KANSAS CITY REPERTORY THEATRE, MARCH 2020
When I first read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, what surprised me most was that it starts not with Victor Frankenstein, but with letters from Robert Walton to his sister, describing his exploration to the Arctic, his ship stuck in ice, and his encounter with Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein, on the verge of death, tells the tale that we think of as the book.
Walton’s story wraps around the story of Victor, and Victor’s story wraps around the story of the creature, and as I completed the book, I wondered “who is the protagonist?” Is it the creature who tells us of his birth and life? Is it Victor, who carries out the creation of this monster and yet fails in rearing it? Or, is it Walton, who hears this tale and changes the course of his own life?
One of the things I love about Kyle Hatley’s theatrical work is that he is in pursuit of a single question: why do we need stories? Storytelling makes us human by creating connection, understanding, inspiration, surprise, comfort, and helps us make sense of our lives in both intellectual and emotional ways.
As a theatre creator I often say, if every play you do doesn’t change you somehow, you’re doing it wrong. It isn’t simply the receiver of a story who feels that impact and connection. The teller of the story needs it too—the story meets us, we engage with it, and we are irrevocably changed.
This adaptation of Frankenstein puts the storyteller center stage, a storyteller who like Walton finds himself metaphorically stuck in ice. Unlike Walton, who is hearing this story for the first time, our storyteller is telling the story for the last time. He may know the tale well, but through telling it he makes discoveries and connections that release him to once again captain his ship and choose where to navigate next.
In this way, Hatley has written a play that is a love letter to interpretive artists—we may not always generate the stories we enact, but we bring our personal truth to them, creating something evocative and singular in our productions that have a profound effect on our very being. As an interpretative artist, I’m honored to share this glimpse of what that feels like with all of you.