Theatre bringing Frankenstein to stage Dec. 6-7

Dec. 3, 2024 - DENTON - There are a handful of names from books, film, television and stage that are instantly recognized. Sherlock Holmes. Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet. Dracula.

None is better known than Frankenstein.

In the 206 years since its publication in 1918, Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, has spawned 187 films, dozens of television shows ranging from serious to comic, 96 plays, numerous books and one excellent hard rock song by The Edgar Winter Group.

And yet not many people really know the story from the novel, or even that the name Frankenstein refers not to the creature that is one of history's most iconic monsters, but is the name of his creator. Who was not a doctor. And did not live in a castle.

The story as told in Mary Shelley's novel is much more profound than most film versions. If you'd like to know the story as the novelist intended, TWU theatre graduate student Felix Ferris would love to tell you.

"Frankenstein is quite complicated," Ferris said. "It's just that very few especially faithful adaptations have been made. Even attempted. I realized just how closely linked her life was to the story that she told, and I wanted to at least try to do something like that."

Ferris, who is in the second year of his pursuit of a master's degree in theatre, has been crafting a Frankenstein script that is faithful to the original work. His script will be presented in a stage reading at Red Bud Theater on Friday, Dec. 6, at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, Dec. 7, at 2 p.m. Admission is free.

"I've done a lot of adaptation of literature for the stage," said Noah Lelek, PhD, associate professor, head of the Division of Theatre, and director of Frankenstein. "It's different because we're focusing on the words and the story versus the blocking and the other things that I'm focusing on when I'm directing a complete staged version."

Instead of costumes, actors will wear formal black outfits, and they will have their scripts in hand to read after having only about 20 hours of rehearsals - a fraction of the rehearsal time for full stage productions.

To be clear, audiences will not sit through a reading of the entire novel. You'd need to bring a lunch for that. And dinner. An unabridged audiobook version on Amazon is eight and a half hours.

At 76,855 words, Frankenstein is not an especially long novel. For context, Dracula is more than twice as long at 164,000 words. Modern horror classics like Stephen King's It is 444,000 and The Stand is a whopping 514,827, making it one of the longest books ever written, topped only by a handful of tomes like Les Misérables and War and Peace.

And while adaptations all too often butcher their source material (for example, The Dark Tower and World War Z), movies like The Martian and The Princess Bride did their novels justice.

So why have directors and screenwriters strayed from Shelley's original work?

Maybe it's easier to cash in on the success of all those movies and TV shows. Maybe because once the world saw Boris Karloff's brilliant performance as the creature in 1931's Frankenstein, the die was cast. That creature was a mute beast assembled by an obsessed scientist.

"In fact, the maker of one version admitted to not knowing the book well, and the motivation for the play was to address a gap in the market," Ferris said. "That just made me angry. You didn't even read the book you were trying to adapt? It's set at a school, not a castle. There's never any castle in Frankenstein. And Frankenstein is not a doctor, he's 19 years old when it starts.

"I thought, 'Okay, let me try.'"

Ferris grew up a fan of old horror literature, reading Dracula, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde, and the stories of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. But he also read Shakespeare, so the elements of faithfully bringing one of horror's greatest works to the stage were in place.

"What got me interested in Frankenstein as an adaptation was a class with Dr. Gretchen Busl (of the TWU English Division)," Ferris said. "We read Frankenstein and applied a lot of various literary theories to it. I really liked this book when I was quite young, but now I was looking at it analytically, researching it, writing papers about it. It's very compelling stuff. I was a theater major at this time, so I began looking to see if plays attempted to do this before. Every time I found one, it seemed only loosely based on anything Mary Shelley ever wrote. That made me want to research Mary Shelley more."

Ferris applied for and won a 2024 Quality Enhancement Plan grant, supported in part by the Jane Nelson Institute for Women's Leadership, and was given $4,000 for research. He made Frankenstein part of his master's project.

"I spent about $150 just accessing Mary Shelley's old letters, which I've incorporated into the script," Ferris said. "I did a whole bunch of work like that, verifying where she was at the time she was writing chapter by chapter because she moved around a bit. She did a lot of editing back and forth."

Ferris discovered the novel was imbued with events from Shelley's life. For example, her son William died when he was just three years old, and themes of that tragedy are included.

"It was almost as though she was experiencing various traumas and various phobias as a result of what she was experiencing," Ferris said. "She would work them into Frankenstein, which created a very personal text, mostly informed by the things she was most afraid of and by her parental problems, which are a big part of the story.

"The big problem was, how do you synthesize a story that is about so many things into one narrative?" Ferris said. "Because it's about a class struggle, it's about parental problems, it's about losing your children, it's about struggle between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in the realms of science, and there's a bit about the corruption of the justice system."

Because a book does not need to be consumed in a single sitting, it can tackle multiple themes and plotlines, which is the great advantage of the written word. Condensing time, however, is the bane of adaptations.

Ferris pared things down. Trimming scenes, cutting themes, editing out characters.

And it was still four hours long. Four hours. A four-hour play turns a theater's snack bar into an aid station.

"I was like, oh God, how am I going to bring this to 90 minutes or even 120 minutes?" Ferris said. "It felt impossible. What can I cut?"

The solution: identify and isolate the novel's central theme.

"It is specifically about the relationship between fathers and their children and how the cycle of abuse is broken," Ferris said. "It is a powerful fantasy about being able to overcome where you came from. Her birth mother died when she was only five days old, and she had to go through a whole bunch of stepmother problems after that fact.

"The central conflict is between Victor and the child that he made for the sole purpose of controlling, only to find that he can't control this thing. It is in many ways superior to him, but just because it is physically or mentally superior to its father doesn't mean the thing is actually happy. It's been given this horrific form that it can't ever overcome, despite being such a better creature than Victor is, which is deeply sad. I think that is what's going to emotionally appeal to people the most. So I wanted to keep that as the center line. As soon as I realized that, I managed to cut a whole bunch of stuff that I liked but just didn't have much to do with Victor and his son."

What has emerged is a much tighter script than that which was used in an earlier stage reading in September.

"We've been working on this for at least a year," Lelek said. "This is kind of the process that a lot of plays do go through, because the playwright has to hear it and get feedback. We've given Felix so much feedback on what's working, what's not, how to reorganize it. We've dropped a number of characters and really tightened it up. Even if people saw it in September, I think they're going to see a completely different script."

"I'm proud of what's here now," Ferris said. "Because I don't think you could actually remove much more without the whole thing falling apart, which is, weirdly enough, where you want to be. Everything has to feel crucial because you don't have a lot of time. It should flow much faster and every scene should fall into the next scene, which I'm really looking forward to seeing."

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