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Pershing Square Signature Center

Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein – Outcast Souls

12/28/2017

Once again, Ensemble for The Romantic Century takes us on a multi-sensory journey into the soul of an artist. As Vincent Van Gogh’s painting (in Van Gogh’s Ear) helped reveal his spirit, Mary Shelly’s seminal creation reflects the author’s psyche. Both shows exhibit quintessential relationships, Vincent’s with his brother Theo, Mary’s, not so much with her lover/husband as with literary child, Frankenstein. The monster is as real and sympathetic here as its creator. Both beings are judged, suffer and struggle towards light.

Playwright/Founder and Artistic Director Eve Wolf integrates influential history. Mary’s life is dramatized in tandem with writing. She often interacts with her “monster.” Symbiotic Romantic music by Liszt, Bach, Schubert, and Busoni are stunningly performed on piano, organ, harpsichord, oboe and vocal. Superb, painterly projection (David Bengali-love the unique play on scale, negatives, and use of shadow) and Set/Costumes (Vanessa James) enriches.  Formidably imaginative choreography by actor/dancer Robert Fairchild acts as vertebrae and gut.

Mia Vallet; Paul Wesley

Background

Mary Wollstonecraft Goodwin was only months old when her mother died. Four years later, her father wed a neighbor with whom she had a difficult relationship. Privately educated and well taken care of on a material level, the young woman’s attachment to romantic/radical poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley was apparently a coup de foudre. Despite being married, Shelley began a public relationship with Mary. Ostracism and debt followed. When Shelley’s wife committed suicide, the couple married, but reputations had been irreparably blackened. They traveled.

The summer of 1816, Mary, her husband, and stepsister Claire Clairmont visited infamous author/poet Lord Byron and his friend/physician/writer John William Polidori near Geneva. Claire was carrying Byron’s child. One of the group’s games involved each concocting a ghost/horror story which he or she would read/enact in front of the others. Byron and Shelley’s overheard discussion of Darwin may have set wheels turning. “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated,” Mary wrote in a diary. Her tale was Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

By the time Shelley drowned off the coast of Tuscany, the young woman had lost three children. She resettled in England with a surviving son. This, her first novel, was published in 1818.

Robert Fairchild

The monster, as manifest by a hypnotic Robert Fairchild, is brought to life by harnessing a vivid electrical storm. (Beverly Emmons’ Lighting Design is a terrific palette.) We watch pain, surprise, confusion; the frustration of trying to control limbs; emerging into an unfamiliar world with no example to emulate. Whiplash. Calling Fairchild physically eloquent doesn’t come near his embodiment of this tortured being. The thespian has become an actor as well as a dancer inhabiting the archetypal role with originality and vigor.

“It was on a dreamy night in November…” Mary (Mia Vallet) writes off to one side. “…his limbs were in proportion as I had selected his features as beautiful…” Shelley (Paul Wesley) continues. This second quote nags at me throughout. Beautiful, then why?!

Mezzo-Soprano Krysty Swann and Robert Fairchild

The newborn slips on pants and a shirt. (This would be more credible if he were imitating someone.) It’s pouring. There’s an enormous moon. Projections merge from surface to surface. Frankenstein ventures out. He flexes, stretches, shivers, lurches, wanders, sleeps. “Holy night…dawn…dreams…” sings mezzo-soprano forest spirit Krysty Swann running her hands just above his supine body like a faith healer. (The powerful vocalist imbues every song with elemental emotion.)

Marveling at a bird, our hero tries to catch it, leaping, whirling, loose of limb, dizzy, exasperated, creating a ballet of youthful hope. Children (Shiv Ajay – who later plays a lifeless body with great skill, Peyton Lusk, Avey Noble) throw stones at him. The creature reacts like the innocent he is. First hurt and puzzled, then unmoored, blindly striking out with horrific, brilliantly visualized consequence. Catching a glimpse of his face in water frightens and appalls its bearer. He watches and listens to a village family longing for acceptance, warmth.

Robert Fairchild, Shiv Ajay, Mia Vallet

Mary intermittently writes letters placing us in time and geography. Godwin (elegant, stern, believable Rocco Sisto) condemns his daughter for the lengthy mourning of her child. Her husband suggests pretentious, complicated revisions on the early work. Mary writes and reads aloud. Her creation learns to speak. He reads aloud and acts out. Contact with people remains unendurable.

If you haven’t read the book or seen one of several films, you may be somewhat confused by the raw end of Frankenstein’s part of the story. Reviewing a synopsis is a good idea. Still, anyone can understand loneliness, rejection, aspiration and despair. This is a banquet of sensation and unyielding emotion.

Robert Fairchild and Mia Vallet

The unfortunate weak links in this otherwise gorgeous effort are Mia Vallet and Paul Wesley. Neither actor has presence; neither moves with grace and bearing of depicted class. Speech doesn’t carry well and is sloppily enunciated. Feeling seems surface. The two have no chemistry and appear to think they stand alone on the stage. This extraordinary evening is, however, well worth attending for SO many other reasons.

Kudos to Bill Toles’ clarity and balance of Sound Design.

Photos by Shirin Tinati
Opening: Robert Fairchild

Ensemble for The Romantic Century presents
Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein by Eve Wolf
Choreographed by Robert Fairchild
Directed by Donald T. Sanders
Mezzo-Soprano- Krysty Swann
Oboe-Kemp Jernigan, Piano- Steven Lin, Organ/Harpsichord-Parker Ramsay
Pershing Square Signature Center    
480 West 42nd Street
Through January 7, 2018
NEXT: Tchaikovsky: None But The Lonely Heart- May 17- June 17 2018

The Whirligig– Splendid Theater

06/05/2017

Every now and then one encounters a production so well conceived and executed that it seems as if creatives share a single imagination. The densely written, highly literate Whirligig is only actor/playwright Hamish Linklater’s second effort, yet it arrives with the gusto and definition of a practiced hand. Its intricately woven story is akin to a good Sherlock Holmes caper with successive revelations. The message is clear, while individuals wisely eschew simplicity.

Alcoholic actor Michael (Norbert Leo Butz) and his ex-wife, manic depressive Kristina  (Dolly Wells) have come together after 7 years, shattered by the imminent death of their 23 year-old daughter Julie (Grace Van Patten). Insidious drug addiction has lead to disease that could have been halted if those around her had been paying attention.

Dad is uber-articulate and charming when not angry drunk. Julie, once one of those bright pretty, young women with endless potential, shares his dark sense of humor. She’s a daddy’s girl. Kristina, though tightly wound, is oddly more grounded than either, despite her (now presumably medicated) illness. She provided no example when needed.

Opening at the girl’s hospital bed, we zigzag through time connecting seemingly peripheral people to culpability they share. Almost everyone on stage could have helped if not prevented her death. These include:

Patrick (Noah Bean), Julie’s attentive doctor, looks after after his maladjusted, housemate brother Derrick (Jonny Orsini) in addition to patients. Each is upset at the fatality for secret and surprising personal reasons. Greg (Alex Hurt) runs the local tavern (a job Patrick had before him). His wife, Trish (Zosia Mamet) was Julie’s best friend and deepest influence growing up. An unspecified breach separated the young women.

The last participating character, Mr. Cormeny (Jon DeVries), was a teacher to all the young people now in their twenties. He holds up a bar stool eloquently pontificating. Cormeny might be considered superfluous, but is effectively employed to reveal plot tidbits, character reflection, and to ask questions for the audience. Butz and DeVries deliver two of the most realistic, nuanced inebriates I’ve seen onstage- no small feat. Michael’s been on the wagon. Julie’s illness sent him back to the bottle. This familiar watering hole acts as alternate arena for exorcism/disclosure.

Characters are well drawn and skillfully manifest. Only Patrick is less distinct, perhaps because his involvement is the most surprising and Linklater doesn’t want us to take notice. Noah Bean (Patrick) does a yeoman like job in the single a role without vigorous dramatic turn.

Alex Hurt’s Greg is thoroughly straight arrow and believable. Jonny Orsini  (Derrick) is slightly over the top when explosive, but later, appealingly tenuous and sympathetic.  Jon DeVries makes the most of Mr. Cormeny creating Linklater’s Shakespearean outsider with humor, shading, and focus. Dolly Wells shows us the loosey goosey, accepting Kristina of early marriage and a taut, self recriminating mother with equal conviction.

Grace Van Patten is an artist who understands subtlety. Julie might’ve appeared an innocuous young woman caught up in her parents’ failings. Instead we see an evolution: coltish love and sweetness, stubborn, self destructive aggression, brief reaching out, and exhausted resignation. There’s a moment when, having played herself in the past, the actress puts back on her hospital gown and we observe her deflate before getting back under covers.

Zosia Mamet’s Trish takes a little getting used to and, as written, engenders less empathy. We see a tough, curt girl and then barely changed, sullen woman so different from her BFF one is repelled but gleans post adolescent attraction. An early conversation with Kristina before the former leaves and one later when she assures her friend’s mother “Drugs are fun, it’s not your fault” bring out the best in the actress. (Why, one might ask the playwright, did Greg marry her?)

In my book, Norbert Leo Butz can do anything. The actor is equally at home as the leading man in a singing/dancing Broadway musical or inhabiting a complex persona. Butz discloses on-stage identity with masterful timing and wonderful physical touches. Prowess is delivering not just a sexy dance with the adored Kristina, but the way his hands absently touch her during dialogue; not only meandering soused exposition that rises as if occurring in real time, but a moment when he makes a beak of a party hat and pecks at a drink. Every theatrical gesture, joke, fall and cry is believable.

Director Scott Elliott has done an inspired job of controlling both visual and emotional ebb and flow. Timing is pristine. The company is cohesive and focused. Everyone listens. ‘A difficult and successfully realized production to which attention should be paid.

Derek McLane’s immensely evocative, revolving set is integral to the play’s inherent meaning and fluency. Large, horizontal tree branches, especially one onto which people climb and sit, work wonderfully. I admit to not understanding a back wall of high, intermittently lit windows in a suburban neighborhood.

Terrific lighting by Jeff Croiter allows scenes to overlap creating psychological bridges. We are, in fact, led.

Photos by Monique Carboni
Opening: Grace Van Patten; Zosia Mamet

Jonny Orsini, Noah Bean
Dolly Wells, Norbert Leo Butz
Norbert Leo Butz, Alex Hurt, Jon DeVries
Zosia Mamet, Jonny Orsini

The New Group presents
The Whirligig by Hamish Linklater
Directed by Scott Elliott
Pershing Square Signature Center   480 West 42nd Street
Through June 18, 2017