We commence work on our next project. As with The Tempest, I’ll post a weekly narrative of the creative process over the whole span of its genesis. No specific time or place for its premiere: hopefully within a year, hopefully nearby, and hopefully to have a touring life. The Jim Henson Foundation has given us a $2,000 seed grant for early-stage development, so it’ll happen somehow, and we’re allowing ourselves an opulent amount of time to do it.
A sixteen-year-old girl, of notorious radical parentage, is swept off her feet by a would-be poet who’s been expelled from college, married and fathered children. They flee the country, impoverished save for heavy borrowing from friends. At 18, she’s lost one child and is pregnant with another. As an entertainment among a small circle of social misfits, she accepts a challenge to write a horror story.
The result is Frankenstein, a work that’s had as wide a range of interpretations as any ancient myth. Usually it’s seen as a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, of seeking forbidden knowledge, of Man usurping the role of God. But for us, in our 1998 adaptation with Touchstone Theatre and our plans for further adaptation to puppet staging, its resonance is deeper.
In Mary Godwin Shelley’s novel, Victor’s obsession with creating life has its genesis in his mother’s death, which may echo her own mother’s death in childbirth. His scheme is a grand “denial of death,” the quest to bypass conception and birth in order to conquer mortality. The result of this denial-of-death is death. We can draw parallels in our present-day alienation from the natural world, our attempts to save nations by destroying them, our drive for bigger bank accounts, bigger cars, bigger bellies to make ourselves too big to fail—whatever strikes you.
Shelley was cutting very close to the bone. Victor’s abandonment of his creation echoes her lover/husband Percy Shelley’s own mix of idealism and irresponsibility. The Creature’s first murder is a child named after Mary’s dead first-born. The principles espoused by her parents, the radical philosopher William Godwin and notorious feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, permeate her vision of the Creature’s innate goodness, yet fall to the assaults of the real world.
For those unfamiliar with any but the movie versions: Victor is a student, not a mad scientist. He has no dwarfish assistant. We don’t see electrodes buzzing or cauldrons bubbling: it’s not clear how Victor animates the Creature. Nor do we know what makes him appear “monstrous,” except for vague descriptions of watery eyes and unusual size. There’s no mistaken transplant of the brain of a criminal, and he learns to speak eloquently. There’s no torch-bearing mob of peasants: Victor and the Creature pursue each other into the Arctic, Victor dies, and the Creature is lost on an ice floe.
On first reading, for me, the novel was disappointing. Years later I came back to it, and despite its dated style and lack of the cinematic hot spots, I was stunned. We staged it with a trio of LeCoq-trained actors from Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem, PA, with great success.
We envision this new Frankenstein with our usual form of puppet: a 2/3rds-lifesize figure, one hand inside the head (moved by wrist and fingers, weight supported by a fingerless glove), the other hand as the puppet’s hand. We also expect to use shadows, video projection, and an enlarged form of toy theatre with 15" cut-out figures—the civilization the Creature encounters—all set in our 10x8x8 ft. aluminum-frame cube, with lighting apparatus self-contained and readily portable.
Why puppets? To tell a large story with a small cast. To create the fractured reality inhabited by both Creator and Creature. To maintain realism of detail while expanding its mythic dimension. And simply because we believe in the enormous power of puppetry.
Work has started on both sculpting and storyboard. More to come next week.
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Life continues, not always requiring puppets. Elizabeth and I midway through a memoir of our creative life together, called Co-Creation, and we’re looking to finish it for self-publication in November to coincide with our fiftieth anniversary. With a friend, we’ve finished a screenplay, and that’s being shopped around. May 3-14, we’ll be in Blue Lake, CA, at the Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre working with their MFA students on dramaturgy for new work. Next week, our son is on his way to Portland, Oregon, to exhibit at a comics convention, and our daughter is visiting from Italy!
— Conrad Bishop
In the flurry of performance, I’ve been neglecting the posts here. Will start up again.
Our TEMPEST is coming up to its fifth and final weekend, going very well. Shooting video of every performance for dvd editing, and it’s truly humbling, in starting the edit, to see every minute of the show, 107 minutes, 14 performances to date, and how !#%$!!X%!!! far away from “perfection” we are. I recommend this process highly as an
essential, though painful, learning experience. Thankfully, our audience doesn’t see it that way. As a friend pointed out, we see the two media with entirely different sets of eyes.
We’ve had lots of wonderful written responses. But this one (prefaced by very effusive positives) evoked some thought, and I wanted to share it.
>I did not like Caliban - that is I didn’t like the puppet representation.
>I wish you had made him as evil and other worldly as was Ariel —
>an imaginative sprite and other worldly. The Caliban
>puppet reinforced that great myth of the US white society: that men
>of color are evil, bad, etc. I do regret that you chose that configuration.
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My response:
Dear ______—
Thanks for all your responses, this included. I’d like to follow up on this Caliban question, as I feel it’s a serious and provocative one. I don’t want to pass it off lightly.
“Evil and otherworldly” I can’t see. In some ways, he’s a metaphorical contrast to Ariel. But to me the power of the character is that he’s totally concrete: He’s born on this island to an exiled Algerian woman accused of witchcraft; he’s deformed; he’s in his late twenties; he was adopted into Prospero’s care, was a companion of Miranda, and felt love and tenderness for the first time in his life; he did something, details not specified, that Prospero saw as seeking to “violate the honor of my child”; he was enslaved and continues to be subjected to systematic torture; he’s filled with rage; and, like Ariel, he desperately longs for freedom. Those facts don’t add up to
“otherworldly.” He has to be given a real and specific face. Nor do I think they add up to an embodiment of pure evil, though indeed they’ve had the same effect that oppression often works on people: they’ve made him a rage-filled, dangerous, easily-corrupted creature. And one who, heartbreakingly, still retains some humanity, a sense of beauty, and a dream of something better.
I don’t think that nexus of traits is untrue to life. Prospero likewise is an amalgam of extreme contradictions, as is, for that matter, Ariel, combining that Robin-Goodfellow playfulness with the implacable, amoral force of an Elemental, and only at the end showing a startling glimmer of human empathy.
But I realize that doesn’t speak to your main point: that making him non-Caucasian reinforces a false stereotype. And this is a huge problem in contemporary stagings of masterpieces from a culture that saw “blackness,” deformity, and illegitimacy all as evidence of an evil nature; that was deeply anti-Semitic; that saw inherited hierarchies as God-given; that saw the treatment meted out to Kate in SHREW an occasion for merriment; etc. So a fantasy-style Caliban might be a means of getting around this. But to me, that’s not possible without significantly rewriting the play. Likewise, though I agree with the political intent of it, I feel that attempts to reverse the equation, to suggest Caliban as the wronged but noble-hearted native under Prospero’s imperialist heel, just flatten the play - it’d require a total rewrite to work, and that’s been done though I think not very successfully.
As a theatre artist, I’m not able personally to avoid ugly elements in characters who are at-risk for “stereotype.” If I create a generic, two-dimensional evil black man, swishy gay, dumb blonde, fanatic Arab or greedy Jew - whether as realism or as farce - then I’m being both stupid and irresponsible. But if those are concrete elements in a multi-faceted character, then I feel I’m reflecting an image that helps us see these “types” as real individuals. And that’s responsible artistry.
So the best I can do for Caliban is just to bring out the reality of the contradictions in his character and in his relations with Prospero, with Miranda, and with his drunken would-be liberators. If those aren’t very specific and clear, then I agree that it’s possible for the audience to jump to seeing only the stereotype. And as in innumerable other challenges of the play, we’re maybe only half successful. Our 90 hrs. of rehearsal should have been double that. As with our puppet MACBETH, which we had in touring repertory over a span of 15 years, at this stage there were elements we were only beginning to explore. It’s a matter of constantly honing in on the clarity of moment-by-moment truth.
So, just offering this for thought. And again, I’m grateful to you for raising this provocative question. If I have a chance to restage this TEMPEST in the future, I’m pretty sure to stay with my design and interpretation of Caliban. But that moment-by-moment evolution of the character will definitely be informed by serious tussle with the issue you raised. Many thanks.
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And received a very gracious response. Definitely this issue should be addressed in the study guide we prepare for the school tour.
•••
I’ve been startled by the response to a particular moment in the play: a kiss between Ferdinand and Miranda at the end of 3:1. A number of people have expressed rapture at it. Stage and movie kisses are a dime a dozen, and young love—unless it’s tragic—is more often than not an object of amusement. It’s very well played by the puppeteers, and probably their necessary care in making sure the puppets’ lips don’t bonk translates as the tenderness of Miranda’s first kiss. But what is it that makes that moment such an object of wonder?
My thought is that it’s an indicator of the power of the puppet medium. The very artifice of it brings about what Brecht termed the Verfremdungseffekt, making us see this thing we take for granted as “strange,” as something new. Prospero’s aside, “At the first sight they have chang’d eyes,” extends to our eyes as well.
Could it be done as movingly by live actors? Probably, but I’ve never quite seen it have that effect. The only comparable moment that comes to mind was in our staging of THE WINTER’S TALE with Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, the moment when Leontes (Whit Maclaughlin) took the hand of the statue of Hermoine (Laurie McCants) and whispered, “Oh, she’s warm.” There, Shakespeare likewise has used a Verfremdungseffekt—the fantasy of the statue coming alive—to focus us with almost unbearable emotion on that moment, the miracle of renewal.
Peace—
Conrad