With Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride” battling it out for the best Frankenstein adaptation on the big screen, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is bringing it to the stage right here at Drew University.
At their Drew Night on Oct. 24, Drew students flocked to see the production, taking advantage of the theatre’s reduced cost on tickets for students. The audience was drawn into not only the world of Victor Frankenstein and his creation, but the world of Mary Shelley herself.
For the stage adaptation, we see the story of the creation of “Frankenstein.” As the story goes, Mary Shelley was with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron when a storm kept them trapped inside their house. Lord Byron then proposed a ghost story contest, in which Mary Shelley wrote what was to become “Frankenstein.”
By framing the story in this way, we get to explore Mary Shelley’s life through the story she wrote.
Each actor doubles as a character in Mary Shelley’s life and as one in the story, with intentional pairings creating intriguing interplay. The acting and the writing makes each character very distinct in performance, yet it is still easy enough to draw parallels between them all.
The clearest example of this is Amber Friendly as both Mary Shelley and Elizabeth. The play heavily leans into Shelley’s past trauma, especially the premature death of her first daughter. Elizabeth is portrayed largely as an innocent victim of tragedy she had no part in.
Friendly brought some of the more chilling moments of the entire play as Mary Shelley to life, inviting the audience in to see the pain the character is feeling inside. In a remarkable show of range, Elizabeth is often bright and bubbly, bringing brightness to the show when needed.
Sean-Michael Wilkinson doubles as both Percy Shelley and Victor Frankenstein, the counterparts to Mary and Elizabeth. In the story, Elizabeth died because of Victor’s choices, while Mary Shelley more so shares her pain with Percy, though he fails to grasp the extent to which it affects her.
Playing the main character of the story within the play, Wilkinson was able to delve into his part and help direct a key idea of the story of Frankenstein, that of humans reckoning with nature in the light of the scientific power we now have. You’re able to see Frankenstein’s internal struggle with this exact plight highlighted by the choices Wilkinson makes.
Jay Wade’s doubling as both Lord Byron and the Creature is the least obvious choice of the main three for double-casting, and that very well may have been because those were the characters left. However, you can still see some similarities in the challenging of societal norms that both characters seem to embrace.
Wade portrays Lord Byron exactly as he should be portrayed—a decadent, somewhat hedonistic, clever and charming man.
His performance as the Creature comes off as one would hope as well. The exposure to incredible suffering from creation turning into a boiling yearning for revenge makes you feel the pain the character is feeling.
In an otherwise serious play, Neil Redfield, who played Dr. John Polidori and Henry, and Brooke Turner, who played Claire Clairmont and the mother, both added refreshing moments of levity and comedy. They certainly contributed to the dramatic acting as well, but what most sticks out is the comic and more lighthearted relief.
As a whole, the adaptation largely succeeds in what it sets out to do, weaving the story of Mary Shelley’s own life with her magnum opus.
Though the play takes out some of the depth that comes from the Creature telling his own story to his creator, and his reading of classical works developing his mind to be quite sophisticated, plenty of depth is added back in by the mixing of these two stories.
If you missed the Drew Night, you can still get tickets for $15 with a student discount. This production of “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” will continue running until Nov. 16. For more information, or to buy tickets, you can go to https://www.shakespearenj.org/.
Nathan Moldover is a first-year majoring in political science and philosophy.
