FRANKENSTEIN 1 March 2010

Sittin’ in a circle, ready for birthday cupcakes. This is the cutest little family of folks. I love them. Julien loves hand sanitizer. This is interesting. Oh, germs.

Yesterday’s rehearsal and discovery – we discovered the magic of light, darkness, height, and secrecy. Publix light discoveries. Different scenes where we can utilize the light and able to draw the house on the back of the wall, and there are ladders and the catwalk, and the light up there lets you shine light down almost like a creature lurking in the darkness. The colors are the same as the colors that matched up for all of the characters. Went up on the catwalks and played. Tried out different scenes with the lights. I like the idea of the spark of lights and power and knowledge. Tracing the shape of a house on the wall with the lights. When really dark, it’s really cool – unique element to play with. Lighting each other, colors combining on the face, different angles. We talked about because we have an even number of people but three characters, so we have an odd number of people, thinking that Lukas and Chelsea might be ideas/something to use/a different kind of presence. Never felt like a full person with Elizabeth, so going to play with different things besides just characters – Chelsea made a list of different things each character shares. Everyone wants something, and their wants mismatch and that’s where a lot of trouble comes from. Maybe Mary Shelley is in the world. She could do anything. If we did decide to put her or the representation of her in it, she could edit – what about Percy, too? She edited Elizabeth’s background. Mary and Percy Shelley? What our showing on Friday, the theme was that all the characters were looking for some way to control – and even the author didn’t have complete control. A big thing is control, or all of them want things to be a certain way and that’s why everything is so fucked up. Different clashing ways to get something everyone wants. Status is part of why nothing can work out. The creature and Elizabeth have such a low status. Victor’s voice being the bourgeois, and he wants to transcend even mortal status. Keep reminding myself about the reason why he got into this in the first place is because of his mother’s death – interesting to focus on the question of what is mortality, and especially today – people cryogenically freezing themselves – cloning dogs, choose what your baby looks like – fertility drug that celebrities are doing so they can have multiple children. The idea of immortality in terms of having left some legacy behind – Shakespeare’s version is having written the lines – Shelley is immortal. Old dead guys who are immortal. Do you write for the goal of immortality? Every single person in the story is trying to control the one thing that can’t be controlled, which is life and Nature and who they are and how other people feel about them. The one thing they personally can’t control is what they want so much to control. If you have an elaborate plan, you feel safe. It’s not even necessary following a plan of hours – I have to think that I will have time or it feels like it will never get done.

New Assignment: over spring break. All going to write new letters. These aren’t necessarily based on characters playing; to fill things out. To do this, some of this you can go back into the text and pull quotes from. I want someone to write a letter from Caroline to someone – a friend – regarding Elizabeth’s adoption (Cassie);
A couple of letters to Victor that are condolences on Caroline’s death (can be from someone else): Rachel
A letter from Victor to Clerval (spelling) about work on the creature:
A letter from Victor to Elizabeth about work on the creature:
Caroline can be introduced because a catalyst and it introduces Elizabeth into the family; Elizabeth adopted (chosen because beautiful – life if you married your stepbrother); can introduce Clerval because he can be someone to bounce things off of without ever being present – if there are letters to or from, he’s like an outside presence.

If Victor were writing a letter to his friends, would he be honest and open about the fact that he’s creating a creature? In this exercise – is that a limitation or – write what you want to write. Writes it but never sends it – his perspective. Writing but never sending letters – something that could be written. Write the letters that are never sent, letters that get torn up. Write an apology that you can never bring yourself to send [that cuts deep, deep, deep into me].

Letters never sent:
Victor to Clerval
Creation to Victor
Victor to Creation
Victor to Caroline
Creation to Elizabeth


CHANGING LANGUAGE

I wish we could read her writing.

THINGS TO FIND FOR THE CHIRREN:
Anne Mellor on Shelley

Questions for Professor O’Rourke:
Differences specifically in terms of text differences – from a scholarly point of view, theatrically I can tell what version I prefer, which do you? Revision of the story of Elizabeth Lavenza is really important. The funny thing is that she says she never changed it – and about 40 pages of changes happened – I kind of think most of the changes that she made, is a compulsive thing when you rewrite. But the Elizabeth Lavenza is the really big deal. Mellor makes a deal about stylistic differences, but I don’t see it. That revision speaks to something central to the novel – you can’t go through life without creating affective hierarchies – the people in your family matter the most; worst form is racism – Shelley saw it as a spectrum, not as separate phenomenon. People didn’t get it – and she wanted them to. Elizabeth turning into a nightmare fairy-tale – taking the idea of the prince and turning it around and the Creation with Justine is really interesting.

That changed so much about the creature’s intentions. I’ve always fixated on that moment that it was an act of terrorism – I looked at it as an act of rape because he wants to take something from her with the expectation that she should be giving this to him, she can’t give him what he wnts. I meant terrorism in the sense that he blames people. Not much difference between rape and terrorism.

Jokes about Romanticism.

Interested in staging – have you decided – there’s a big thing – do you call it the creature or the monster? We call it the Creation. A real recent shift, about ten years ago that happens – that term pre-judges. Makeup? Have an idea for creature makeup that is really simple. All it would do is distinguish – we have two creatures. It would distinguish them as each and everyone else. I wouldn’t want the creations to look monstrous because I like to think of Victor as a monster. Everyone has the capability of that. I don’t know much about the stage adaptation tradition, but in the 19th century – Ira Aldridge did a Frankenstein the Man or the Monster and I don’t know a lot about it, but I sort of think – Aldridge was very canny, and I think he played the role as though his blackness was monstrous – that that’s what constructs the monstrosity, the way people react. Even exposing the way people see your leg not as normal – not normal because of how people see you, not because of how you see yourself. The stage version maybe just has a little lean and we are all acting like he is horribly disfigured. What about not even signifying it and turning it into a hidden signifier? The idea that the monster is undistinguishable and you have to kind of find that monstrosity.

You can also think about we all look different – no huge signifier between color of skin, gender – we can politicize. What if the monster is the asocial behavior – you become a monster when you are not contained within the norm – when you have no restraint on your feeling of desire for love, and you don’t understand that you don’t bring your private desire into the public sphere and that signifies your otherness. That’s how we think about people as monsters – those who do not stick to the norm.

Arrested Development. Accidental moments of violence or social awkwardness make you a monster. This is my monstrosity. A lot of the work we’ve been doing are moments where I completely forgot who was playing who and everyone was capable of doing violence or being victimized and it just became this really interesting – there was no boundary between the three main characters.

Interesting if we all explored the monster – drawing a card and figuring out who’s it – but then everyone has to agree on who the monster is. Everyone has to agree. If you draw a card that says you’re a monster today. We’re all different versions of each character.

I think each character is a different aspect of the other characters in many ways.

We’re focused on V, E, and C. Mary Shelley saw these people around her who were egomaniacs and that was the monstrosity in them – and then she looked at herself. How did she feel about the miscarriage? Probably didn’t want to get pregnant. Was she relieved? I see what’s wrong with these people but what about me. We have just started about talking about the possibility of exploring Mary Shelley. Ken Russell movie about the ghost story contest (GOTHIC).

Most of the introduction is fake. The publisher wanted it, you had to have something to make the new edition, so she just wrote it. Sure, sure.

Questions about Mary – how is Mary’s point of view so different from her mother’s? Mary – put down your sewing needle and be yourself. And for Shelley – women characters are my purpose is to love this man and that’s it. Part of it is the personal; Shelley is in the post-revolutionary generation, but Wollstonecraft believed she was going to change the world, but then the French Revolution became the Terror – so Shelley maybe believes in the principles but there’s not a way to suddenly change the world. Mary Shelley’s letters and journal are amazing. Late journal entries. Not being written for private purposes – she knows she’s leaving her legacy and her last couple journal entries are about political activism and that kind of stuff. We’re all really bothered by how incomplete the female characters are and part of why the creation doesn’t go well is because how he’s bypassing needing a woman and it doesn’t go well. Bypassing Nature. I think for Mary Shelley’s perspective, Nature doesn’t do such a good job. Why huge focus on Nature? Nature doesn’t choose – it isn’t partial. We exist in it. You can find beauty or you can go to see and drown. Nature is brutal. She has that terrible dream about her first baby and it runs through the whole book – Nature just did it to her. Her dream about her child. Made it so much more powerful and violent.

Questions about Rousseau – critique of Rousseau – read in the article that there’s one way of viewing the novel is a statement that man in his natural state is neither good nor bad, and that was how I read it the first time – man has choice, the monster can choose – the monster says after Victor has died, I could have chosen not to, but I was so bad. I saw it as existential. Nobody does choose otherwise. Her essay on Rousseau – is kind of out of the box. FIND THAT TOO. It’s a piece of genius – makes a weird judgment on Rousseau, at least he went crazy – so at least he does feel guilty. She’s so critical of him personally rather than considering his ideas. His ideas came out of his personality and his self-interest. The tradition of Rousseau studies is to take him seriously and Shelley really called him out. Making a philosophy to excuse your actions. To put it down on paper and to have other people believe it…that’s crazy. Isn’t that religion? [Hooray Perry!]

Multiple moments of characters dealing with death and birth bed. We die a lot in the scenes that we do. It does turn more into dying than creating. A lot of it is about birth – a nice reminder. Wollstonecraft dies giving birth to Shelley; never got to know her mother – where she and Percy Shelley courted – they went to a graveyard and sat on Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave and read poetry and then eloped. He was already married and had a life with two babies and then she totally felt like a monster. You can go to the grave and sit on the grave. It’s walking distance. King’s Cross tube station – on the right side – housing estate on the right – 18th century church still there with a graveyard.

Do not list Godwin or Wollstonecraft in the list of the graves. SO INTERESTING.

One of the reasons why people go to the Abbey is to see the beautiful famous people who have inspired so much. They’re not doing anything but decomposing.

What ideas – if you were going to see a response to Frankenstein – I know what I like, but what would you be interested in seeing? One of the things we were talking about at the beginning – I think there needs to be an arbitrary visual signifier that takes on absurd importance – how does a group form that consensus? The real mislead in the critical tradition on the novel is what did Frankenstein do wrong? Everyone is wrong. Everyone is looking at the creature and saying gross. Everyone does it. Nothing is wrong with the creation. What’s wrong is the way everyone treats him. If he could just explain what he was. This is how the world works – this is what Shelley is saying. People sort it out and say “those people are not going to count.” Walkton and the people on the ship save Victor and they say – the one we’re saving wasn’t the savage, but a European. AS EVERYBODY DOES. People make these distinctions. What if Victor makes a partner? Then you and a lot of other outside people are going to come take all of our stuff. Victor stands in defense of the Europeans. We’re going to be together and you’re not with us and that’s what makes us a group – when we leave when somebody out. If you’re not like us you’re against us.

How is that inside you? That’s the harder thing to find. That hate inside ourselves. I think she wants people, when they read the novel, to feel guilty. Instead, people think Victor is guilty. YOU SHOULD FEEL GUILTY. Everyone either felt like they hated Victor or they hated the creature – at first it was a very clear Victor is right or the creation is right, but we have found neither is right or wrong. I remember writing down that it made me ashamed of humankind – I can’t say that there’s not one of us who wouldn’t be repulsed by something that looked dead- I was so alienated by the creation’s behavior – killing a child, blaming the murder on Justine, then I gave up and didn’t like anyone.

The book is written out of guilt – if you look at the baby dream and think of her circumstances – this is not a wanted child – it’s terrible but on the other hadn, we are going to be able to do what we imagined when we eloped. A great deal of the emotional force in the book is from guilt. It’s a hard thing to elicit. It mostly does not produce that result, and I think it should. Even if you find yourself reading the book and siding with someone, you can still be made to feel guilty. I thought it was fine that the creation killed everyone, but other people were horrified.

Elizabeth’s step-siblings. What happened to the other four kids? The Lavenzas. What happened? How did I do that? What are you overlooking every day? Fundamental question of adoption – is it better to be adopted or left? It doesn’t turn out better that she’s adopted to a wealthy family. Sometimes there’s an issue – international adoption. Not right to take them out of their culture – are we bettering their lives by bringing them to the US.? Also that question, at least in a contemporary dialogue – is Elizabeth better off being adopted than her siblings, growing up poor but with family and each other?

The idea of changing – I see why – also because it causes her to be the complete opposite of the creation – it gives him more internal justification of killing her (creation) – but I’m wondering if that didn’t happen – if that edit didn’t happen – does that change the monster’s purpose? He kills Elizabeth because V won’t give him a companion. I would still kill her. Does it change it? I think it is completely different because of that. The adoption story underscores the choice of Elizabeth because of her looks. The difference is that the Creation is excluded from a familial order; 2nd version – she’s chosen, he’s not. Mary runs off with Percy – comes from household where there are three teenaged girls – she’s the one who’s chosen and goes off with him. During the writing of Frankenstein, one of the teenaged girls left behind commits suicide, the other girl is impregnated by Byron and loses the baby. Elizabeth is the chosen one and everything turns out – it didn’t get any better. What right did you have to have a better life than the people left behind?

It’s an astonishing life – her life is just astonishing. One miscarriage, one lived to a year old, one three weeks old. When she says that it’s a product of a happy times, you think, well, by the time you wrote the novel, it was only the one miscarriage and the sister’s suicide – then by the second one, lost two more babies and the husband. Percy built his own boat and took it out on the Mediterranean and drowned.

When he drowned – the bodies washed up and Byron and others came down to burn the bodies, one of them took Percy’s heart out of the fire and there was a custody battle over the heart. What the hell? Who gets the organ? How do you respond as the wife of someone who is dead?

Somehow it flattens out because they had it pressed in a book. Like a bookmark. Like dried flower. Hang it upside down. We should use that because it’s so disturbing. It sounds like bad poetry.

Trelawney, etc. re the heart.

If you travel to Europe and being in England – you can see these random body parts – in Romanticism – isn’t that more of a practice of how you would not move the body, but you would move the body part. Chopin’s heart was transferred from Paris to Warsaw. Almost like a saintly thing – they’ll get a piece of the saint or some kind of relic. Bone, head, etc.

Sometimes it has less to do with the person and more to do with the place.

ANNE MELLOR’S BOOK. MARY’S LETTERS AND DIARIES.

Form a community around a piece of someone’s body. It’s so disgusting to see this dead thing, but it’s cool to have Jesus’s finger in my church. It’s not disgusting then. Mary kept his heart and

Leigh Hunt might have had the heart first. She had one child who made it.

Husband reduced to parts of his body. Like keeping the ashes in an urn or stuffing your dog. Can’t do that to your husband though.

All these juicy details – we’d like to land in these details that are very fruitful, general ideas are wonderful but when you build a performance you have to touch something very tangible – I know what love means because I can touch your heart. Anything that you would like to give us that’s a palpable detail in which you are interested? Personally for you – where is that something in the novel to which you return that’s an object of wondering, a place that you find – what do you think of Victor Frankenstein? V thinks he failed and that’s the important thing – his own sense of failure – that seems to reflect her. You really have to worry about is the way you’ve failed people. Who really has a sense of failure because they failed other people – V is pretty singular in literature. How can you convey that to an audience – this is the burden of the book – how have you failed other people? How do people fail themselves? Mary Shelley – when she ran off with Percy Shelley – she ran off with him and what’s her obligation to Percy’s wife? She wrote in her journal – all the sorrows of her life she took as the retribution. Her son’s wife cut it out with scissors. No contact with Percy’s kids – tried to get them after the wife committed suicide – got married to get custody – British courts said they were unfit parents. V sees himself as a failure, but that’s also the same thing about the perception – how everyone sees it – if he hadn’t seen the creation as a failure, there wouldn’t have been otherness created – he succeeded and created life and the second it happened he couldn’t look at it – immediately shamed – failed because he succeeded. You push the envelope as far as you can, and when you realize you’ve pushed it as far as you want it to go and that’s when you look at the ruins of everything around you. And now there’s nothing.

We call my Victor the sad bastard Victor. And now knowing that Mary Shelley so much felt that failure is so palpable – the palpable aspect is the biographical narrative. It’s almost too deep. The unlikelihood of Frank making life is the same as this 19-year-old girl beating these two big poets, and what does it get you? You have a book and all these lives are ruined. This makes me wonder about Elizabeth. There’s such disdain – you get rescued and now she rains misery on Elizabeth on purpose – I used to think she just didn’t bother – but now I see why. The failure of the revolution is also a meaningful event in interpreting the novel. How does that translate to something that your generation attempts?

You grow up and want to change the world and the revolution fails – is there a connection that can be drilled. How does it relate to us in our time – what does it mean on the stage- it is becoming tricky – these wonderful ideas are so interesting to talk about and they need to land on the stage and become theatrical language. In a way we are even trying to get away from any conceptualization to find the response that is more primal/personal, and it kind of corresponds with people’s lives and understandings. We put ourselves in this struggle because we don’t want a heavy concept until the end – we don’t want to execute something, we want to discover something in the process of doing theatre around the novel.

Thinking about how it applies to our generation – what is our sense of failure – I’ve just realized this idea of failure – at this age, there are so many reasons to feel like a failure – even choosing to major in theatre – V being our age and thinks about failure and put so much effort into this thing and the potential – people who only watch musical theatre could watch this and say it’s stupid, we can just fall flat on ourselves. That’s what everyone goes through – you take something and put your life into it and you ignore everyone around you and abandon yourself to what you’re doing and you get what you want and there’s no one there. A lot of people will choose not to put their whole lives into what they want to do.

Even the safe way can be viewed as a failure – there’s failure at every turn. Victor being our age – he’s just old enough to have responsibility enough to go away to school himself, intelligent enough, but young enough not to be able to handle it when shit goes wrong. But if something happens, I will call my dad and he will bail me out. He’s very young.

Mary is YOUNGER THAN FRANKENSTEIN. She is 19 when she writes the novel.

Mary Shelley’s own life arc is the precocious version – unlimited sense of possibility- when she’s young (16) all collapses at 17. When she and Percy first eloped, they proposed that Percy’s wife go with them – they would all live together. Two years later the wife (Harriet) commits suicide. Parents did not believe in marriage, stupid bourgeois concept – until Wollstonecraft got pregnant, and then they got married. Marriage = stupid state-sponsored thing that special people aren’t supposed to do. A creation that kills. On one level, isn’t it that this word creation because you are artists and your work can do damage – when good things are used for the wrong purpose – it’s the nature of creation – there is danger built in and failure is part of it in some way. Even if our show’s a failure it’s still commentary on the book so we’re safe either way. We kill one audience member a night.

Brown-bagging audience members.

A lot of this may be involving the audience somehow – the audience choosing. Take out one person and you choose – one person sits far away. Normal people don’t like that. What if we could rearrange and we could start moving people how we want them to sit. A plant in the audience and pick that person to be the creature – let them think it’s a random person. How is this person different?

Precious presence – opportunity. To get more juice to the work. We talked about identification and the easiness in which we find ourselves – the creature in us – we identify with that otherness – isn’t that interesting in the novel itself – isn’t there some true desire for extraordinary life in us? Are our lives as crazy as this woman’s life? Have we gone as far as Victor? How much have we done? Or are we the norm? Are we the odd people or the others? Which do we want to be? How much of a revolution? How much am I doing?

The first paragraph of the essay on Rousseau – that takes up this question about. It’s difficult to know what to call Rousseau – In ordinary men, it would be called egotism or vanity. If you’re exceptional, how much more latitude do you have? How do you know if you’re ordinary? The question happens on two levels – the self as an individual, but also at an automatic political level where you take privileges for granted – individual as special, but also at everyone living in a rich country and clothes are made by people who make 8 cents an hour.

DO you know how revolutionary it is to destroy the notion of family? It is much more radical to reform family life and structure in a world that doesn’t recognize women (for Mary), and even today – communes have failed.

The Frankenstein family has that portrait over the mantel – it’s not everyone or the family – it’s a bunch of dead people. Family is fighting over a finite amount of stuff – that’s family. That guy died, we have his stuff.

Every generation thinks they’re the lost generation – everyone feels discredited and discounted. So I thought I was going somewhere smart. The idea of failing – we feel like we’ve been failed by the people before us who have left us this dying world. The next generation will blame us.

Frankenstein says – they should have told me not to study weird stuff instead of accepting.

After they elope, they met in the first place because Godwin is an important political philosopher and Percy is heir to money, gives Godwin money, and runs off with his daughter. Story is that Godwin had sold his daughter. Godwin was really pissed off – but continued to want money from Percy. Told Mary that they still had to send money, but not with Percy’s name on the check. Mary wanted to go see her father and he wouldn’t see and she stood on the street outside his house and waited for him. Comes out that her father failed her. Maybe a reason why the father figure is not as prominent – he’s not really do anything. Godwin remarries a widow with two kids. He sends Mary away to live with someone else then.

Interesting idea to explore the people before you and your own failures and how are they going to affect the people after you. I want to make scenes with Mary Shelley story – we’ve done some physical activities and paired characters together and mix people and see what happens. Might be interesting to make scenes with Mary Shelley and see what happens.

Can we find the happy in this story? No.

Walton never learns from Frankenstein. Poor genius. People insist on finding something happy – they think Walton learned. He did not. Walton glorifies Victor to the end. I would not have turned back. People are so determined to find something redemptive. People want Walton to learn.

Is there light in the tale? Light in the dark. Hopefulness? Creature teaching itself to speak. I know that there’s happy in the story. Temporary. I feel like if we somehow highlight the light in the darkness. Searching for something happy in the story. The fact that you are trying to find something happy. The search itself is fascinating. That is already a character – a search for something hopeful. The search for something happy – Lucas’s Elizabeth. Even in Hamlet – don’t play it knowing you’re going to die. There is hope. It vanishes in many ways. You cannot play death from Act I.

Something systematically missed: V embarks on this project of creating and renewing life after his mother died. Possibility that he can bring her back. The question of nature. Nature comes and takes somebody and he found it unacceptable. Emotionally unacceptable. I’m kind of on one side of a divide in Frankenstein studies – people try to connect this to what Shelley thought about science. I think that is a biographical story about her own life at the core of it. It’s not about spaghetti.