Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was an overnight success when it appeared in 1818, and it’s been in print continuously ever since. That’s long enough for loads of wildly divergent interpretations to have sprung up. These days, it seems, Shelley’s story can mean just about anything.
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All this hyperbrainy slobbering ignores one key fact about Frankenstein: it’s awful. Every chapter of Shelley’s florid prose springs more laughable implausibilities and strained coincidences. Brought to life unable to speak, read, or even comprehend the existence of words, the creature ends up talking like the King James Bible after listening to conversations at the window of a peasant cottage (where he’s never spotted, despite being eight feet tall) and then reading a copy of Paradise Lost conveniently dropped in the woods near his hovel. Spurned by his creator (from whom he wants only love, or at least a revived lady corpse he can take to South America), he vows to ruin Dr. Frankenstein’s life—and then manages to anticipate that several months later Frankenstein will fall asleep while sailing alone in a storm off the coast of Scotland and be swept to the precise remote Irish beach where the creature will dump the freshly murdered body of the doctor’s best friend.
In short, everything about Frankenstein has been up for grabs for quite some time. So it would seem a perfect vehicle for director Sean Graney and the Hypocrites, who have a habit of performing their own reanimation experiments on classics, ripping them apart and stuffing the holes with whatever strikes their highly intuitive fancies. Authorship has never been sacrosanct to the troupe; their shows privilege idiosyncratic responses to texts over faithful interpretations. A play about Frankenstein’s monster as proto-cyborg lesbian seems right up their alley.
Graney’s signature promenade style, where the audience wanders freely onstage with the performers, doesn’t help. He mounted previous such productions on smallish, multilevel stages, but this time almost everything happens on the flat floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s expansive stage. If you don’t hustle to stay close to the action, you can lose sight of it for long stretches. And since it’s hardly ever possible to stand back and view the full sweep of things, the scope of this potentially grand tale feels tiny.
