PLAYING WITH FIRE: AFTER FRANKENSTEIN
That was some idea Lord Byron had back in 1816 when he challenged himself and a few of his friends to a literary contest. “We will each write a ghost story,” Byron said, according to Mary Shelley–who with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their mutual friend John Polidori agreed to Byron’s proposal. Out of that group project came Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, based in part on discussions she and the others had had concerning the animation of inanimate matter by electric stimulation. So did Polidori’s novel The Vampyre, whose portrayal of an undead seducer stalking London set the pattern for numerous Byronic bloodsuckers to come–most famously the title character in Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula.
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That’s only one of many respects in which the famous Boris Karloff film differs from its literary source. Whatever else Mary Shelley’s monster is, he’s talkative, a far cry from the inarticulate bolthead played unforgettably by Karloff (and spoofed just as unforgettably by Peter Boyle as a song-and-dance man with two left feet who bellows out a crude imitation of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein). The creature, as Shelley calls him, not only speaks, he quotes Paradise Lost; Milton’s epic poem about man and God informs his own rage and confusion at having been cruelly rejected by his creator. Scientist Victor Frankenstein ran in horror at the imperfection of the being he had brought to life from pieces of corpses. “Remember that I am thy creature,” the monster admonishes his maker. “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel . . . I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
Playing With Fire opens with two men confronting each other over an icy sea at the literal and metaphorical top of the world; behind them hangs a coolly shining globe of Promethean light, which later turns red-hot in scenes depicting the making of monsters. We know one of these men is Victor Frankenstein and the other is his creation, but at first we don’t know which is which. Both are well-spoken, deep-voiced, and torn up by rage, despair, and exhaustion; neither looks especially grotesque, though neither looks normal, either. The ambiguity is deliberate and effective, for as the men’s debate unfolds we realize that each is the other’s doppelganger, codependent, and tormentor. The Creature–strongly played by Dev Kennedy, with pallid, strangely smooth face and long, flowing black hair–invites Frankenstein to kill him. Frankenstein–John Reeger, better than I’ve ever seen him in a powerful performance that suggests searing dry ice–affirms his murderous intention, but can never bring himself to act on it. Instead he quizzes the Creature about his life (for the purposes of scientific observation, we are assured). In flashback, the men recount Shelley’s story–pared to its essentials, with most supporting characters removed and its key themes highlighted by ironic commentary. (When Frankenstein reminds the Creature of his unfulfilled vow–“Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous”–the Creature sneers: “I was bargaining at the time.”) Their reminiscence is cinematically intercut with scenes featuring their younger selves (sensitively played by Robert A. Mullen and Christopher Garbrecht as maker and monster respectively) as well as Frankenstein’s beloved stepsister/fiancee Elizabeth (Susan Fox, who explores the tension between the character’s penny-dreadful heroine surface and her underlying frustration with her limited options) and Frankenstein’s teacher, Professor Krempe (played by Donald Brearley with a nicely barbed humor to contrast with Frankenstein’s obsessive seriousness).
Ultimately, though, the emphasis on telling rather than depicting the story distances the audience, an effect enhanced by director Friedman’s stylized approach. Instead of blood, for instance, she adorns Dracula’s victims with red scarves; and the final pursuit of Dracula to his Transylvanian lair is so abstractly choreographed that the audience at the show I attended wasn’t even sure what ended up happening. If he reworks the script for future use, Sie should find a way to pull the audience more closely into the tale’s horrific essence by drawing the characters more closely together. For now, his Dracula is witty, culturally instructive commentary on its source–but a little bloodless.
