By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
photo by Tim Fuller
At the Rogue Theatre, Bryn Booth and Christopher Johnson, foreground, and Hunter Hnat in the shadows take the familiar Frankenstein story into new territory.
Equally dark and disturbing but without the extreme cinema effects we associate with Frankenstein's monster, that is the Rogue Theatre's stormy production of “Mary Shelley's Frankenstein” by playwright David Catlin.
Now available online in a virtual format, all the actors onstage are wearing masks, bringing action to their pre-recorded words.
There is no “zoom effect” of each actor contained in a separate panel on the screen. As in the Rogue's previous production, “A View from the Bridge,” this solution to current pandemic restrictions works beautifully.
Thoughtfully enough, the Rogue has posted a free "preview" clip of its professionally filmed full-90 minute production at the company's website, www.theroguetheatre.org. Tickets are available online.
Live performances on stage will be offered at the Rogue the last weekend in November, also with masks. At present, those are sold out.
But as an online theater experience, this film of the Rogue cast directed by Cynthia Meier packs a thoughtful wallop that's not to be missed!
Opening in the midst of this very real COVID 19 crisis does feel creepily appropriate, a constant reminder that outside the theater, we are surrounded by a more immediate threat.
Catlin debuted his play last year, pre-pandemic, stripping away the usual traditions of movie emphasis on the grotesque and replacing them with the more mentally chilling chains of responsibility that can reach out from beyond the grave.
This is traditional storytelling of the purest theatrical kind, performed in period costumes of the early 1800s on basically a bare stage, surrounded by enormously effective lighting and sound, as well as a delicately placed music score that urges on deeper involvement with Shelley's morbid philosophy.
The Rogue's version is taken more directly from the original novel by Mary Shelley, first published in 1820, where the harried story of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his unfortunate Creature is set among five friends in an abandoned Swiss castle amusing themselves on long stormy nights by making up frightening ghost stories.
Meier has chosen to give her players a kind of overstated formality in speech and manner that goes with our image of 19th century European privilege. Among the players are Christopher Johnson as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hunter Hnat as Lord Byron, Bryn Booth as Mary Shelley, Claire Hancock as Claire Clairmont and Sean Patrick as Dr. Polidori.
The Shelleys, Lord Byron and their close friends were like proto-hippies. Young and brilliant figures of the art world, flaunting their freedom from the sexuality and morals of more ordinary folk. Their own feelings become important later on, as they join together to play out the tale of the driven scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Johnson) and his tortured Creature (Hnat).
Mary Shelley – devoted to her lover Percy (who became her husband) – would shock her friends by reminding them with this story that no amount of fancied freedom on Earth would let them escape God's own final judgement of their lives.
But back to Dr. Frankenstein and his determination to create life in a laboratory setting...animated by his desire to control the apparent life-giving properties of electricity.
The story is intensely told as a play within the play. Mary Shelley takes the role of Elizabeth, the doctor's devoted companion. Percy Shelley plays Victor, who turns away in wretched horror from the living "thing" he has created out of dead and decaying human bodies.
Lord Byron becomes this feared creation, who has the power of speech and intelligence as well as super-human strength. Johnson and Hnat in these roles become dueling vortexes of emotion, as the Creature is determined to make the doctor feel guilty about his creation.
Yet, the success of “Mary Shelley's Frankenstein” is a true ensemble effort as all the cast maintains high intensity in telling this sprawling tale that stretches both wider and deeper than the Hollywood movie genre it subsequently spawned.
For additional historical background and details on streaming the fully enhanced video version at any time through Nov. 29, visit theroguetheatre.org or call 520-344-8715 for administrative questions, 520-551-2053 for the ticket line. Tickets are $42, students $15.
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