Why I Adapted The Yellow Wallpaper. Twice
By Jeff Davis
I wasn’t the first person to attempt to adapt The Yellow Wallpaper. The groundbreaking short story has been adapted to radio plays, stage plays, opera, and film countless times, though never to great success.
If anyone were to tell me that The Yellow Wallpaper was impossible to successfully adapt to the stage, and that as a seminal work of American feminist literature, male identifying playwrights shouldn’t touch it, I’d be inclined to agree.
So why should I, a white, middle-aged, middle class, cis-gender male attempt to adapt this un-adaptable piece, let alone do it twice?
The short answer: There was no way not to.
In the fall of 1999, during what was my sophomore year of High School, my English teacher taught a unit on Gothic horror stories. The unit centered around The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I was 15 years old. I’m now 42, and Gilman’s words have continued to thrill me and inspire me for 27 years.
When I first read it, I was in the closet and suffering from depression, an issue which has continued—albeit controlled through medications and therapy—for the rest of my life. Naturally, The Yellow Wallpaper immediately spoke to me in a way that most art does not. I felt seen. I appreciated the statements it made about mental health and women’s rights, statements that were bold and unheard of in 1892. I also appreciated all the artistic choices Gilman made in her work. The Gothic thriller edifice. The feminist themes. The unreliable narrator. Gilman somehow took several elements that should be at odds with each other and created a work that is not only beautiful, poetic, and haunting but also important, impactful, and moving.
As soon as I had finished reading, the theater nerd in me had several thoughts: One, this needed to be a full-length play. Two, the play needed to be a two-person show focused on the unnamed protagonist and her husband/doctor, John. And finally, all of the action needed to be confined to the room with the yellow wallpaper. All other characters and locations from Gilman’s short story should be mentioned but never seen.
Naturally, I wondered if The Yellow Wallpaper had ever been adapted for the stage, especially with these conceits and limitations. I would eventually find a few stage and film adaptations in circulation at my library, but none had taken this approach, and I filed the idea in the back of my mind.
In 2014, when I joined the now defunct Agape Theatre in Georgetown, my mind kept coming back to The Yellow Wallpaper. It was a story I still wanted to tell.
So on September 4th, 2015, I began writing.
That version of The Yellow Wallpaper received a one-night only staged reading in Georgetown on November 12th, 2016. It starred my dear friends Cici Barone as the wife, Ismael Soto III as John, and Evelyn LaLonde as the narrator.
While I was pleased with the material, I knew it wasn’t entirely ready for a full-scale production. I was pleased that I expanded the story and deepened the characters and their relationship, but it was too long and the second act descended into melodrama (I could picture John twisting a handlebar mustache with one hand while tying his wife to some train tracks with the other). I also couldn’t quite crack how to provide the audience with a gripping final scene. Gilman’s final scene, in which the wife crawls over John who has fainted at the sight of her peeling wallpaper off the walls, works well as literature but would be laughable in the theater, and I couldn’t land on an alternative that really hit the audience in the way it needed to.
I continued to work at it, editing and re-editing the manuscript for a year.
And then I stopped. Life happened. I got married. I started teaching. And The Yellow Wallpaper sat idle in my Google Drive for almost a decade.
Enter Jennifer Rose Davis.
While I had known of Jennifer and the Archive Theater Company for years, we truly became friends while working on an unrelated theater project in the fall of 2025. Shortly after that project closed, we met for coffee.
Like any two theater and literature nerds, the conversation naturally moved to our favorite topics.
“I would love to find a play that’s based on classic literature but isn’t going to break the bank to produce,” I recall Jennifer saying between sips of coffee. “Something with a small cast.”
I smirked. “You’re familiar with The Yellow Wallpaper, aren’t you?” I asked.
“Of course I am!” Jennifer said, her eyes getting wide. “Do you know of a good adaptation of it?”
“I don’t know if it’s any good, but I know of one,” I said.
I emailed Jennifer the script and a video of the staged reading as soon as I got home. A week later, I received a call.
“Hey Jeff. It’s Jen. If we were to produce The Yellow Wallpaper, what venue would you want it to go to?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.
I was lying. I certainly knew. There was one option that was leaps and bounds above the rest.
“Somewhere small like Trinity Street Playhouse would be great.”
“Good! Because they have three weeks in September. I’m going to book it.”
It’s at this point that my intestines tied themselves in knots. I hadn’t looked at the script in almost a decade, and our world had changed tremendously in those years. Roe v. Wade was overturned. Our country overlooked a qualified female Presidential candidate in favor of a convicted rapist who proudly proclaimed he could grab women by the pussy not once but twice. And we all felt madness ensue when we were secluded to our homes for months on end during a pandemic.
I insisted that if we produce The Yellow Wallpaper, it needed to be The Yellow Wallpaper 2.0. I wanted to look at my work again with the lens of the past decade, and I wanted to create a new version that, while still set in the late 1800s, spoke to the present day.
And so Jennifer, our wonderful director Faith Sanders, and I all independently reread the script and compared notes.
I will forever be in their debt for the incredible guidance they provided.
All of the notes from Jennifer and Faith came in the form of “What ifs.” “What if you focused more on the healthcare system, specifically how it doesn’t listen to women or trust women with their own bodies and minds?” “What if writing was a bigger focus?” “The journal entries from the short story don’t really push the story forward on stage. What if it was poetry instead?”
These questions completely reshaped the play. In the following months, I re-read Gilman’s short story and her essay “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.” I did more research on the rest cure and its pioneer, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, the shocking details of which are now prevalently featured in the text. I also spoke with women in my life who have lived through miscarriages and postpartum depression, most notably, my mother. What she disclosed to me was eye-opening. What she still didn’t disclose was heartbreaking. My conversation with her was the first time I heard her refer to my unborn older siblings–Joy and Gregory–by name. Their names are now in the text.
But the most fascinating discovery as I went back to the drawing board was the discovery of Gilman’s poetry. The notoriety of The Yellow Wallpaper and her own work within the suffrage movement has overshadowed the discourse surrounding Gilman’s poetry considerably, but I found hundreds of incredible poems exploring sex and gender politics, power, control, depression, and the sense of self, many of which sounded like they were written by the enigmatic protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper.
Many of those poems have made their way into the play in unique and chilling ways.
Armed with a laundry list of compelling what-ifs and a multitude of new research, I started editing. About 80% of the text was re-written entirely. The rest was rearranged and woven into the new material. Entire subplots and scenes from the initial version were removed in favor of new ones. Ultimately, despite the massive changes, the current version of The Yellow Wallpaper does what I wanted to do all along. It’s The Yellow Wallpaper for today while still honoring the classic and beloved work by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
So back to that initial question. Why should I, a white, middle-aged, middle class, cis-gender male attempt to adapt this un-adaptable piece, let alone do it twice?
The long answer: I didn’t. At least not by myself. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s voice is in this. Jennifer Rose Davis’s voice is in this. Faith Sanders’s voice is in this. Cici Barone’s voice is in this. Evelyn LaLonde’s voice is in this. My mother Kathleen Clancey Davis’s voice is in this. My mother-in-law Angie Knoll’s voice is in this. The late Lynn Beaver, who I recently discovered was secretly in my corner during the pre-production process, her voice is in this. And somewhere in there, the voice of a white, middle-aged, middle-class, cis-gender male with his own story of depression, identity, and autonomy is in there, too.
I wasn’t the first person to attempt to adapt The Yellow Wallpaper, and as long as our society would rather control the marginalized rather than listen to them, I won’t be the last.
I’m cautious to consider what Charlotte Gilman herself would think of that. Perhaps it makes her smile to know her work continues to gain attention. Perhaps she’s angry that the short story’s still as relevant and horrifying as ever. Perhaps…no, probably…it’s a bit of both.
But I have one last thought, again inspired by Gilman and her words.
In one of her greatest poems, one that finally helped me unlock the ending that had plagued me for a decade, Gilman writes:
“She walketh veiled and sleeping,
For she knoweth not her power.”
It is my wish that all of us who are struggling with depression or lacking power and control in our own lives find the strength and courage to wake up, take our veils off, and walk into our power. And once we do, let’s look around, wake others up, listen to their stories, and help them find the strength and courage to remove their veils, too.
Jeff Davis of Ovation Theatricals
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