In the theater world, holiday programing used to mean the blitz of Christmas-themed money-makers that companies offered between Thanksgiving and Christmas: those predictable-as-Nutcracker mountings of "A Christmas Carol," "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" and "The Santaland Diaries." Last season, San Diego's own spunky Cygnet Theatre launched a radio-play version of the classc film "It's a Wonderful Life," which the company will reprise this December.

It appears we now have Halloween plays as the latest marketing ploy. In downtown San Diego, Sledgehammer Theatre has already opened its gory, grand guignol shocker "Seven Crimes," and this weekend Cygnet offered a two-person adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher of Henry James' classic ghost story "The Turn of the Screw." Intense and psychologically layered, James' Victorian tale is tightly wound around a young governess's threatening apparitions of the former care-takers of the two youngsters in her charge. Did this now-deceased duo--the valet Peter Quint and the former governess--corrupt the children while they were alive, and do they control their behavior now from the afterlife? These worrying questions are articulated through the personna of the Governess, a vivacious and confident 20-year-old taking on her first job after a sheltered upbringing in an austere and repressive rural vicarage. Amy Biedel plunges into this role with the sleek perfection of a competition diver. The Cgynet stage is bare, save for three asymmetrical stairways, but through Biedel's wide-eyed enthusiasm, we see the luxurious estate with its vast gardens and lake, the home in which the chidren are housed, along with a housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. Biedel's precise and well-modulated diction aptly places the character's time (1870) and class, a well-bred middle class woman with higher aspirations. Biedel's vowels are so bright and beautifully placed, she should be the vocal tutor for Shaw's Professor Higgins. Biedel's projection ofher character'srich emotional and perhaps spiritual journey is a wonder to behold.

David Tierney has the unenviable task of realizing four of the play's other characters: the Master (who hires the Governess at the story's opening), the housekeeper, the 11-year-old child Miles, and the mute ghost of Peter Quint. The story's other character, Miles' younger sister Flora, is a non-speaking part, although Beidel sweetly conjures the girl in a few deft interactions with her. Since Tierney is allowed no costume changes, each character change is communicated through tone of voice and subtle body language. Tierney projected the cold authority of the Master with ease and found the opposite set of subservient mannerisms for Mrs. Grose. His take on the precocious Miles was less convincing, however, placing the lad's clipped speech in a higher vocal register when Miles was polite and disarming, but then dropping to a low snarl when the boy turned confrotational. We don't want Miles to become a baritone just because he is angry. This cavil should not diminish Tierney's excellent work overall, especially as the important emotional counterbalance to the Governess's effusions.

Director Janet Hayatshahi, a Sledgehammer alumna, wisely chose an abstract approach to James' ghost story, a genre which by its very naturte needs to override realism for maximum effect. Excluding props, furniture, and scenery focused everything on the actors' recounting the tale day by day, as if it were a court-room reconstruction of events, and Hayatshahi's pace was relentless without being breathless. Scenic designer Sean Murray's three stairways divided the Cygnet stage into a surprising number of discrete places in which to locate their scenes. Eric Lotze's shadowy lighting and suble red flashes for the Governess's sightings of Peter Quint sent shivers down my spine. Veronica Murphy's dark Victorian costumes at first seemed perfunctory, but as the play progressed, I found the rustling of the ample folds of the Governess's black dress an enchanting sound design.

James' story presents a challenging sexual subtext, and Hayatshahi chose to represent it by having the two actors join in unexpected waltz patterns at the front of the stage. These moments of silent, slow dance never clearly revealed with which character the Governess was dancing: her romantic fantasy of the Master, the boy Miles, or her own repressed erotic longings. But this winsome and slightly eerie symbolsim humanized the tale and warmed up the cool Jamesian narrative.

This play is short--a mere 75 minutes--but it is a full, robust evening of theater, full of suspense and mystery. Happy Halloween!