This determination proves a powerful motivator, but also an isolating burden. Frankenstein returns to school and throws herself into her task. Cocooned in her apartment—Joe Schermoly’s set seems to reflect both the brilliance and chaos of its occupant’s mind—she puts off friends’ and relatives’ entreaties to come home and recover together with them. Instead she constructs a vessel and, with all her memories of her father and pain at his death as fuel, blows into it the breath of life.
Her creation, a human-sized puppet designed by Cynthia Von Orthal and voiced/operated by Hainsworth, squarely occupies the uncanny valley, both grotesque and piteous, humanoid and other. They beg Frankenstein for guidance, acceptance, communion with another living soul; aghast, she rejects them and refuses their pleas. The Creature’s needs and Frankenstein’s refusals feed on each other, building inevitably to further tragedy.
Lifeline Theatre Mixes Hope and Despair
Although Robert Kauzlaric’s adaptation retains elements both of horror and of science fiction, the genre Shelley originated, it is not so much a horror story or a sci-fi story as a meditation on loss and grief. From Victoria’s mother Caroline (principally played by Risha Tenae, ably understudied by Julie Partyka) informing her of Alphonse’s death to the final confrontation with the Creature, a sense of desolation looms. Jordan Kardasz’s crepuscular lighting and Barry Bennett’s elegiac music reinforce and enhance this feeling.
About the Author: