Sometimes the oldest stories are the best. Look at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which has spawned so many movie versions that reference books don't bother to count them all. Half the theaters in Central Florida have done their own versions of this Gothic horror tale at one time or another, with enough jagged scars and bolts through the neck to stock an entire costume shop at Halloween. But think how much more frightening the old story might be if performed on the stage of your imagination, with man and monster chasing each other through the dark recesses of your mind. The Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's gripping new production plays the story that way, with light and shadow, sound and silence all transforming one solitary actor from creator to creature, from pursuer to pursued. It's the difference between the movie and stage versions of The Elephant Man - the first with its performer made up to resemble the hideously deformed title character, the latter trusting an actor to create that deformity with imagination alone. In the Shakespeare Festival's Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus, Eric Hissom shifts from one character to the next with the donning of a pair of eyeglasses, a slump of a shoulder, a change in accent or tone. Hissom propels himself so forcefully through this one-man show that you begin to suspect he's driven by demons. But it is craft more than anything that brings this Frankenstein to life. The festival has returned to Shelley's novel for its version of Frankenstein, which has little to do with the monster movies most of us have seen. The novel was the creation of a very young woman (Shelley was not yet 20 when she wrote it), but it asks questions about nature, science and responsibility that are just as provocative now as when she raised them in 1817. In this adaptation, Jim Helsinger has pared more than 200 pages of the novel into less than two hours of stage time, with one actor inhabiting six characters and with the emphasis on Victor Frankenstein's story nearly all of the time. A character named Robert Walton begins and ends the tale, and he tells of how he discovers a nearly frozen Frankenstein on an ice floe in the most northern reaches of a frigid sea. Walton has set out by ship to discover what he imagines to be eternal sunshine at the North Pole, and the story of his vanity-driven expedition gives way to the story of Frankenstein's similar drive to prolong and even regenerate life. | Under Michael Carleton's direction, the Shakespeare Festival makes it easy to imagine you're in arctic climes, with the sounds of wind rushing and sled dogs barking and the lighting silver and cold. Sound designer K.C. Ladnier and lighting designer Eric Haugen have had a field day with this production. The birth of the creature is accompanied by lights as red as blood; his breath sounds like air squeezed through a giant bellows, and the beat of his heart seems to have been amplified a thousandfold. Bob Phillips' rustic set turns from ship to shed to laboratory with little but a shift in lights; a white sheet becomes a broken body, and a misshapen shadow behind that sheet is as fearsome as any monster in your mind. The setting of Shelley's novel skips all over Europe, and Helsinger's adaptation, which the festival has shaped during previews, follows suit sometimes more than it should. It's relatively easy to imagine Victor making his way from Switzerland to Germany and from Lake Lucerne to the Arctic Ocean, but it's harder to understand how the creature makes the same trips. The rapid shifts from one place to the next can be confusing, and maybe faithfulness to Shelley could be sacrificed for simplicity's sake. In fact, the play might benefit if it could be whittled back a little more: Such high-pitched drama can get a bit wearisome when it rarely shifts in tone, and the climax would be more powerful if the text leading to it were a little more spare. Shifting one or two sections of the second act too would allow us to see and understand how the creature learns to speak before we hear him quoting the classics. Yet this show manages to transform the creature most convincingly from a hideous monster to an articulate being, one with intelligence, feeling, even wit. And Hissom finds resonances both in the frenzied Victor and in his powerful, increasingly sympathetic creation. Hissom invents his minor characters almost offhandedly (and one of them, Clerval, is a bit too much a cartoon Frenchman for his purposes here). But the two major ones are much more than that, and the contrast grows more and more telling between a Frankenstein gripped by the fury of invention and a creature whose bloodless intensity comes from the certainty that he has been wronged. Frankenstein can be a horror show, and this Shakespeare Festival version is perfectly happy to give you the creeps. Yet horror is all the more horrible when it arises not from bats and bloodletting but from the doubts and delusions in the human mind |
