Mother wit among the Romantics: 'Mary Shelley's Frankenstein' opens IRT season

The only book I've ever owned and read based on a Time magazine review is Richard Holmes' "Shelley: The Pursuit," a biography that garnered much praise upon its publication on in 1975. I think I was especially impressed by how the review ended, which went along these lines: Percy Bysshe Shelley's three decades of existence were less a life than a haunting. At about the age the poet was when he died by drowning, I just had to read such a ghost-saturated biography.

The truth of that interpretation comes home when the poet's life is seen through the independent authorial stature of his beloved second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley. Though her life settled into the status of Keeper of the Flame, Mary's experience as continually bereaved mother and premature widow is transmuted through a sustained haunting — one marvelous adolescent creation, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus." 

Victor Frankenstein applies himself to work, organ by organ.

The novel itself, inevitably associated in the public mind with the Boris Karloff movie, is a detailed, wide-ranging evocation of how actual life can take on a haunted character. So it does for the obsessive Swiss scholar Victor Frankenstein, whose name is often applied by mistake to his nameless, bizarrely concocted Creature. 

David Catlin's play justly bears Mary Shelley's name in its title. In adapting the novel, he has put the focus on the theme of male self-aggrandizement and intellectual pretension, and crucially on the imaginative breakthrough a brilliant but taken-for-granted woman has inspired in fiction ever since.

"Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" opened Indiana Repertory Theatre's 51st season Friday night, the production also marking Benjamin Hanna's first as artistic director.  Mary's authentic recollection of its gestation in a friendly lakeside competition to come up with the best ghost story provides the framework of Catlin's shrewd adaptation. 

Risa Brainin, who directed several brilliant IRT productions at the turn of the century, adds to that distinction this smoothly assembled account, drawn from the immense variety of place and character in the original story as well as the forceful, but never strained, spin on its gestation that Catlin has come up with. The production team has met the challenge superbly, chiefly through Carey Wong's scenic design, Michael Klaers' lighting, and the projections of Miko Simmons, which are essential to making sense of the Creature's peripatetic sufferings in the second act. 

Nate Santana plays the Creature, whose full-body emergence is teasingly delayed from what seems to be a slow-cooking cauldron/coffin. (The science of sparking life from miscellaneous, freshly deceased flesh is rather murky in Shelley's original, too.) The novel's extensive depiction of the wandering monster's self-education and cunning is wonderfully embodied in Santana's portrayal. We are meant to find our admiration for him growing even as Frankenstein sinks in our esteem. 

The party mood rules from Claire, Byron, Mary, and Polidori.

Santana was also memorable on opening night for his vigorous, bawdy Lord Byron in every scene that reverts to the fiction-generating game at the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva. I appreciated how he incorporated a hitch in his step — a kind of skipping gait — to suggest Byron's club-foot deformity, a lifelong embarrassment that scarcely put a crimp in his charisma. Byron's frenetic overemployment of dashes in his correspondence (which is well worth reading) is a punctuational symbol of the attention-deficit way he lived.

All the cast makes its mark in several roles each. Ty Fanning is chiefly Victor, often succumbing to nervous prostration from the enormity of his experiment. He is also a blithe representation of Percy Bysshe Shelley. On opening night, he had that haunting quality in the role that evoked for me the Time review from my youth: His Shelley was scintillating, careless, yet somewhat loving on his own terms. You had the feeling Shelley couldn't help basing his emotional depth on something he'd read in Plato.

Terry Bell was chiefly Victor's sensible friend Henry, who paid with his life for his loyalty to the mad scientist. His performance provided  an anchor of stability that seemed essential for throwing Victor's fantasies into contrast with the real world, into which even the Creature's insights come to seem truer than his creator's.

The female roles fell into capable hands. First, there was the character versatility of Andrea San Miguel, mainly as Claire Clairmont, who seems to have been a kind of Marianne Faithfull to the coterie of celebrity friends. Of course, the principal responsibility for projecting female stature — an inheritance from her two super-brainy parents —rests on the figure of Mary, identified by her maiden name of Godwin in the cast list. 

Rebecca Marie Hurd managed to project both the sheer womanly allure and the partially hidden but

Mary weaves her monstrous story to rapt audience.

searing, emergent intelligence of this title character, a proper proto-feminist. Hurd is also Elizabeth, the put-upon "more than sister" of Victor who sacrifices so much to his scientistic dreams. Blending these two roles through the skills of the same actor amounts to the most tendentious aspect of Catlin's adaptation, but it works dramatically, thanks to Hurd's versatility. 

Catlin's Shelley habitually calls Mary "my moon," and the tribute cuts two ways. The moon is after all at the heart of a major Shelleyan theme, represented by "Mutability," a poem ending with this chilling reminder: "Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; / Nought may endure but mutability." 

On the other hand, the silvery moon is the traditional inspiration of illuminating night thoughts, insights from which Percy and Mary each fashioned literary gold. The alchemy has had no more enduring confirmation than Mary Shelley's haunting novel. The theatrical Q.E.D. of this is available at IRT through Oct. 14.

[Photos by Zach Rosing]