The Yellow Wallpaper Wants You to Feel Many Things. Comfort Isn’t One of Them.

There’s been a lot of discourse lately about annoying and even problematic audience behavior in the theater. Talking, texting, noisily opening candy wrappers, and Patti LuPone’s least favorite: taking photos.  

And while I’ve never been a fan of any of those behaviors and never will be, there’s one more that is my greatest pet peeve.  I hate when audience members gravitate exclusively towards plays they think will be pleasant or comfortable.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love a good crowd-pleaser.  If you’re producing Noises Off, The Importance of Being Earnest, or Arsenic and Old Lace, I’ll be first in line to buy a ticket.  God knows that in the world we’re living in, sometimes we need some safe, pleasant, comfortable escapism.  Sometimes we need a show that demands little from us and allows us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the theatrical equivalent to mac-and-cheese.

But that shouldn’t be all that’s on offer, and a diet consisting of only mac-and-cheese isn’t healthy.  Sometimes you have to have your peas and carrots, too.

And while I hope audiences appreciate The Yellow Wallpaper, I have never been interested in making this play safe, pleasant, or comfortable.  

I know that’s a challenging thing for lots of audiences to swallow.  It’s a challenging thing for lots of producers and theater companies to wrap their heads around, too.  Escapism almost always sells better than social and political commentary.  It seems the industry has cynically decided that challenging, socially conscious work is the exclusive territory of small black theaters and that commercial theater has room only for the soothing and sanitized.

But the modern theatrical landscape consistently proves that assumption wrong. Audiences do not need to be coddled.  They need to be challenged.

And when theater dares to provoke, audiences lean in. 

Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie became a critical and box-office phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic by relentlessly refusing to offer a comfortable night out, dragging audiences through a visceral indictment of how the legal system systematically silences and disbelieves female-identifying victims of sexual assault. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate transferred to Broadway, shattered box-office records, and swept the Tonys by confronting the mostly white, upper-middle class Broadway audiences with their own history of white privilege and the denial of racism and violence.

We saw the same hunger for confrontation with Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, which turned personal trauma and the fight over bodily autonomy into a Broadway triumph, and Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop, which brought an unapologetic, brutally raw critique of race, queerness, and the theater industry itself straight to Broadway’s biggest stage. Even commercial revivals like the 2023 production of Parade demonstrated that confronting historical anti-Semitism and mob violence could pack houses and spark urgent public dialogue.

These productions didn't succeed in spite of their discomfort; they succeeded because of it. The most vital theater has never been about placating an audience; it is about disrupting complacency.

Perhaps the greatest example of this phenomenon is Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play.  The play–which blisteringly explores race, sex, and gender politics in America on a set which literally held a giant mirror up to the audience, confronting them with their own reflection for the entire evening–was nominated for 12 Tony Awards in 2019, more than any other play to that date.  It was so popular that it was remounted in 2021, again to great acclaim, and was the topic of a documentary film.

While I didn’t get an opportunity to see the play, I loved reading about the production and how vehemently everyone involved stood by the fact that the play wasn’t an easy watch.  In director Robert O'Hara’s pre-show address to the audience at the invited dress rehearsal, he didn't offer a polite, welcoming speech. He laid down a mandate:

"Everyone is welcome, but no one is safe. I'm not here to provide you with comfort and entertainment. No one is walking through my life making sure my gay, Black body is entertained and comfortable. If you come expecting comfort, you may not have it. I will not give it to you."

Playwright Jeremy O. Harris echoed this philosophy when the play was published. In his introduction to the text, he explicitly instructs future directors and casts that the production "should not work to make the audience feel comfortable with what they are witnessing at all."

The same could be said about The Yellow Wallpaper.  If I’ve made you comfortable, I’ve failed.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s masterwork is often viewed as a gothic horror story or psychological thriller.  And sure, it fits in those boxes, but it’s far more than that.  Beneath its gothic veneer is a furious, precise autopsy of institutional gaslighting, medical subjugation, domestic captivity, and the silencing of women. If I were to adapt it merely as a spooky but entertaining Victorian period piece, I would be robbing it of its teeth and would be doing a profound disservice to Gilman and to the audience.  

My goal with this adaptation is not to make you comfortable. It is to make you think, to make you squirm, and to make you confront your own complicitness in the treatment of women.  But most importantly, I wish to make you angry enough to spark real conversations and real action when you leave the theater.

Theater has an obligation to be more than a refuge from reality; it must be an instrument to examine it. 

When you take your seat for The Yellow Wallpaper, I hope you come prepared. Be ready to be challenged. Be ready to be uncomfortable.  Be ready to be frightened.  Be ready to be angry.  And be ready to continue the conversation long after the stage goes dark.

After all, everyone is welcome, but no one is safe.  Now eat your peas and carrots.

Mon Darter and Sadie Okerstrom as Joh Stetson and "Wife" in The Yellow Wallpaper.