Review: FRANKENSTEIN at McCarter is a Beautiful Creation

Lookingglass Theatre Company's production of FRANKENSTEIN, now running at McCarter's Mathews Theatre, is exquisite. Forget green monsters and macabre plundering of graveyards, this production, whose script was adapted from the novel by director David Catlin, is as much about beauty and creation as it is about the abyss of death and loss.

It is also a masterful theatrical production, the kind that makes theatre greater than the sum of its parts. The script, which weaves Mary Shelley's life into the story, illuminates the novel FRANKENSTEIN and the woman who wrote it. Mary Shelley, played by an enthralling Cordelia Dewdney, flows between storyteller and character, at times orchestrating events, at other times receiving the blows of loss and rejection. Is she the monster or the Doctor? The grieving mother or daughter?

She is all of them.

"I'm fascinated by the blur between Mary Shelley's story of creation, rejection, and destruction and her own life of love, loss, and abandonment. How does the human heart survive desolation and misery?" notes director/adaptor David Catlin. "This is a story that continues to unsettle us."