New York parents, more than anyone else, should be freaked out by The Turn of the Screw. Why? When childcare in New York City costs, on average, around fifteen thousand dollars a year and most of the people doing that labor make, on average, around ten dollars an hour, things are bound to get tense. But Benjamin Britten’s opera about child care and the weight of unspeakable trauma is tense from its first moment.
The man we meet has two children in his “care”—not that he actually cares about them. He regards them as an annoyance and has hired a staff to raise them. The girl is the Governess, but this is 2025, so she’s a nanny. She’s a college kid, maybe, or a very recent graduate, dressed in half-styled Gen-Z clothing: wide-leg jeans, Chucks, a big button-down with a sweater vest and matchy-clashy tie. Just young enough and broke enough, in other words, to agree to an obviously shady deal: care for the two children of an absent uncle and never, ever write to him or speak to anyone about the job. She’s enthusiastic and capable but utterly unprepared for what awaits her at the beautiful manor house that will be her home. The children’s uncle (Jack Hicks) is styled as the devil himself: black suit with red accents, sunglasses, menace. The bargain is bad from the beginning, and it only gets worse.
A raised catwalk stage surrounds the orchestra (here conducted simply but effectively by Zachary Schwartzman) creating a square. Birnbaum’s use of space, as always, is strong; this production is at its best when things happen slightly outside the audience’s view. Actors scuttle and appear suddenly hanging from the walls, or action is partially blocked by the orchestra. Dozens of black trash bags stashed beneath the runway-style stage serve as reminders of this family’s baggage, all the trauma that they refuse to verbalize. Actors dump them out to find stuffed animals, dead leaves and the clothing of dead employees covered in either dirt or blood.
Birnbaum is unafraid to choreograph movements down to the measure. It makes her a compelling director, especially for this piece where the Governess finds herself caught in a dance where she neither knows nor likes the tune. The disturbing chorus of “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son” in Act One is somehow even more so when staged with actors moving robotically in VR headsets.
Birnbaum is working with all adults in this production, which makes for surprising dynamics between the characters. Miles, approaching puberty but sung by a countertenor to indicate an unbroken voice, towers over the Governess. Flora’s tantrums are more frightening when she’s about the same size as her caretaker. Countertenor Felix Aurelius was a strong choice for Miles. His voice is a silvery soprano that imbued Miles with a tender sadness rather than the subtle malignancy I’ve seen and heard in other productions. Aurelius also blended nicely with the promising Kerrigan Bigelow as Flora.
The opera does work better with children, but this casting does afford Birnbaum certain opportunities that would be inappropriate or downright unethical with child actors. She can make the latent sexual themes more explicit. When Mrs. Grose (Kayla Stein) kisses the Governess, it feels like a proposition because it is one. Their uneasy solidarity took on a new dimension; these women are allies, but are they themselves at risk of replicating the Quint-Jessell affair? The ghosts of Miss Jessell and Peter Quint have a mild sex scene, while Quint’s sexual interest in Miles is more overt but also somewhat less nauseating, at least until you remember that Miles is supposed to be about twelve.
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On the side of evil, Peter Quint was played by an attention-grabbing Colin Aikins, clad in a rather chic outfit of a gauzy see-through top and combat pants that made him a queasily attractive predator. He is a very fine actor, with presence and sizzling physical energy, and his Quint was more than sufficiently terrifying. Soprano Page Michels’ Miss Jessell felt out of place despite singing well throughout. Her styling—a swishy black caftan with ample cleavage and bare feet—was the biggest visual misstep, both too mature and too sexy, and her character is less nuanced and less compelling than Quint’s.
As for the good characters? Natasha Isabella Gesto had an astonishingly warm and mature sound as the Governess and the right mix of naïveté and precocious authority to remind us all just how young this woman is. She still reads Teen Vogue, eats Twizzlers and wears a “Slay the Patriarchy” t-shirt; she can’t be much more than twenty-two (though to be clear, Twizzlers have no age limit). Kayla Stein was surprisingly sympathetic as Mrs. Grose and had a powerful, rich soprano.
This production reminds us more clearly that The Turn of the Screw is an opera about the class dynamics of childcare, a job that almost always falls to underpaid women. Nannies and housekeepers may get to stay in their charges’ Hamptons mansions and may even be hailed as “members of the family,” but they are always employees. They’re there at the discretion of the parents and the children and can be dismissed at any time. The potential for exploitation is ever-present for nearly everyone involved, from children to carers to parents, and the work is difficult. Some of the most affecting moments in Birnbaum’s production were when we see Mrs. Grose and the Governess doing the daily labor of childcare—zipping wriggly kids into jackets, watching them play with expensive toys that surely cost exponentially more than the women’s hourly salaries and picking up after them.
By the end, only the Governess is left with a dead child and her life in tatters. She cleans up Miles, too, folding his corpse into the bag. While the trash bag conceit was effective in the first half, by the end of the second, it tipped into heavy-handedness. The final image of the Governess wrapping Miles’s body in the black plastic, while striking, made its final point by selling out her character, who throughout seemed to care for the boy sincerely. The Turn of the Screw is about the unspoken; the Hefty bags spoke too loudly. But Birnbaum’s point stands: in the twisted dynamics of family secrets, it’s the women and servants who have to deal with the trash.
