Stephanie Berry as the Creature (right) and Rob Morrison as the Chorus in Tristan Bernays’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Tristan Bernays’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Timothy Douglas and playing in repertory with Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Dracula at Classic Stage Company, is a strange hybrid of the ploddingly literal and the vaguely conceptual. Its pleasures lie in listening to Stephanie Berry, who plays both Victor Frankenstein and “the Creature,” recite long passages of beautiful prose. But as a piece of theater, it is a flat, almost somnolent experience, and one that doesn’t seem to say anything new or urgent about the story.
Accompanying Berry is Rob Morrison as “the Chorus”: he does some narration and plays music and sound effects that are meant to set the tone and stand in for emotional responses to the Creature, such as recoiling in fear (according to a note in the script, the Chorus should “create the world the audience is seeing”). There are also some scattered songs, or fragments of songs, that don’t really add anything in terms of narrative or character—it feels as though Bernays and Douglas couldn’t quite decide whether to fully integrate songs into the proceedings or not and so settled for a half measure.
Morrison atop the table upon which the Creature first came to life. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
Morrison is also charged with inhabiting some of the characters, including in one scene Victor Frankenstein, when Victor meets the Creature in the mountains after he has killed Victor’s brother William. It is then rather confusing when Berry later switches from the Creature to playing Victor as well—why not continue with Morrison?
In fact, the scenes that work best are when each actor is playing a character: the Creature’s introducing himself to an elderly blind man in the hope of finding a family, only to be rejected when the old man’s children return home and see the Creature up close, or the abovementioned scene of confrontation between Frankenstein and his creation. Conversely, if the production wants to be a one-person piece, in order to emphasize some kind of duality between creature and creator, shouldn’t it have Berry play both characters throughout?
The production is spare: a long table and chair, some buckets, a lamp, and a mirror comprise the set (scenic design by CSC artistic director John Doyle), while the costumes are minimalist and not period-specific—a black overcoat and beanie for Berry, for example (costume design by Toni-Leslie James). The first quarter of the play involves the slow process of the Creature’s language acquisition (involving the now seemingly obligatory moment of audience participation), with the Creature pointing at various objects from his daily routine and naming them: “Berries. Bird. Tree. Fire. Yuck [The foul tasting roots]. Berries. Bird. Tree. Fire. Yuck. Sky. Branch. Bushes. Frankenstein. Coat. Berries. Fire. Tree. Music.”
The play then skips over time to his full flowering of eloquence (it is nice to be reminded how articulate the Creature becomes in Shelley’s novel, and in Bernays’s adaptation, since in popular culture the monster has been reduced to “Fire bad!”). And, again, there is pleasure in listening to Berry recite the heightened language with skill, but it can’t fully compensate for the production’s lack of drama or coherent storytelling.
The production feels both too dutiful and yet too abstract. It lacks the life-giving spark that the Creature himself laments: “I could not find that spark, you see, that—Promethean ignition that flew from your fingertips so easily at my birth, but which eludes my clumsy grasp.”
Frankenstein plays through March 8 on an irregular schedule at Classic Stage Company (136 East 13th St.), in repertory with Dracula. For tickets and information, call (212) 677-4210 or visit www.classicstage.org.
