‘Lightning’
to strike Cultural Arts Center
Lit Live mounts play based on ‘Frankenstein’ creation
Lit Live mounts play based on ‘Frankenstein’ creation
By Michael
Aushenker
A creation
story about the ultimate creation story marks the latest Lit Live production at
Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center.
“And
Lightning Struck: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Creation,” which runs Feb. 9
through 12, tells the story of how Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sparked the idea
for her novel, “Frankenstein,” one of literature’s great archetypal stories.
Playwright
Robert Weibezahl wrote the original script for “Lightning,” to be helmed by Simi
resident Austin Robert Miller, a 21-year-old actor making his directorial debut.
‘It’s alive!’
The year is
1831, and Matthews, a visitor from the West, drops by Shelley with a request:
to write the introduction for a new printing of her best-selling 1818 novel,
“Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.” Matthews tells the widow that he is
interested “not the story of the creature itself but the story of how you came
to create it.”
Shelley shares
with the visitor her memories of the strange, stormy night in 1817 when a group
of friends—Shelley, then-husband Percey Shelley, Lord George Byron and John Polidori—tucked
inside an English mansion, engaged in a contest to come up with the best ghost
story. Not a spoiler, but as suggested by the play’s title (not to mention
history!), Mary Shelley won the gambit by a longshot.
Shelley’s now
nearly 200-year-old masterwork surely ranks among the most influential pieces
of literature of all time—having anticipated a roster of Gothic tales from Polidori’s
“The Vampyre” to Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde.”
In the pop
culture, Shelley’s central themes of man playing God, science gone amuck, and
reanimating the dead have inspired everything from the 1930s Boris Karloff
“Frankenstein” movies and Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedy “Young Frankenstein” to “The
Munsters,” “The Incredible Hulk” and “Robocop.”
Preview of things to come
On Jan. 11,
in the basement of the Cultural Arts Center, Miller led his cast through an
intimate reading. The dry run commenced following an introduction by Simi Valley Arts Commissioner Steven
Hayes.
A Simi
resident of 53 years, Hayes formed Lit Live in 2014. Including “Lightning,” the
company has mounted five works to date, beginning with “The Dark Heart of Poe,”
based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poems, in Miller portrayed a young Poe.
“And Lightning
Struck” stars Kay Capasso as Shelley, Evan Smith as Byron, Jennifer Ridgway as Younger
Mary, Alyssa Villaire as Shelley’s half-sister Claire, Schafer Bourne as Victor
Frankenstein and Tom Mesmer as Frankenstein’s creature.
“It’s one of
the more eloquent scripts that I have read,” said Cole Wagner, who portrays
both Matthews and Polidori. “Robert beautifully tackles the intellectual
(spirit) of the era.”
Following the reading, Mesmer, who relocated to Simi four
years ago after 20 years in Hollywood, expressed his excitement for Miller as
director. As actors, Mesmer and Miller had played older and
younger versions of Hank Williams respectively for a jukebox musical.
“He has that
confidence already,” Mesmer said. “This is right up his alley.”
Mesmer is no
stranger to playing iconic characters, having portrayed everyone from the titular
messiah in the Art Center’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” to the monstrous half of “Beauty
and the Beast.”
For
“Lightning,” Mesmer turned to Shelley’s novel for inspiration on how to portray
Frankenstein’s creation, eschewing the more pop-culture interpretations as a
slurring, inarticulate brute with neck electrodes lumbering around on platform
boots. Come Feb. 9, Mesmer’s creature will appear zombie-ish, possessing cloudy
eyes, long hair, bare feet and a cloak.
“He’s a like
a sponge,” Mesmer said. “He becomes hyper-intellectual. So much that it hurts
him.”
Literary liberties taken
“I’ve always
been more fascinated with the back story,” said Weibezahl, who described these
personages as wealthy, intellectual “19th-century hippies.”
“Byron was like
a rock star,” Weibezahl continued, while Shelley was only 19 when she hatched
the “Frankenstein” idea and 21 when she wrote it.
Shelley
proves quite quotable in Weibezahl’s play. At one point, she describes Victor
to Matthews as “a visionary and a coward.” At another, Capasso as Shelley says,
“I prefer the reality of today over the possibilities of tomorrow.”
“I created the
structure. Some of the dialogue was quoted from letters,” said Weibezahl.
That
structure includes intercutting between Capasso’s older version of Mary
Shelley, circa 1831, and Ridgway’s Younger Mary, circa 1817. More scenes with Frankenstein
and his creature appear in the play’s second act, when creator and creation
philosophically go mano-a-mano.
After
Miller’s mother, executive producer Brenda Miller, approached Weibezahl with
the play idea in summer 2015, the playwright, a Thousand Oaks resident of
nearly 17 years, embarked on writing it.
“He took
that idea and he made something very beautiful,” Hayes said.
Weibezahl
fine-tuned the script after an initial reading last summer. By October 2016, the
production held auditions at Thousand Oaks’ Bridge Academy and North Hollywood’s
Madeline Clark Studio.
Long before
snagging the lead, Capasso, who kept a dossier on Shelley during rehearsals, held
a fascination for the author, having seen a National Theater Live production of
“Frankenstein” (starring Benedict Cumberbatch) eight times.
“Her mother
was a huge feminist before it was really a thing,’ Capasso said.
Weibezahl
did employ artistic license writing “Lightning.” While Shelley wrote a preface
to her 1831 second edition, Matthews is made up.
“He is what
I would imagine an educated, middle-class publisher (and Shelley fan) of the
era would be,” said Weibezahl, who also parallels in his play the inextricable
link between Victor and monster with that of Shelley and “Frankenstein,” “bound
together forever,” as Matthews states.
Cole Wagner,
who portrays both Matthews and Polidori, feels that, two centuries later,
Shelley’s source material remains timeless.
“Every year,
the fan base gets stronger,” Wagner said. “One-hundred years from now, people
will still be talking about it.”
