12 short plays about Frankenstein
Lafayette theater company's 'Frankenstein Experiment' presents different takes on famous monster
By Mark Collins, Camera Theater Critic
January 8, 2006
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LAFAYETTE — Imagine a pre-teen boy approaching his father with a question about a girl he's grown fond of. The boy asks Dad, "How do I get her to like me?"
In C.P. Stancich's comedy "The Facts of Life: A Reappraisal," Dad answers, "Well, son, first you kidnap her."
That's because Dad is a take-off on the Monster from Mary Shelley's 19th century gothic novel "Frankenstein."
Stancich's comic story, in which the Monster is married and explains the birds and the bees to his curious son, is one of 12 short plays that make up "The Frankenstein Experiment," showing at the Theater Company of Lafayette Saturday through Feb. 3.
It's an ambitious project for TCL, which recently changed its name from Lafayette Community Players, and one that's roughly three years in the making. The project involves 25 local actors, six directors and numerous designers, technicians and backstage hands.
"The Frankenstein Experiment" is in conjunction with the national tour of "Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature," an exhibition which shows at the Lafayette Public Library beginning Friday, after being on display at the Boulder Public Library this past fall.
Shelley's tale of the scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, and the tragic Monster he creates still resonates with people today, in part, because of "our relationship to science, which is really ambivalent," said TCL artistic director Madge Montgomery. "With cloning and those kinds of issues, people oftentimes frame their reservations in terms of Frankenstein. I think we're trying to balance a sense of morality with science."
Rather than produce one of many scripts already written about Shelley's Monster, Montgomery decided to commission new works for the "Experiment" after someone from the library approached TCL three years ago with the idea of staging something while the Frankenstein exhibit was in town.
Montgomery called on three playwrights she knew in Washington state, including Stancich, then opened up the other slots to other writers. Out of 35 entrants, TCL chose eight to write 10-minute plays for the "Experiment," and picked one already produced script by a playwright from Georgia.
The 12 shorts will be performed on rotating days in two groups of six — titled "Fire and Ice" and "Promise and Peril."
"At the heart of the exhibit is exploring the ways in which Frankenstein is still a contemporary thing for people. It's really part of our culture," Montgomery said. "I thought having something that was new and having a variety of perspectives would match the exhibit, rather than having a single re-creation of the novel."
Among the dozen perspectives are Stancich's comic take, Jonathan Bender's "I've Created A...," which fills a Gothic world with New Age psychobabble, "Frankenstein 3000!," Seattle playwright David Golden's story of two brothers pitching a screenplay to Hollywood bigwigs, and Steve Rasnic Tem's "A Hideous Idea," which finds two parents facing the horror of a son who's been sentenced to death.
Denver writer/actor Edith Weiss went back and read Shelley's novel for the first time in 20 years when she earned a spot on the bill. She also read two of the three novels that Shelley's Monster read in "Frankenstein" — Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther" and "Paradise Lost," by John Milton, to help feed her imagination before putting pen to paper.
The Shelley novel grabbed her attention because "it speaks of those things in this world that we don't want to deal with. We don't want to deal with other people's hunger, other people's cold, and especially other people's ugliness," Weiss said.
Her play "Hoping to See God" puts the Monster and his creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, together in limbo after they've died. The play, directed by Billie McBride, touches on the parent-child relationship, a theme also present in Shelley's novel.
"It's Victor coming to grips with what he's created," McBride said. "Is he willing to take any responsibility for what has happened? There are some humorous moments in the piece, but it's a serious look at that kind of father-son (relationship), when the son wasn't quite what the father had hoped he'd be."
For Stancich, there's a father-son connection to writing a play based on "Frankenstein" that doesn't show up in his script. Stancich got a kick out of writing "The Facts of Life: A Reappraisal" in part because his father, Anthony Stancich, was an actor and friend of Boris Karloff, the man who portrayed the Monster in the original 1931 "Frankenstein" movie.
The elder Stancich briefly worked as a stand-in for Karloff, according to C.P. Stancich. Later, with permission from Boris, Anthony Stancich changed his name to Tony Karloff and worked the nightclub circuit in the Midwest and Northwest from the late 1940s until the early 1960s, doing impressions of famous monster actors Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Bela Lugosi as part of his act.
Boris Karloff's daughter, Sara Karloff, is scheduled to give a lecture about her late father's famous portrayal of the Monster at the Lafayette Public Library on Jan. 22.
Stancich said his own birds-and-bees speech was left up to his mother and it was his mom who let him stay up past his bedtime one night when he was 8 years old so he could watch Boris Karloff's "Frankenstein" on television.
"It started with a thrill because I was (allowed to) stay up late to see it," Stancich said. "I remember being taken out of myself, which even though I was a kid, it didn't happen all that much. I remember it being a special treat."
The traveling exhibition "Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature" is on display at the Lafayette Public Library, 775 W. Baseline Road, Friday through Feb. 24. Several accompanying lectures, book discussions, films and children's programs are planned; visit www.cityoflafayette.com/library or call (303) 665-5200 for more information. Boris Karloff's daughter, Sara Karloff, is scheduled to give a lecture at the library at 2 p.m. Jan. 22. Additional information on the traveling exhibition can be seen at www.ala.org/frankenstein.
Contact Camera Theater Critic Mark Collins at (303) 473-1369 or theater@dailycamera.com.