The plays keep piling up, but I get ahead of myself. We started Saturday out by going down to church, where Mer graded papers while I put up a temporary mount for a new computer projector at church. I hit a few snags, but managed to get it in rough working order. Sunday was “Friend Day” at church, and so I wanted the new projector up for that service. The permanent mounting kit was due in early during the week, so in the meantime, I improvised by making a mounting kit out of a metal baking sheet. It worked well enough to work for one service.
After that, we went home, where I took a nap, before Mer and I headed up to Cleveland Heights, on the east side of Cleveland. I took Mer to a theater we had never been to or even heard of – the Ensemble Theater. I had stumbled across them online and saw they were performing an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, based pretty firmly on the book and not on the movies. I had listened to Frankenstein on iPod last year, so I was interested in how it would translate to the stage.
Pretty well, as it turned out. Because the weather was poor (cold rain), the audience was sparse, with maybe only eight or ten of us in attendance. The actors still played well, which was admirable. There was one fill-in actor who missed the occasional cue, but that is understandable.
Ensemble Theater’s solution to the wide-ranging action and settings of the book was to go with no set. There was a central raised platform, which was accessed under any of four scaffolds, which were used occasionally by the cast. We were told by characters or by a narrator where we were, and the action would commence. It was effective, and probably the only low-budget way to approach it.
There were only six actors, and two were always the same (Frankenstein and his creature), with the other four actors playing all the other parts. The actors playing the two leads were very strong. The other actors were good, but made occasional odd choices; for example, one actor chose to play an Austrian professor as a buffoon, which he was not in the book, and that was odd. The young woman playing Frankenstein’s beloved was very good as the beloved, but was weaker as the narrator Mary Shelley. There was also a place where a man was narrating, and they cut to a recording of “Mary” finishing his lines. If the director was going to use a recording anyway, why not just have the man finish his own lines? It was a little jarring.
Still, I really loved the production. It was true to the book and was intense in many places. The starkness of the bare stage and the suggestive (rather than literal) props used by the actors helped us to fill in details with our minds. It was a good theater experience, and we really liked the small theater space, as well as some of the productions they have coming up. I look forward to going back soon.
On the way home, since we went right by it, I do have to admit we stopped for dessert at the Cheesecake Factory. It is hard to drive past that place.