Review: The Yellow Wallpaper by The Archive Theater Company
by Michael Meigs

 

I’ve been waking up late at night, thinking about yellow wallpaper, fretful and upset. Or, rather, about Archive Theatre’s The Yellow Wallpaper, which I attended on opening weekend in early September.

 

Not the way that beautifully fragile Sadie Okerstrom obsessed over the grim, grimy yellow wallpaper hung precariously on the set depicting a room with barred windows in a dilapidated, isolated manor.

 

This script by Jeff Davis based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1891 twenty-page short story* tracks a wife’s descent into madness while confined by her physician husband for a “rest cure” for nervous affliction. The through line of Gilman’s story, presented as short first-person jottings in a hidden diary, is the wife’s conviction that a menacing, spectral woman lurks behind that horrible wall paper. The two other characters—husband John and his sister Jennie—are rarely present.

 

 Davis has crafted his stage version of The Yellow Wallpaper as a two-hander featuring wife and husband in dialogue throughout. Or perhaps as a three-hander, for Cody Arn’s set looms ever present, mute but menacing. When the wife is alone onstage, that set has an unnerving tendency to shudder, creak, even to illuminate before and behind thanks to Amy Lewis’s at times unnerving lighting design.

 

I dislike tales of horror as well as tales of madness, for life can be all too horrible and mad on its own. There’s been comment that this stage version is “gothic,” implying the intervention of forces from beyond the grave. I found Davis’s interpretation not to be a tale of horror; I perceived it instead as a prolonged study of cruelty.

 

Not Theatre of Cruelty, pioneered by Antonin Artaud in the early twentieth century as immersive theatrical experience meant to jolt and shake a passive audience. No; Davis subjects the wife to the ministrations of a husband who’s self-sure, patronizing, patriarchal, dismissive, duplicitous and exploitative. I had to admire Mon Darter’s unflinching embrace of a character the playwright designed to represent all that was horrible about nineteenth-century middle-class males and is equally horrible today in so many “cis-normal” men.

 

 

The script goes far beyond the short story in depiction of that dismissive cruelty. The man’s a brute, a smiling, pernicious, damned villain, and his saccharine lies turn one’s stomach. Elaborating upon the basic story, Davis invents a sanatorium where women are confined, treated to electroshock, given hysterectomies without their consent or even their knowledge (“Well, no, it wasn’t an appendectomy. . . .”). The husband confiscates the wife’s earnings from journalism; after all, she is his property, isn’t she?

 

And worse, the husband admits that he was, well, uncomfortable with these procedures but had to obey the instructions of the supervising physician. And two hundred, perhaps three hundred women were deprived of all possibility of bearing children. The scope given to the alleged malpractice is stunning; forget the Hippocratic Oath, this is the Nuremberg Defense, “I couldn’t disobey my superior’s orders.”

 

Exaggerated? Yes, probably. Unreal, though? Perhaps in the details, but the Archive Theatre producer told me that women who’d attended The Yellow Wallpaper had come forward to say they’d felt their own lives mirrored in this story.

 

The emotional content of Davis’s script is devastating. For me, it was like watching a cobra toying with a kitten before killing it. For those women it was a lifeline, an assurance that their suffering at subjugation was no less real than what Sadie Okerstrom enacted onstage.

 

 

As a male in what seemed to be a predominantly female audience, I felt accused. That angered me. I grew up as the eldest of six sons of a reticent, stoic physician and a former nurse who never dictated or dominated, who freely gave each of us choice and autonomy. Later, as I matured and grew to understand the previously unknown opposite sex, I applied their same principles. With others, including my wife and daughter: choice and autonomy in action, emotion, and relationships, even though on some occasions those choices worried or distressed me.

 

Thinking back about it now, much later, perhaps I was a feminist before the word became common coinage. I hope I was. And still am.

 

*At Project Gutenberg: https://tinyurl.com/49tu2tun

 

EXTRA

---

The Yellow Wallpaper
by Jeff Davis, adapted from an 1892 story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Archive Theater Company

September 4 - 20, 2026

Trinity Street Playhouse, 4th floor of First Austin, 901 Trinity Street, Austin

Our industry night is Wednesday, September 9th, and we have special discount tickets for industry artists on that night. We want anyone who wants to see the show to be able to, so reach out to us and we’ll work with you.