In tale of Mary Shelley, creation and death, gods and monsters take on new meaning.
Anyone with a passing interest in Mary Shelley has heard the story of how the famous Gothic novelist created “Frankenstein” as part of a party-game challenge.
It’s a romantic notion that in 1816, she, her husband Percy, vampire inventor John Polidori and others sat around in a Dorothy Parker-like circle, wittily one-upping one another’s ghost stories.
But that’s not the horror story Buntport Theater is now staging.
Buntport takes a much more surreal and humanistic approach in presenting for the world its own rather strange and compelling new creation: The deliciously titled “My Hideous Progeny.”
The title refers, of course, to the mad doctor of Mary’s imagination who ignited the spark that created life from death. Only here it also refers, much more sadly, to Mary losing four children.
The story opens with a delirious Mary (Erin Rollman, in her most demanding role to date) lying fully clothed in a bathtub filled with ice – her doctor’s advice for how best to recover from a miscarriage. Thinking of those poor dead children as Mary’s true inspiration for the random body parts Victor Frankenstein stitches together to create his misunderstood monster not only sets us on a discombobulating theatrical course, but forces us to reconsider our deeply engrained notions of the famous novel.
This play is a mental sea voyage of its own, and the bathtub, which Rollman never leaves, is the ship the ensemble of six navigates through both literal and figurative icebergs.
This entire tale plays out as a fever dream, and not just Mary’s. The dreamer shifts between heartbroken Mary and her sleepwalking poet husband, who was plagued by laudanum-induced hallucinations of his own.
It’s weird, no doubt; at times it’s as cold (as ice) as its premise. But it’s fantastic and indefinably lovely, as well.
The Buntport team creates all its own work in collaboration. “My Hideous Progeny” launches its 11th season, but is its first new offering in a year. And it makes up for lost time by firing many creative and verbal synapses at us, some that hit the heart directly and others that streak by like shooting stars and land with more nebulous impact.
“My Hideous Progeny” ranks among Buntport’s most melancholy works, earnestly avoiding the ample available satire and ghoulish humor of the genre that, say, Mel Brooks found so irresistible. “Young Frankenstein,” this is not.
This is instead a sincere character study that tells the scandalous love story between Mary and Percy (Brian Colonna), one that was said to drive his first wife to drown herself. Evan Weissman plays the boorishly vain Lord Byron, who concocted the famous “let’s all make monsters” party game, and Hannah Duggan is Mary’s contrastingly quite pregnant stepsister, Claire.
The notion of creation – whether of children or monsters, real or imagined – dominates this sad rumination, which is set against a kind of virtual visual plasma that flows over the clear plastic walls of the set like a Flaming Lips video, occasionally revealing other monsters lurking in the recesses of the Shelleys’ collective brain.
Quick quotes from “Frankenstein” begin each scene as kind of live chapter titles. And as we navigate further inward, “Heart of Darkness”-style, the play becomes a foreboding philosophy on the living dead – and the dead living.
Water is everywhere, from the ice cubes eerily knocking against the walls of Mary’s tub, to Percy’s fatal obsession with it. It’s easy to see how nature’s literal spark of life is supplanted by a more unnatural current in Mary’s famous novel.
This quick, confounding evening centers on the remarkable Rollman, who delivers an open and necessarily restrained portrait of a woman who possessed the literal omnipotence to make life out of death on a page, but not so easily from her womb (though one child survived).
This is a Mary steeped in historical fact – but never brought to life so lovingly and hauntingly before.
-John Moore, September 30, 2011, Denver Post