Teen’s Death Is Turning Point for Play

The play’s usually the thing--but not these days, not in Ojai.

Elsewhere, of course, it would be.

In Los Angeles, they wouldn’t cancel a production because of a slaying. If the death were particularly newsworthy, it might even trigger a quick call to the publicist: Isn’t this a timely twist? Can we include it in our ads? What about a note to the reviewers? Can we write in a subplot?

But that isn’t how it is in Ojai.

As the rage over Kali Manley’s death subsides, one of its lesser consequences is that the show--in this case, “The Turn of the Screw”--won’t go on.

“It just seemed so right to not do it,” director Taylor Kasch said.

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At other times, “The Turn of the Screw” would grate against a community’s spirit and offend public sensibilities about as much as “Mary Poppins.”

It’s a weird tale, to be sure--the story of a young English governess who comes to believe the two children in her care are at risk of being possessed by malignant dead souls. It’s adapted from a ghost story written by Henry James in 1898.

Today, the plot is still bizarre, even if the language sounds stilted and vaguely comical: “For there, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous author of our woe--the white face of damnation. . . . ‘No more, no more, no more!’ I shrieked to my visitant . . . “

The story culminates in the unexplained death of a 10-year-old boy: “We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped,” James wrote.

This is strong, dark stuff--but no stronger than any of the bile that nightly floods Jerry Springer’s stage and no darker than anything from the pen of Stephen King--who once observed: “I really have the heart of a little boy--it’s sitting in a jar on my desk.”

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People in Ojai no doubt read their share of Stephen King and tune in--yes, even in Ojai--to more than any sane person’s share of Jerry Springer. Even so, canceling “The Turn of the Screw” was a wise call by the people behind the play that wasn’t to be.

“The Turn of the Screw” had nothing to do with the killing of a 14-year-old girl, but it would be hard to understand how Ojai, a town torn up by Kali’s death, would at the moment benefit from a terrifying touch of the macabre.

The Boston Globe praised the play, calling it “a portrait of psychological vampirism.”

A reviewer in Florida panned it, saying the adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher “grabs hold of the story’s psycho-sexual motifs and shoves them in our faces.”

Whichever the case, this seems like the wrong time for it, and the right time for something frothy and escapist and glowing--in a word, something a lot more supercalifragilisticexpialadocious.

“We felt weird going on stage and doing the piece, not just because it’s dark but also because the little boy dies at end,” said Jeff G. Rack, one of the play’s two actors. “We thought it would be in bad taste to put it up right now.”

The play, produced by the Flying H Theater Company, was to open at the Ojai Art Center on Friday and run through Feb. 7. Rack was to play the little boy and four other characters, and Christine Zirbel was to play the governess. They had been in rehearsal for about three months.

Now there is talk, instead, of producing a cabaret evening in late January or early February to benefit the Manleys.

“Some things are bigger than a play,” Rack said.

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com