North Shore Theatre Group presents Annalisa Loeffler in an exciting, new one-woman play adapted from the classic short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. One actress. One hour! Touring theaters, libraries, colleges & schools Fridays (evenings only), Saturdays and Sundays, March 27 - May 31, 2009.  Suitable for adults and for children (ages 12 and over). Directed by DeLisa M. White. Costume Design by Jeanette Aultz Look.  Written by Greg Oliver Bodine.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a prominent American novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and non fiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women, and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper", which she wrote after a severe bout of post-partum depression.

In 1884, she married the artist Charles Walter Stetson, and their only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson, was born the following year. Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered a very serious bout of post-partum depression in the months after Katharine's birth. This was an age in which woman were seen as "hysterical" and "nervous" beings, thus, when a woman claimed to be seriously ill after giving birth, her claims were sometimes dismissed as being invalid.

Gilman sought help from the nation's premiere nerve specialist, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell. He diagnosed exhaustion of the nerves and prescribed the Rest Cure, a controversial treatment that Mitchell pioneered. The treatment he prescribed Gilman was called the Rest Treatment; it included: 1) bed rest, 2) isolation from family, 3) overfeeding to increase fat volume, 4) massage and occasional use of electricity on the muscles. To begin, the patient could not even leave her bed, read, write, sew, talk or feed herself. She tried for a few months to follow Mitchell's advice, but her depression deepened, and Gilman came perilously close to a full emotional collapse.

After she left Walter Stetson and returned to California with Katharine, Gilman's depression lifted, and she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” with embellishments, to illustrate the impact of the Rest Cure: The story, she said, "was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.” She sent a copy of it to Mitchell.  He never responded, but in her autobiography, Gilman reported that Mitchell had altered his treatment after the reading the story, a contention that has never been corroborated.

The Yellow Wallpaper (Play YouTube video trailer)

First published in 1891 in New England Magazine, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is widely regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.  WARNING: read on for plot spoiler. The play is narrated by Jane, whose husband — a physician — has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has to hide her journal entries from him so that she can recuperate from what he has diagnosed as a "temporary nervous depression" -- a diagnosis common to women in that period. The windows of the room are barred, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control her access to the rest of the house.  With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the room's wallpaper. In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper, and comes to believe that she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up.