Do you find modern medicine disturbing, what with Big Pharma in bed with doctors and the FDA, children running around on drug cocktails, and therapists who charge $200 an hour to ask you about your mom? Well, let’s harken back a little. A mere century ago, a well-meaning doctor might instead order a troubled woman subdued, deprived of social or intellectual stimulation, and confined to a room. Indefinitely. To put it another way, she’d be locked up, abandoned in the walls of her own home and her own increasingly addled mind.
This was the cure prescribed in 1885 to the young writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Her classic fictionalized account of her isolation and descent into derangement, The Yellow Wallpaper, is a sharp and frightening critique of both the medicinal and the cultural attitudes of the nineteenth century. Part horror story, part psychological thriller, part radical feminist statement, this scary tale has been adapted for the stage as a one-woman show. It will be presented Saturday, June 17, at 7:30 pm in the Ludcke Auditorium on the University of New England’s Westbrook Campus in Portland. Part of a conference on Gilman at the Maine Women Writers Collection, the production features professional actress Michèle LaRue as the treated woman. Admission is free, with a suggested $5 donation. Call 207.221.4433.
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, Entertainment, Special Interest Groups, Food and Drug Administration, Performing Arts, Women's Issues, Theater, University of New England, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Less
