Review: MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company

Victor Frankenstein had a plan. A magnificent plan. A plan to conquer death, overturn nature and establish himself as the greatest scientific mind since God invented the universe.

Good news: His creation lives. Bad news: Victor wants nothing to do with it.

Welcome to  Mary Shelley'S FRANKENSTEIN at Baltimore's Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, where the dead are restless, and the living are worse.

The year is 1816. Napoleon has been dispatched, the weather has turned against humanity, and at a villa beside Lake Geneva, a group of brilliant young people has gathered to endure what history will remember as "the year without a summer."

The company includes Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Fabiolla Da Silva), Percy Bysshe Shelley (Vince Eisenson), Lord Byron (Joshua Williams), Claire Clairmont (Dawn Thomas Reidy) and Dr. John Polidori (Jose O. Guzman).

All are young, talented, in love with themselves and, rather inconveniently, with one another.

And they are bored.

Byron proposes a ghost-story competition. Mary, all of 18 years old, produces Frankenstein.

In David Catlin's theatrical adaptation, directed by Ian Gallanar and Lizzi Albert, the famous gathering becomes the framework for Shelley's extraordinary tale. The authors step into their inventions. The inventions take possession of their authors. Literature becomes life, life becomes literature, and the distinction grows increasingly difficult to maintain.

Gallanar and Albert orchestrate these shifting worlds with a sure hand, weaving literary invention and Gothic horror into a seamless theatrical nightmare.

Byron, the celebrated literary bad boy, becomes the outcast Creature (Williams). Percy becomes Victor Frankenstein (Eisenson), exchanging poetic ambition for scientific obsession. Mary moves between the young writer and Elizabeth Lavenza (Da Silva), the woman whose affection for Victor proves considerably more durable than his good sense.

Eisenson makes an impressive transition from the ardent Romantic poet to the increasingly feverish scientist. His Victor is possessed by an ambition so consuming that the practicalities of success appear to have escaped him entirely. He takes one look at the result and flees.

Williams makes the Creature's gradual transformation painfully convincing. Innocence gives way to rejection, rejection to loneliness, loneliness to rage. What emerges is not the familiar monster of popular imagination but a being whose capacity for suffering is exceeded only by the determination of others to make him suffer.

The exchanges between Williams and Eisenson are intense. Victor regards his creation with horror; the Creature craves parental love, understanding and, finally, an explanation. Victor, who has mastered the secret of life, proves remarkably ill-equipped to provide any of them.

Da Silva brings intelligence and emotional presence to Mary and Elizabeth. She embodies both the young woman discovering the power of her imagination and the vulnerable heroine helpless to alter the terrible events unfolding around her.

Reidy and Guzman display remarkable versatility in the many roles that round out the story. Together, the five actors move through Catlin's shifting identities with an assurance that keeps the elaborate storytelling accessible.

The production's technical imagination is equally impressive.

Shartoya R. Jn. Baptiste's scenic design transforms the stage into a world of graves, laboratories and shadowy recesses. A concealed trapdoor provides an effective means of moving between the realms of the living and the dead, while a wall of catacombs looms over the stage.

Katie McCreary's lighting and Adam Mendelson's sound design are formidable collaborators. Lightning races along the theater's balconies, accompanied by a heartbeat that echoes through the story.

Kristina Lambdin's costumes bridge the worlds of Romantic-era literary society and Shelley's Gothic imagination, giving the shifting characters a visual identity without sacrificing the production's theatrical fluidity. Hannah Brill's hair, wig and makeup design gives the Creature a disturbingly convincing appearance. Chris Reuther's puppetry introduces an unexpected note of delicacy into a world otherwise preoccupied with the gruesome.

What makes Catlin's adaptation especially rewarding is its insistence on keeping Mary Shelley at the center of her own invention. She is not simply the young woman who happened to dream up a monster while the famous poets amused themselves. She is the imagination through which the entire nightmare unfolds.

Shelley understood that the ability to create something extraordinary does not necessarily imply the wisdom to care for it. Technology changes, but human vanity proves more resistant to improvement.

Shelley's Creature learns the essential lesson of civilization: People are perfectly capable of behaving like monsters without looking like them.

Mary Shelley'S FRANKENSTEIN runs through November 8, 2026, at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, 7 S. Calvert Street, Baltimore. For tickets go to boxoffice@chesapeakeshakespeare.com or call 410-244-8570

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