By Victor Gialanella
Adapted from the novel by Mary Shelley
October 15 - Held over through November 20, 1999
What is science without a soul? How cruel can humanity be when its conscience is abandoned? What is our accountability to nature? In a world filled with such everyday topics as cloning, doctor-assisted suicide and Y2K, the classic themes of obsession, technological irresponsibility, creation, nightmares, survival and loss have never been more relevant. Lauren Caldwell’s latest creation takes those themes head-on in an updated version of Frankenstein. Originally written in the summer of 1816 by nineteen-year-old Mary Godwin, Frankenstein was the result of a literary challenge. While vacationing in Switzerland with her future husband/writer Percy Shelley and poet Lord Byron, the artists were dared to write ghost stories. With the help of tempestuous weather and a “waking nightmare," Mary Shelley met the challenge: I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life...His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away...hope that...this thing...would subside into dead matter... Nearly two centuries later, the waking nightmare is conjured again in Caldwell’s production of Victor Gialanella’s Frankenstein, where the familiar battle between science and nature rages on. Inspired by the stylized work of Anne Bogart and Robert Wilson, Caldwell places the “pale student” of Shelley’s nightmare against the backdrop of the “theatre of images” where the actors’ bodies become the instrument for unraveling the haunting tale of one man’s success and its terrifying price. Join us October 15-November 7 for a modern visit into Victor Frankenstein’s nightmare and the tormented world of his creation. |
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