Everyone knows Frankenstein—or thinks they do.
Pigweed, Crowhill, and Longinus visit Baltimore’s Chesapeake Shakespeare Company for a stage adaptation of Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein*, and discover a production that gets surprisingly close to the original novel.
They talk about the remarkable summer at Lake Geneva when an 18-year-old Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori challenged one another to write ghost stories; how the play moves back and forth between Mary’s life and the story she created; and why Shelley’s creature is so different from the lumbering Hollywood monster most of us know.
The real creature is intelligent, articulate, powerful, sensitive—and terribly lonely. Is he really the monster of the story, or is Victor Frankenstein?
Along the way: the beautiful and unusual Chesapeake Shakespeare theater, the “Year Without a Summer,” the origins of the modern vampire story, Romanticism, a bit of disagreement over the play’s treatment of Mary Shelley, and Voodoo Ranger’s Halloween Slasher IPA.
A great play based on a great novel.
And poor monster.
Happy Halloween!
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