Review: FRANKENSTEIN Resurrects a Classic at Prime Stage

I'm a lifelong horror buff, devouring the Famous Monsters of Filmland on celluloid and printed page, as well as the artsy, philosophical "elevated horror" that has become a literary and cinematic movement in the last decade. Both the schlocky and the thoughtful branches of horror can both trace their roots back to the shadow cast by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its innumerable adaptations. For whatever reason, her novel itself has never been a favorite of mine, though I love the way she bucked convention and gender roles to invent literary science fiction and elevated horror. Maybe it's because Frankenstein has transcended being a character on the page in a story with a beginning and end, and become a genuine folk icon. Even a perfect adaptation of Shelley's novel will feel incomplete because the idea of Frankenstein is now so much bigger than the text of Frankenstein. Here, science fiction writer Lawrence C. Connolly and director Liam Macik thread the needle of the Frankenstein myth in an adaptation that stays unusually true to Shelley's novel but nods to sources beyond.

It's the fabled "haunted summer" when the young Romantics revolutionized science fiction, horror and dark fantasy, and unpublished but respected young author Mary Shelley (Stacia Paglieri) is competing in a ghost story competition with her then-more-famous husband Percy (Isaac Miller) and Lord Byron (Michael McBurney). While her competitors struggle to eke out a fully-formed idea overnight, Shelley synthesizes her passions and elements of her personal life into the tale of Victor Frankenstein (Isaac Miller again), a scientist who creates artificial life (Everett Lowe) but forgets to take any personal stake in the development of the Creature's mind and soul.

The show is at its best in any sequence involving Lowe, whose physicality is somewhere between a jungle animal and the carefully precise danger of a Michael Myers type. Gone are the green skin, the bolts and the stitches of modern myth; Connolly's adaptation makes it very clear (without using twenty-first century terms) that Frankenstein isn't a stitched-up corpse or even a cyborg but an android, a truly artificial, synthesized form of life using biomechanical engineering. With his menacing stature, aquiline nose and deep, deep voice, Everett Lowe gives the great Clancy Brown a run for his money in the realm of enormous, well-spoken sepulchral bruisers. Due to trauma after his creation and the neglect of his maker, the Creature (who all but references the "go ahead and call me Frankenstein" meme at the end of the show) has become all brain and no heart, a natural sociopath. By contrast, Isaac Miller is young, handsome, youthful and passionate, all heart and instinct despite his great intellect. The two clash as rival wits, as much as they clash like father and son or like predator and prey.

Woe to those drawn into the battle between Victor Frankenstein and Just Frankenstein, especally Maddie Kocur as Justine the unfortunate nanny. In the play's best scene, the Creature's "last temptation" of the woman he has framed for murder, Kocur is heartbreaking and Lowe is terrifying. The other supporting leads do great work as well, especially Stacia Paglieri in her dual role of Mary Shelley and Victor's fiancee Elizabeth. So much of the show depends on her either as narrator or as straight-man to the fiery characters around her, be they pompous poets or mad scientists. The supporting cast is also packed with smaller roles, some bordering on cameos, by other Prime Stage regulars, including Adam Seligson, Carolyn Jerz and David Nackman (who, curiously enough, was most recently seen playing Boris Karloff himself).

At a talk-back after the show, author and adapter Lawrence Connolly discussed how Shelley's superhuman monster, gifted with a perfect mind and a perfect body but no heart to speak of, is much scarier than James Whale and Boris Karloff's malformed and mentally deranged but ultimately well-intentioned Frankenstein. He's right, but therein also lies the reason Karloff's monster is the best-remembered: it's harder to say "who is the monster and who is the man" when Frankenstein senior is an arrogant and distant father, but Frankenstein junior is an unrepentent serial killer and master manipulator. Victor Frankenstein did the same thing Mary Shelley did: create life, something bigger and better than its mortal creator. But just like Shelley would surely be confused by Young Frankenstein and Frankenberry cereal, Victor surely had no idea his creation of a superhuman being would result in a devil more than a god. You just never know how your kids are gonna turn out, do you?