Review: Lab Theater Project Presents Owen Robertson's CREATING MONSTERS, A New Take on Mary Shelley's Creation of Frankenstein

"Create your monsters, my love. Give them life." --Percy Bysshe Shelley to his future wife, Mary

It's one of the greatest openings in film history. In Bride of Frankenstein, the 1935 sequel to perhaps the most famous horror film ever, there is a short stormy prologue featuring three individuals--author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Elsa Lanchester) with poets Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Gordon) and Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon). They laud the success of her 1818 novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, and she tells them that there's more to the story. And then we venture into what is rightly regarded as the finest Frankenstein film of all time.

I thought of this opening when I saw the premiere of playwright Owen Robertson's CREATING MONSTERS at the Lab Theater Project in Ybor City. In Bride of Frankenstein, the prologue lasts a little more than three minutes in length. With Robertson's new work, it's as if he took that scene and added love triangles, incest, miscarriages, fight scenes, and expanded it to over three hours with two intermissions. There's a lot going on and yet very little going on at the same time. CREATING MONSTERS is quite entertaining and obviously well-written and heavily researched, but it also becomes maddeningly adrift and its structure, if that's what we want to call it, brings new meaning to the word "mess."

They call 1816 "the Year without a Summer," and that's when CREATING MONSTERS is set. We follow Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as she finds her voice as a writer and, ultimately, as a woman. She has an open relationship with Percy, the love of her life who meddles in her writing and actually changes her words without telling her; Mary also must share him with her over-sexualized stepsister, Claire. In a villa in Switzerland, we meet Lord Byron, the famous Romantic who has his eyes on both Mary and Percy, and Dr. Polidor (who would go on to create the vampire genre with The Vampyre), who also lusts for Mary. All this and Frankenstein too. At times it's almost farcical--Rumors meets Crimson Peak--but it also brings to mind Gothic, the 1986 Ken Russell film that, like CREATING MONSTERS, deals with Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Claire, Dr. Polidor, and the creation of Mary's immortal monster. Gothic was certainly a psychological horror film; I'm still trying to figure out exactly what CREATING MONSTERS is.

Robertson's play, being new and untried, is still finding itself. It has three acts and a whopping eighteen scenes, two of them short monologues and one of them so long that it could be a One Act play by itself. The strong Act 1 lasts 45 minutes; the meandering Act 2 runs for nearly two hours; and Act 3 ends it all with a powerful twenty minutes. Obviously this is done for the purpose of set changes (turning Mary's home into Lord Byron's Swiss villa and then back to Mary's home), but it throws the whole shebang out of whack. The way it's designed, it becomes structurally unsound, to put it mildly. When Act 2 ended, it was 10:47 and several dazed patrons seemed to think the show was over, not knowing that there was a final Act; I'm glad they returned because it turned out to be the best scene of the bunch, both writing-wise and acting-wise. (And they and the entire audience wound up giving the show a standing ovation.)

I have no qualms with lengthy works, applauding a five-hour Iceman Cometh and a seven-hour Angels in America. But for this show, and for its purposes, perhaps some of the center section could and should be trimmed. There is so much repetition, scenes that we feel like we've seen just minutes before, that you think CREATING MONSTERS' title should be changed to Creating Déjà Vu. Some points are so belabored that they could be the basis of their own drinking game (take a sip of beer every time Lord Byron impatiently rebuffs Claire's sexual advances, and you'll get mighty drunk real fast).

My biggest issue script-wise is that, due to the slogging Act 2, Mary's creation seems like an afterthought; we lose focus of her struggle and her salvation as the writer of Frankenstein until Act 3. In my opinion, CREATING MONSTERS is a trudge at three hours; it would improve greatly, in my estimation, at two or even two and a half hours.

The acting and directing make CREATING MONSTERS soar. Best of all in the cast is Newt Remetta as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Although short in stature she towers over all and boasts the most marvelously expressive eyes. As her beloved, Percy, Shaun Memmel sports a wig that makes him look like a Bay City Roller. The last time I saw him onstage, he played Wykowski in Biloxi Blues, a horny soldier who wanted to hump everything in sight, even the furniture. Percy is also sexually overcharged, but it's a far different portrayal; he's strong but he holds back his fury, only unleashing his outright anger once. I like how Memmel and Remetta work together, connecting in a very outside-the-box relationship. And I like how we are shown that this man, perhaps the ultimate Romantic, still has the Alpha Male chauvinistic need to control his future wife, even down to the punctuation in her writings. He's getting in the way of her artistry and her womanhood. "How is it my voice if you're changing my story?" Mary asks him pointedly. It's one of several great lines.

Emma Hurlburt plays the saucy, salty, sultry, leg-spreading Claire. Her fiendish cattiness, her verbal fireworks against Remetta's Mary, galvanized the audience. My one issue with Hurlburt's performance is that several of her movements across the stage did not seem natural; it felt like they occurred because she was directed to move at certain intervals, not out of character motivation.

Maurice Parker is full of spicy wickedness as Lord Byron. He captures Byron's flamboyancy, sparking the show to life, but he also at times reminds me of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride. "All you can do is eat and fornicate," Parker's Byron tells Claire at one point. And then there's a moment when Byron moves aggressively toward Claire, and he lets out a monstrous growl, sounding very much like the pained moan of Frankenstein's monster of later moviedom (was this intentional?). Parker is funny at first but then wears thin because he seems to be retreading scenes and reactions (again, this is an issue with the play itself; how many different ways can he reject Claire?).

Cody Farkas as the fifth member of the cast brings stammering to an art form as Dr. Polidori. His performance saved the show because he only hopped onboard the CREATING MONSTERS train a few days ago and learned all of his lines in that short amount of time; incidentally, Farkas' Dr. Polidori got some of the biggest laughs from the audience.

There's a lot of slapping, punching, strangling in the show (thanks to Sarah Berland's fight choreography). It's a long exhausting evening, but rarely a dull one.

Roz Potenza directs admirably; the performances worked with each actor connecting. The pacing issues, which usually falls on the director, go hand in hand with the script issues here. Owen Robertson's set design worked well in the intimate surroundings, including the Jackson Pollack splatters on the ground that help give us the "feel" of a marble floor or something similar. Wayne Linderman's lighting design was suitable (great lightning), and Jonah Robertson's sound design effective (you feel it's actually raining outside). Mary Kay Cyrus' props work, especially a godawful dog bust that doesn't make sense until halfway through the show.

Caroline Jett's costumes serve each character well and are mostly appropriate for the era. My only issue comes with Dr. Polidori's trousers, which have a zipper on them, which is an anachronism (zippers weren't officially invented until 1893, long after the events of CREATING MONSTERS), but this is an issue when the actor in question has to be clothed in an emergency 24-hour time period. So kudos to Ms. Jett who, along with Mr. Farkas, helped save the show.

Lab Theater Project is a godsend to the Tampa Bay area. They are a small theater company that focuses on new works, and it is my honor to see the birth of these plays whenever I get the chance. They've been around for seven years and have occupied the space on Henderson for the past two. They are so important to our area because they give us that Off-Off-Off-Broadway vibe and are also reminiscent of Chicago's Storefront Theater. If you haven't gotten a chance to see their space, then venture to CREATING MONSTERS where you get to see the dawning of a new play by a small but mighty theater company in their awesome surroundings. You'll agree that, small as they are and hit or miss as some of their shows may be, they are the lifeblood of our local theater scene.

Owen Robertson's CREATING MONSTERS plays at the Lab Theater Project in Ybor City until September 11th.

To post a comment, you must register and login.