There is a very good reason why some stories are told under the cover of darkness – hidden from the world and everything that takes place during the mundane trivialities of the day.  Because some stories aren’t meant for the daylight.  Only a blanket of blackest night will give some words that extra visceral thrill, only the the anonymity of the night can help create that tension that starts racing along every nerve ending – only darkness will give some stories the ability to make your heart race . . . will draw your lips together – will make you believe that the words are true.

The Tragic Story of Doctor Frankenstein (written by Stanton Wood and directed by Edward Elefterion) is just one of those stories – a tell-it-in-the-dark story: so when it starts in the dark, crackling terrifyingly to life before remaining partially hidden, a little chill of anticipation runs up your spine.  You may not know what to expect from this story – but your racing heart is telling you all you need to know about how it will end.

Elefterion frames this work organically – the stage is bare and everything that is necessary to tell the tale is crafted and created from the people who creep about the stage.   The lighting design is reminiscent of campfire ghost stories – strong lights beaming hotly and casting shadows – carving faces into ghoulish masks.  The sound design is equally unprocessed – hisses of train breaks, whispers, crackles, and every sound both necessary and nightmarish are the product of two very talented women -  Lauren Cook and Nikki Dillon who also act as props when necessary.

Beyond the staging, there’s another reason this Tragic Story pulls you in.  It is completely unexpected – though not without precedent.  For the Doctor Frankenstein is Doctor Victoria Frankenstein (Elise Knight)  – a brilliant , beautiful, tortured doctor who lives in a world she creates from her mind, with mostly herself for company.  So much so that she’s splintered herself off – and a second Victoria (Jocelyn O’Neil) exists to aid when necessary, to take over when necessary . . . to help support the enormity of the weight that’s on this fair doctor’s shoulders.  After all . . . she did manage to reanimate a lovely dead body – only to then find herself horrified by her own actions.  She’s got to be able to share that burden with someone – even if the other person is just an offshoot of her insanity.  In effect, this trio  becomes a strange family unto itself – Victorias 1 and 2, with the “Child” (Emily Hartford)  acting as the completion of this unholy trinity.

Emily Hartford as this reanimated corpse had me frightened beyond belief.  For much of the beginning of the play she does little besides lurk and lunge, and – without that wall of protection (a movie or TV screen) the immediacy of her terrifying presences was a little too much to bear.    A few times the lights went out completely and I was grateful that I’d chose to sit in the last row up against the wall  – knowing that she couldn’t pop up behind me.  Slowly, however, this monster/child’s terrifying persona goes from merely a grunting, gasping, groping thing to an eloquent being who explains her torment to her creator in heartbreaking detail.  She’s almost more frightening when she can put words to the barren emptiness she’s doomed to exist in.

Arthur Aulisi is the lone male of this production – he plays Zachary (Victoria’s long-suffering sweetheart who doesn’t fare well by the end) in addition to the other male characters of the play.   He is particularly touching as Victoria’s father who stands by the sidelines and suffers as he watches his daughter disintegrate.

Ultimately, however, this play belongs to the women – the two tragic sides of Victoria who create a shattered tableau and become more seamless as the play moves on – and their unfortunate creation, the unwanted Child who Victoria can neither liberate nor obliterate.  She has started this – and she must see it through till the tragic end.

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Related Posts:

• Doctor Frankenstein’s Magical Creature – Cries In The Dark
• Two Themes For The Price Of One: “Before Your Very Eyes”
• A Wonderfully Flat Thing – Or A Journey Into Your Imagination
• Cake: When All Else Fails, Eat It (Planet Connections 2010)

Marie Antoinette is famous for the saying, “Let them eat cake!”

Whether she actually said it or not doesn’t really matter in the face of history or the minds of the people whose rumor-mill worked overtime and managed to get her head in the guillotine anyway.

Cake (written by Felipe Ossa and directed by Leah Bonvissuto) helps us to imagine what would happen approximately 200 years later if  - instead of a monarch – we get someone like Dana Dunnigan (Ramona Floyd) who lives on the conservative right and has a radio talk show where her celebrity and the power of her notoriety among her detractors very well might lead to her beheading too.  It’s the glorification by an adoring fan-base, determined to save her,  that helps keep her around.

We enter the story as Dana replies to people calling into her radio show. Dana seems to have a barb for all – friend and foe alike. We get the impression that, to her, it’s more important to be notorious than well-liked.  Not to mention the fact that she always knows how right she is about everything. Regardless of whether people love her or hate her, she seems in her element and in control.

Dana believes all the wrong things for all the right reasons and aggressively grates against all of our revolutionaries-in-training: Emily Richardson (played by Erin Leigh Schmoyer), William Devita (Dan Shaked) and John Mulcahey (Samuel Adams) among others.

Cake is about a similar transformation as that of Alice In Wonderland who ate cake and was able to then leave the purgatory of the bottom of the rabbit hole – finally able to enter Wonderland itself.   Throughout Cake Dana’s path follows a similar coarse as she finds herself wanting to actually do something in the world rather than just continuing to be the pundit she has always been, at the end after she falls through her own rabbit hole of being abducted.

Ramona Floyd, Samuel Adams, Dan Shaked, & Erin Leigh Schmoyer

On the opposite side of the fence, but with a similar journey,  Emily and her cohorts also change from being caricatures of the standard “socialist proletariat revolutionary” wannabe that can be found on any college campus into true adventurers ready to take their special talents and make a difference.

First we meet Emily, who tells us she goes into Corporate America with her camouflage of a smart pant suit and blouse, and that her training as an actress has always stopped anyone from believing she was anything else than what she appeared.  “It’s what I do.”she says.  She has a strong dislike for Dana which makes her personally invested to lead the kidnapping of Dana for the plans of her group.  Schmoyer as Emily artfully acts a character within a character able to convince Dana as well as the audience that she really is “one of them”.

Then we meet John Mulcahey (Samuel Adams) who is trying to compile all the philosophies of all the great (but terribly obscure) revolutionary writers of the 20th century into his “late, great” polemic. Late because “All the great {socialist} writers wrote their first polemics by the time they were 22…and I’m 24″. Great because he believes by doing such large amounts of time researching the obscure foreign books of as many of the brightest social theorists as possible, he could produce such a compelling argument against the old system that no one of any sense would be able to resist it and…as Marx would say the “State will fall away” at last.

And William Devita (Dan Shaked) seems at first simple: he wants John, and more importantly he wants John to want him in return.“I just want to jump your bones…Texts for sex has always been our contract”. He reads and translates aloud (“Always first in the mother tongue,” John insists) page after page and book after book of those obscure texts in Spanish, in French, in Italian, in Portuguese. William is definitely a polyglot among other things, but doesn’t seem to have the marketable skills as John and Emily have. Clearly William is the symbol of the noble proletariat, the everyman that everyone can aspire to be. He always smooths things over by being the least extreme but most capable of the bunch.

Leading this band of activists is a man referred to as “Che”(real name: Patrick Strife played by Arthur Aulisi) who is not as together as he seems.  His style of leadership is actually quite subtle, and he skillfully gets what he wants by making people think that what he is getting them to do was their idea all along.  It is he who comes up with the plan to abduct Dana Dunnigan . . . we find out the “why” later on in the play and it doesn’t quite match up with what we’ve been lead to believe.

In the end everything turns out for the “better” for everyone, just not what any of the characters would have expected at the beginning.

The twists and turns of this play will keep you riveted not just to find out what is coming next, but how it will happen.  Set in the 1990s, scene changes and climactic scenes are often accompanied by driving house music.  That and the unique flavor of those times at the end of the millennium are artfully captured by both the writer Felipe Ossa as well as the set designer (Dan Soule), stage manager (Megan Jupin) and fight choreographer (Ian Roettger) and others work together to make a really exciting play that will make you want to talk about the good old days “before the bubble burst” if that’s your cup of tea — or your piece of cake.

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Related Posts:

• Ye Elizabeths: Living Vicariously Because … (2012 Planet Connections Festivity)
• Ye Elizabeths – 5 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2012 Planet Connections Festivity)
• Planet Connections Q&A: Cake / Revolution!
• The 2012 National Newborn Festival Is Almost Here!
• That’s Quite A Story – The Tragic Story Of Doctor Frankenstein