Gorey Stories
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
The Jobsite Theater is excited to get to work on their electrifying 2004 – 2005 season with a new adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Jobsite has made a Bay area tradition out of Halloween shows. Jobsite has opened previous seasons with critically acclaimed and sold-out engagements of Clive Barker's The History of the Devil, Steven Dietz' Dracula and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. In addition to that history, Jobsite feels that Frankenstein is a logical evolution of last season's Top 10 production of Bloody Poetry.
Playing With Fire: After Frankenstein picks up where Shelley's novel left off. In this fascinating and eloquent drama, an exhausted and dying Victor Frankenstein (Shawn Paonessa) has finally tracked down his Creature (Michael C. McGreevy) in the lonely, frozen tundra of the North Pole. What follows is a fierce debate, interrupted by key flashback scenes from the novel (featuring Ryan McCarthy as Victor, Sarah McKenna as Elizabeth, Ron Sommer as Professor Krempe and Jason Vaughan Evans as Adam), as they wrestle with the tragic consequences of this experiment gone awry. The exchange between Frankenstein and the Creature becomes a confrontation between parent and child, scientist and experiment, and ultimately between God and humanity – culminating in the Creature's agonizing question, "Why did you make me?"
One of the most enduring horror stories of all time, Frankenstein has held readers spellbound since its publication in 1818. Written at a time when science was in its ascendancy, the novel spoke directly to popular fears about the dangers and consequences of man's overstepping nature's boundaries.
The story of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist obsessed with the desire to create life, and the Creature he reanimates with electricity, lays bare the frailties – both good and evil – of the human heart. Frankenstein deserts his Creature in horror, and the Creature – frightful, dangerous, abandoned and yet longing for acceptance – seems all too human in his yearning and isolation. Today the story resonates as a brilliant interpretation of the consequences of scientific inquiry and as a timeless illumination of the human soul and the monster that lurks within all of us.