UNM's theatre and dance department is doing "Frankenstein" in an unusual vein.
"It's pretty much reality times 10, 100 percent of the time," actor Starnes Reveley said, who plays the unloved creature from Mary Shelley's book. "Everyone's screaming and crying and drooling and laughing hysterically. There's never a normal moment. Everything is just so heightened. And that's just the text. The emotional part of it - people have to break down into tears and sob pretty much constantly."
Director Kristen Loree said she read 40 versions of the play before deciding on a version that takes place on an iceberg. The acting is based on movement, and it's physically exhausting, Reveley said.
"They wanted to make me taller, so they put me in eight-inch tall stilettos," he said. "Not only do I walk in eight-inch heels, I dance in eight-inch heels. I pick someone off the ground and throw them over my shoulder in eight-inch heels. I have to climb up a ladder and sit on the top. The worst part is I have to stand on a rolling 45-degree angle platform while it's moving, and that's, like, super, super hard."
The set is minimal and colored in whites, blues and grays to look icy and cold. Student David Horowitz put a huge crack down the middle of the stage to represent the split in the creature's brain. The crack also serves as an entrance and exit for actors.
"The entire play is basically sort of like a fever dream of Frankenstein," Horowitz said. "It's hard to tell what are dreams and if there is any reality to what he's saying at all. Frankenstein, by creating the creature, he kills everything that he loves. The scene is split down the center by this rift, this void, where Frankenstein ends up because of his confused nature."
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Loree said she wanted to reach into the characters' emotional cores.
"If we were to turn that inside out so the emotional core of the character was exposed, what would it look like?" she said. "How would it walk? How would it sound? How would it feel? It's been a really interesting journey."
In scene one, the only text is something like "We are alone, father. Father. Father, alone."
"'Father' is one of the first words and one of the last words you hear in this particular production," she said. "We don't really know who any of these characters are. They're all what we're thinking of as dead versions of their characters. They're moving like dead people. They sound like dead people. It's spooky and scary and it swirls around the stage, and then the lights come on, and we meet Victor Frankenstein, who's sick and on a ship in the arctic."
Loree said her fascination with the plight of social outcasts led her to direct "Frankenstein."
"I was obsessed with the idea of freaks and how society judges people who are different and deems them somehow unacceptable and abandons them," she said. "And so my first impulse was to direct 'The Elephant Man,' but it's so costume- and prop- and setting-heavy. We've been in school six weeks, and we're already putting up a play."
"Frankenstein"
Friday, Saturday, Oct. 9, 10, 11 at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday at 2 p.m.
Rodey Theatre
$15 general, $10 faculty and seniors, $8 staff and students
