I was wary of contemporary theater after a man stripped down to a giant bird costume last season, smashing a reasonable play into postmodern oblivion -- but I was willing to risk it for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (I don't really know what postmodern means in theater terms, but I'm going to hope it applies here because I like how it sounds.)

I love the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I remember reading the book jacket when I was a kid, and couldn't believe that this was an old story, that something so scandalous and so true-feeling was written by some olde timey guy with an enormous mustache. I'm not sure if actually read the book or not, any more than I remember my stacks of Nancy Drew and Baby-Sitters Club. But I was smitten with the story, and if I never saw more than a mid-90s film version, I was still a devotee of the idea that the meek and mild-mannered might be terrorists in their off hours.

The ACT production added a more substantial female character (none in the book) and Mr. Hyde was played by all the other actors in turn. The latter is the interpretive detail that made me hesitate, but the execution was seamless and effective. It's hard now to imagine the same Mr. Hyde as acted by one actor, or even by the same actor as played Dr Jekyll.

I don't know that Hyde really seemed more multifaceted because of the multiple actors varying portrayals -- one good actor could have accomplished this. What if did give was a disjointed, loopy feeling you might expect from opium-induced schizophrenia, and which highlighted the muddled nature of the story's moral message. It was all very clean on the surface, spare set and costumes, clear articulate dialogue, but very mixed-up when you had to follow Hyde's actions and thoughts. The character was elusive, beyond human.

Dr. Jekyll could have been simplistic in comparison, a one-dimensional goody-two-shoes foil for the complexity of our darker desires, etc. But the actor was appealingly awkward at times, convincingly desperate, and increasingly morally ambiguous. He may be The Good One, but he's incredibly flawed. His face was somehow perfect for the role, kinda young and weak and English-looking.

I love it, but I don't personally relate to the story like I did as a kid. I wanted to wreak havoc, to have immense, unsuspected power over people, didn't want to be pigeonholed as a well-behaved Jekyll unless it meant my hidden deviousness was that much more poignant. The story represented possibilities of adventure. Now, it is much more frightening to think that I might unwillingly harbor instincts toward evil; that the Hyde in us is not manifested through voluntary trouble-making but through unintentional malicious actions. I didn't get this when I was a kid -- that the story was about uncontrolled madness, not bad behavior. It's this that makes the story frightening.

Story time

I finished Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows last weekend, and haven't really recovered. Beyond the basic disappointment of the end of the entertainment, I'm forced into this reoccurring realization my new best friend is actually a figment of the combined imagination of the author and myself. Is my mind unusually swayed to have these characters in my dreams, to find I pick up their dialect or thought patterns? Should I fault the enveloping nature of the fiction, or my own gullibility (and the fact that I read all seven in eight weeks), for making me wonder if people at work are secretly working for the Dark Lord?

Regardless of cause, I get quite smitten with some characters, and closing the book seems to flatten them into shocking nonexistence. Suddenly, they're nothing more than a body of words. I feel adolescent foolish all over again to have become emotionally involved with someone who can't possibly adore me back. It's embarrassing.

Usually it's a Jane Eyre or Anne Elliot, some moderately attractive but witty underdog heroine who leaves me to be married to the most fabulous man in England. Maybe I've read too few books with male leads, or maybe I just didn't relate to them. After Holden Caufield, I read Nine Stories and anything else I could find by JD Salinger; but Harry Potter seems even more gone for the fact that I've got nothing else written by JK Rowling.

I'm working through Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot, hoping to be inspired toward the appreciation of US history I didn't grasp in Advanced Placement. Maybe it's too droll or too nerdy, but my ability to follow the essays merrily is dampened by irritation that Vowell is far too entranced by politics and history. It's like reading inside jokes among high school social studies teachers, jokes I just don't get. The Salem witch trials? Interesting. Not really entertaining in the novel way I've become used to.

In a similar historical-significance vein, I'm halfway through (Kelsey's) Dave Egger's What Is The What, an enhanced biography of a Sudanese "Lost Boy" refugee. I've guiltily avoided picking it up again, because it's a slow trudge through tragedy upon tragedy, though villages, deserts, violence, and US bureaucracy. Again, interesting, but ...

Brian says I should read another Octavia Butler, or maybe I'll go for a Nabokov, or 100 Years of Solitude, or reread the Vonnegut I thought I got in high school.

Or I might give up literature entirely and focus on this month's 840-page Vogue. Certainly not the same as a great character-driven novel, but at least the main players -- fall boots, shiny hair, semi-intellectual fashion commentary -- won't be gone when I close the cover.