Frankenstein (Max Tachis, Left) and Henry Clerval (Jeremy Ryan) Create Life from Lifelessness in Frankenstein
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Next on our stage: RAPTURE, BLISTER, BURN LIZZIE STAY TUNED FOR OUR MAY 18-JUNE 18 JULY 13-AUGUST 20 2016-2017 SEASON! HIGHLIGHTS Victor Frankenstein (Max Tachis, left) and Henry Clerval (Jeremy Ryan) create life from lifelessness in Frankenstein. Photo by Taylor Sanders. A companion guide to “Frankenstein” adapted by Kit Wilder from the novel by Mary Shelley March 23-April 23, 2017 This issue of Highlights was researched and written by Kit Wilder. Read past issues, and a digital version of this issue, at cltc.org/highlights. WHY “FRANKENSTEIN” “You are young, and eager, but let me caution you! You want to make your mark, surely, but you cannot yet see the dangers that lie ahead. Know thyself, young man – know the world in which you live – lest you unleash the unimaginable!” -Prof. Waldman in Frankenstein For 200 years, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus – Mary Shelley’s tale of horror and hubris, of the follies and flaws of humanity — has gripped the imagination of readers around the world. Now, City Lights revisits Frankenstein with a fresh perspective and the use of modern multimedia technology, including projection mapping. This commissioned work, the second in City Lights history, is written and directed by Kit Wilder, who was director and co-writer of the company’s first original commissioned piece, Truce: A Christmas Wish From the Great War, in 2014. Wilder explores the hubris that brings the young scientist Victor Frankenstein to play God and create a sapient creature. When he rejects his work, Frankenstein throws his entire world into a downward spiral of violence and recriminations as the cautionary tale explores the very nature of the human existence. Victor Frankenstein (Max Tachis, left) and Henry Clerval (Jeremy Ryan) CHARACTERS are challenged by more than their ethics. Photo by Taylor Sanders. Victor Frankenstein (Max Tachis): A brilliant young university student, obsessed with death. In love with Elizabeth, his adopted cousin, he sacrifices everything in his obsessive quest to achieving the “unimaginable” – restoring the dead to life. The Creature (Nick Mandracchia): Victor Frankenstein’s “creation,” a man brought back to life and abandoned to wander alone. His experiences allow him to “remember” elements of his own former life, and he learns to be human once more. Henry Clerval (Jeremy Ryan): Victor’s lifelong friend, loyal, capable, and caring, Henry will do anything for Victor. He attends the University of Ingolstadt with Victor, and remains by his side even through the worst of times. Elizabeth (Roneet Aliza Rahamim): Orphaned and taken in at four by Victor’s parents, she is Victor’s adopted “cousin” – and he the love of her life. They have, according to Victor’s father, been friends, playmates, confidantes. It was Victor’s mother’s dying wish that Victor and Elizabeth be married. Alphonse (Steve Lambert): Victor’s father, a solid, capable, sympathetic figure, he is, according to his son, a “brave man and a good father.” He loves his family and his home, and is sentimental and fun-loving. He harbors a deep concern for his son, who gives him no end of worry. William (Nicholas Papp): Victor’s 10-year-old younger brother, he is precocious, imaginative, creative, rambunctious, and fearless. Professor Waldman (Ross Arden Harkness): A physician and surgeon, he is one of Victor’s teachers at the University of Ingolstadt. Old Man (Ross Arden Harkness): A kindly, blind cottage-dweller, and father of Felix and Agatha. The Creature remembers much about his former life and about what it is to be human from secretly watching him and his family. Felix (Alexander Draa): The Old Man’s son. Agatha (Caitlin Papp): The Old Man’s daughter. Mathilde (Kassia Bonesteel): A young girl whom the Creature encounters in a field of buttercups not far from Ingolstadt. A Man (Alexander Draa): Mathilde’s father. PRODUCTION NOTES BY PLAYWRIGHT AND DIRECTOR KIT WILDER City Lights Theater Company is pleased to bring you this world-premiere production of our new stage adaptation of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, in anticipation of the bicentennial of the first, anonymous publication of Mary Shelley’s novel in 1818. From the beginning, we conceived Frankenstein as a marriage of art and technology, bringing together Shelley’s 18th-century tale and 21st- century production techniques to illuminate for modern audiences the cautionary heart of the original: that the Alphonse Frankenstein (Steve Lambert) fears more than his own conscience in more knowledge mankind Frankenstein. Photo by Taylor Sanders. acquires, the more prudent he must be in the application of that knowledge; that he dismisses the supreme role of nature in his quest for achievement only at his mortal peril; and that today, when his creative and destructive capacities have attained almost Godlike proportions, his stewardship of the earth – and of himself – has never been more important. For what central issue today is not, in some way, a product of mankind’s assumptive domination over the world in which he lives, or the result of something that began with “best intentions”? Climate change, environmental decay, overpopulation, disenfranchisement, food and famine, religious zealotry, violence, warfare – yes, the threat of terrorism even: all of these and more can be traced to mankind’s overweening social, cultural, scientific, and technological abandon. And in the midst of unprecedented technological and scientific development of a kind that threatens, as Frankenstein’s creature does, to turn upon its own maker in ways both obvious and insidious, perhaps the answer lies in the recognition and understanding of our own common bonds. As a modern story of man’s “footprint” on earth, Mary Shelley’s 200-year- old Frankenstein is perhaps more relevant today than at any time in its history. City Lights has long been eager to marry art and technology in the creation of theater that speaks to modern, tech-savvy audiences. With Frankenstein, this demands, in large part, that we part from tradition and avoid cliché. There is something safe, even quaint and comical about watching a 19th- century scientist dabble with fictional, “old-fashioned” scientific tools in a gothic laboratory (consider the electrical apparatus that reanimated Boris Karloff’s iconic monster in the 1931 film – and that was so effectively “reborn” for Mel Brooks’ comic masterpiece some 43 years later). While it is entertaining to be sure, there is nothing genuinely frightening or edifying about presenting Frankenstein in this way – not anymore, not to modern audiences who live and work, day after day, with technology in all its very real glory. Technology is the language of modern life – especially here in the Silicon Valley; to “fake” technology upon the stage is to invite disbelief and, worse, irrelevance. As a modern story of man’s The answer, of course, is to make use of technology – real technology, known and understood by today’s modern “footprint” on earth, Mary Shelley’s audiences – to tell the story. In this way, Frankenstein can 200-year-old Frankenstein is be relevant once more, and can speak to modern perhaps more relevant today than at audiences in an immediate and visceral way. To that end, we have conceived a production that incorporates cutting- any time in its history. edge theatrical technology not to simulate what cannot be done – reanimate dead flesh, create a human being, remake a man – but rather to do what can and must be done: tell the story itself. We hope that you find Frankenstein relevant once more, as we have, and that it engages you on a level that promotes a very real understanding of Mary Shelley’s story and its current implications. ABOUT THE CREATURE In crafting this adaptation, and this production, I have in no way attempted to recreate or pay homage to any past film or stage incarnation of Frankenstein’s “monster” as we have come to know him. And significantly, there is no depiction of his “reanimation” in Mary Shelley’s original work; in fact, she goes out of her way to avoid any such description and leaves it entirely to the imagination – and so have I. In this way, I have liberated myself from any preconceived notion of how the creature is created, what he “should” look like – and, indeed, what he really is. For what it’s worth, the Creature is, to me, a person literally “reborn”: a full-grown infant. Past film and stage adaptations of Frankenstein have almost all presented a creature made up of many different bodies, sewn together as a kind of “patchwork” of humanity, with scars and sutures still seeping, and anatomical parts imperfectly fused. As effective as this has been in the past, it occurred to me as I prepared to write that Victor Frankenstein’s creation need not have been fabricated from many different bodies, just one – and that body need not have a single scar, or perhaps only a very few. I imagined, then, a creature utterly hairless, with lustrous, pale skin – a baby’s skin, in fact. (I was pleased to discover upon rereading the novel that this is, in fact, closer to Shelley’s own description of the Creature than any stage or screen depiction I had seen up to that time.) Further, and more significantly, it occurred to me that such a creature, reborn, would not so much learn from new experiences as remember his past life experiences – and through remembering, regain the physical, emotional, and cognitive abilities of the “full-fraught man.” It is my hope that such a creature is at once grotesque enough to inspire loathing, and fascinating and familiar enough, conversely, to inspire empathy. And this is the heart of the matter, truly: empathy is an essential component of theater, and it is essential to Mary Shelley’s original work.