker tn the haunted house, undergoes a horrible confrontation and dies in the process.
 
The original audience for The Turn of the Screw--written in 1898—took the governess at facevalue, accepting mostly without question her version of events.  Within a decade or so, however, readers began to notice that we had only the Governess’s word for what happened at Bly.  Perhaps, some surmised, this account of innocence perverted by lascivious ghosts was untrustworthy, and the Governess, herself obsessed by erotic demons, had imagined it all.  Perhaps she even frightened poor Miles to death with her terrifying insistence on the presence of the stalker Quint.  Critical opinion has volleyed back and forth between these two positions ever since, the story in itself offering tantalizing ambiguities in support of both sides.  (Brad Leithauser provides an overview of these competing interpretations in a 2012 article in The New Yorker.)
 
What we need to notice here is how Henry James uses the paradigm of innocence and corruption in a way that is distinctly modern, which is to say distinctly problematic.  Whereas Shakespeare is clear as to the villainy of Iago, the virtue of Desdemona, and the naïve folly of Othello, James leaves us grasping at straws.  Do the ghosts exist, or are they figments of the Governess’s imagination?  Are the children angelic victims of a neurotic young woman, or are they eager participants in their own corruption?  Here again, as in Genesis, the loss of innocence is the heart of the drama.  But in James’s story the identity of the serpent remains radically indeterminate.
 
The Portland Stage Company provides us with three versions of the loss of innocence. Shakespeare harrows us with the vision of credulous virtue being led by the nose to catastrophe; Stephen Wade regales us with the songs and stories of a distant America whose loss we all share; and Henry James reminds us that distinguishing evil from innocence may baffle the keenest observer.