Pittsburgh's Prime Stage Theatre reimagines 'Frankenstein'

Nov. 1—Movie and theater-goers are widely familiar with "Frankenstein," the eerie tale of a scientist's ill-advised creation of life in a laboratory.

Not so well-known is that Frankenstein is the name of the creator, and not of the creation, as well as the story's origin — how it was imagined by the teenage Mary Shelley as she traveled through Europe in 1815 with her husband, the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was completed in 1818 when she was 20.

Prime Stage Theatre will tell the story behind the story with a new adaptation by Pittsburgh playwright Lawrence C. Connolly, running Nov. 4-13 at the New Hazlett Theater on Pittsburgh's North Side.

As Connolly's "Frankenstein" opens, Shelley, along with her husband and others, is staying in Geneva as the guest of another British poet, Lord Byron.

"Originally, Lord Byron made a challenge to the people visiting: 'What say we write scary stories and tell them to each other tomorrow night,'" Connolly said. "(Mary Shelley) tells her idea to her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, and as she tells it, it comes alive on stage."

Connolly has Shelley and Clairmont walk through the rooms of the mansion late at night, as Shelley describes her plot, scenes and characters.

"She tells the very straightforward story of a character who loses his mother, decides he must cure death and, in doing so, he creates life," Connolly said. "And that life takes on a life of its own that he cannot control, and he must pay the consequences."

Shelley and her companions become the characters in her story. She imagines herself as Elizabeth Lavenza, the fiancee of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, personified by her husband. Clairmont is imagined as the Frankenstein family housekeeper, Justine Moritz.

Shelley sets each scene as she sees it in her head and then steps back as it is played out by the other characters on stage.

"The really exciting thing about beginning with Mary Shelley and then shifting to Victor Frankenstein is that, in many ways, I see the story of Victor Frankenstein creating life as being a metaphor for young Mary Shelley creating the novel," Connolly said. "The story is, in many ways, the story of the writer's struggle as she attempts to write something and realizes as she writes it that it wasn't quite what she had in mind, and she might have to pay the consequences for sending such a thing out into the world."

The story evolves on this double track.

"We have Mary Shelley coming up with the idea for her novel and we have the story of Victor Frankenstein having the desire to create a new life form," Connolly said.

Dual roles

Shelley's sprawling novel necessarily was condensed for the stage. All 10 cast members, except Everett Lowe as Frankenstein's creation, play two or more roles.

"Paragraphs and pages of back story went out the window," Connolly said, as it was pared down to a 90-minute run time — though the essence remains.

"This production is true in many ways to Mary Shelley's original concept, so people who have seen the Boris Karloff movies or other well-known film adaptations will see homages to those films, but we're also using things from the novel that have almost always been left out of the film adaptations," he said.

It ends as Shelley concludes the telling of her tale to Clairmont.

"All the men have gone off to write and Mary ends up spinning the best story of them all," Connolly said. "The next morning, the men get up and they've kind of dabbled a little bit with some ideas. Claire announces, 'Mary has a story that will set your hair on end.'"

Connolly was asked to write the adaptation in 2019 by Wayne Brinda, Prime Stage's producing artistic director.

"It's a novel I have great respect for, and I've always been intrigued by Mary Shelley's life, so it just seemed like the thing to do," Connolly said. "I thought, why had I never thought of this before?"

"Frankenstein" is directed by Liam Macik.

In addition to Lowe, cast members include Stacia Paglieri as Mary Godwin Shelley and Elizabeth Lavenza, Maddie Kocur as Claire Clairmont and Justine Moritz, Isaac Miller as Percy Shelley and Victor Frankenstein and Michael McBurney as Lord Byron and Robert Walton, a polar explorer who meets Victor Frankenstein in the Arctic, where the doctor has pursued his fleeing creation.

In the novel, it is to Walton that Frankenstein tells his story, which Walton conveys in letters to his sister back in England.

Curtain times for "Frankenstein" are 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and Nov. 11 and 12, and 2:30 p.m. Sunday and Nov. 12 and 13. The Nov. 12 matinee is sensory inclusive, while audio description and American Sign Language interpretation are available at the Nov. 13 matinee.

For reservations, call 412-320-4610 or visit primestage.com.

Shirley McMarlin is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Shirley by email at smcmarlin@triblive.com or via Twitter .