There’s a game I like to play whenever I watch student drama. It is not an attempt to make their work better which, for some bizarre reason, seems to obsess people who must engage students. Students know perfectly well what they are doing, and any critic like myself trying to “set them straight” needs to go find a gag and a rope to bind themselves lest they do any more damage. In fact, my game is the opposite of that.
I call it “How Would a Professional Screw This Up?”
When I say that students know what they are doing, I mean it. They are studying. It’s in the name. And through study they are cultivating themselves, and striving toward a goal, as the etymology of the word implies. This status in their greatest strength. Students try, and try, and keep trying for whatever reasons drive them. Indeed one of the loveliest things about the UW Undergraduate Theatre Society has always been how many actors and crew are NOT theater majors. They are not trying to be professionals with glib answers and a bag of magic tricks; they are trying to do a show in a way that makes sense to them and (if the world is fortunate) to others as well. The very worst advice anyone can give them is to give them patent answers that are irrelevant to their personal quests.
The opening scene of the recent production of Frankenstein offers an object lesson. It is an incredibly painful, tedious five minutes of watching an incoherent actor moan and scream and flail.
The way a professional would screw this up would be to do the thing typical of American drama: be afraid of the emotion. “Oh no,” one would say, “This is far too much. The audience has already got the point after 15 seconds so we can just create a shorthand glyph/trope/manipulation that tells them they don’t have to feel anything here because we’ll do it for them superficially before we get on with what’s really important!” Five minutes would collapse to 30 seconds, the sound designer would pipe in some orchestral strings in a minor key played slowly, and voilá! Instant triteness, just add water!
Instead director Ryan St. Martin and actor Brennan Sandora commit to the premise that “what’s really important” in this scene is in fact the emotion, the rage, the confusion, the inability to know or answer, the shock, the pain. Sure you could telegraph it gently so that no one had to feel anything–but what would be the point? Isn’t the audience supposed to feel something? And before one suggests, “Yes, but not so much,” I would submit that this is merely because our culture is so redolent with bogus disdain passing itself off as machismo these days that “so much” is the start of an antidote to our social cowardice about emotion. Furthermore, if one tells students that the cardinal rule of theater is “show it, don’t tell it”, are they to be chastised for showing it? Is this scene not the perfect introduction the theme of Mary Shelley’s novel, that life is filled with pain to be assuaged and in the absence of empathy there will be rage as catharsis?
The production here is very spare. A minimal yet exceptional costume for The Creature by Laurence Wulfe and Molly Roberts is typical of the imaginative approach to physically staging the piece. Three portable risers that can be fit together to look like a hangman’s gallows. Table. Bed. Operating staging table that is a cross between a crucifix and a pentacle. Three rocks (Ernie Bushmiller would approve). At no point do the props or the scenery (designed by two of the actors, Ty Kemple and Andres Kou) hint at greater realism or solidity. This is the world from The Creature’s point of view. For a being that has lived less than two years, why would it be filled with anything more than essentials?
A professional production would screw this up by trying to show off their budget and flood the space with baroque excess. It wouldn’t just be the bed that happened to be hanging out in the storage. It would be the pinnacle of Rococo, some contraption of interlocked walnut with gilding and carvings, probably fitted with lights as if its brocade and bronze accoutrements weren’t enough. De Lacey’s house, certainly, would never be represented merely with a table and chair and black curtain in a professional production.
Nick Dear’s adaptation of the novel is like his other, more purely historical plays. It does what I expect a historically bound work to do. It shakes the text up the way one shakes a tree to find which fruit are rotten and will fall and which will withstand the quake. 20th Century adaptations, especially the ones on film, tend to take the view from the outside, i.e., from Victor Frankenstein’s detached, rather smug attitude or at best a somewhat sympathetic view of The Creature as misunderstood misfit.
But after a century of revolutions, counter-revolutions, and technological wars that led Britain into its current nostalgia for nationalist idealism and xenophobia, Mr. Dear decided that it was time to remind people that the process of Othering leads to nothing but bad. So he logically took the viewpoint of the traditional Other here: The Creature, so much an other that he doesn’t even have a name.
Given our absurd American propensity for identity politics in the 2020s, any sensitive student on a university campus these days could hardly help but pick up on this theme easily. They live it every day, wondering what should be, can be, and will refuse to be named, processed, codified neatly for the latest Adding Machine, all the while doing their best to convince themselves they have and should have control over it all. Meanwhile, Kristi Noem plays over their YouTube videos.
The hapless professional would analyze the script and change it, “tone it down” to make it more suitable for their aging bourgeois audience. (I kid, of course. We all know that professional theaters don’t analyze scripts.) This is what I call “professional attenuation.” Just as surely as lead attenuates an x-ray or water attenuates a radio wave, the professional theater attenuates the drama. Do we have the budget? There’s an awful lot of people in the play, wouldn’t it be cheaper to use doubling, tripling even? The student takes it at face value and says, okay: let’s make this shout.
And shout they do. Director St. Martin has not only obviously read the play but also has thought deeply about it. While I have various problems with Mr. Dear’s script, I think Mr. St. Martin has elided them (mostly) rather well. His particular approach to The Creature’s birth and the ensuing agony of it made me think about emotional endurance, in a local theater scene in which my repeated complaint is the utter absence of real emotion. This is no mean feat. I would hardly call his interpretation a pleasant one, but it is not a pleasant play or novel, despite what people raised on movie version after movie version might think. It’s not an Us v Them Universal Studios production; it’s an Us created Them cautionary tale.
The cast are lovely to watch, even if they probably absorbed too much Guillermo Del Toro imagery–how could anyone not these days? Ty Kemple plays a Victor Frankenstein that most certainly deserves to be strangled without turning him into a complete monster (sorry). His throwaway, smug ironic distance is emblematic not so much of scientists as it is of politicians, but I’m willing to buy that. It’s a far cry from his work on Rocky Horror Picture Show, for which I am thankful. I’ve been a fan of Rose Champion since she impressed me in The Addams Family, and here she is clearly in her element as a Gothic heroine. I like Machaiah Streckfus as De Lacey too. His earnest directness gives the story some human warmth that dissipates the agony of the first eleven scenes. It’s hard to play the role of moral compass in a play driven by completely selfish personae, but he does it smoothly without ever being saccharine or just plain clueless. And how lovely to see Josephine Paulson and Rain Anderson again, after their turns in The Adding Machine last year!
I’ve written many times over the years about how much I love student drama and why. Those reasons haven’t changed, nor has my appreciation. Students take it upon themselves to do their best, and rarely give excuses about how or why something cannot be done. By comparison, I could go to almost any regional theater in these parts and be met with a litany of reasons why nothing can be done. But as Nietzsche once wrote, “Error is cowardice.” It isn’t that professionals can’t do plays with all the fire and roughness of students experimenting in the medium. It’s that they won’t. Students will always remain the vanguard of the Rough Theater because they can but also because they prefer it. For a CHID major (represent), or biochem, or Asian studies, or economics, whose academic area is not theater, one is far more free to enjoy the ride and do the best one can. The roughness of such performance isn’t a bug; it’s a feature — a feature sadly lacking from a lot of performing art.
