While driving to Germantown Community Theatre to take in a rather unfortunate production of Gorey Stories my twin girls (who are seven-years-old and terribly excited about all things Halloweenish) started asking questions about Frankenstein. As my wife Charlotte and I tried to untangle their weird web of wonder and curiosity we quickly realized that we couldn’t be sure if we were taking our answers from Mary Shelley’s seminal book, which we’ve both read, or if we were drawing our conclusions from the countless plays, films, cartoons and comic books that followed. Unable to achieve any kind of narrative consistency we conceded our ignorance and just started making things up. I imagine that our pop culture dilemma isn’t unique and I also imagine that many who attend Theatre Memphis’ production of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde will find themselves adrift on a similar ice floe. As is the case with Shelley’s un-dead abomination Robert Louis Stevenson’s strange tale of a doctor who transforms himself into his own doppelganger— a creature of terrible fury and tremendous appetites— has been told and retold so many times it’s difficult to keep all the versions straight. And maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. Perhaps these stories never really belonged to their original authors, but to a collective consciousness that needs to play with its monsters and evolve them from time to time. That’s where Theatre Memphis’ production of Jekyll & Hyde, Jeffrey Hatcher‘s curious adaptation of Stevenson’s classic tingler, comes in. Hatcher’s bold abstraction of this oft told tale is suspenseful, shocking and true at least to the spirit of the original, even when it wanders off in new directions.