Monday night, I
went to a reading at the historic St. Peter's Church in Chelsea of the new play
called MONSTERS SPEAK. The piece is a
series of monologues written by William Henry Koch, Jr. re-imagining some of
the most famous creatures of stage and film.
The first
monologue, performed by Ryan Hilliard, portrayed Doctor Frankenstein's monster,
and it was quite comic in tone. The nameless creature, wittily self-aware, made
numerous references not just to Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein, but to the James Whale
film adaptations as well.
The first
adaptation of Frankenstein was Richard
Brinsley Peake's 1823 melodrama
Presumption. Though the play had comic moments, it was meant for the most
part to be taken seriously. Later that year, however, Peake wrote a second
play, Another Piece of Presumption,
which begins in a theatre with the playwright Dramaticus Devildom endeavoring to
get his play staged. Devildom's play, it so happens, is essentially a comedic version
of Peake's last play, with the main character's name changed to
"Frankenstich" and Devildom commenting on the story throughout the
action.
Koch's
monologue, then, is a part of a long history of Frankenstein adaptations, which have over and over again revisited
older material from a new and often campy perspective. James Whale, after all,
followed up his 1931 film version of Frankenstein
with The Bride of Frankenstein in 1935,
and arguably one of the best adaptations of the story is Mel Brooks's comic
send-up Young Frankenstein, which
later returned the story to the stage as a Broadway musical. Peake would have
been unsurprised.
The second monologue
of the evening portrayed Kharis, the title character in the Universal Pictures Mummy series. In Karl Freund's original 1932
film, the mummy's name is Imhotep, but in a series of follow-up films his name
became Kharis. His goal was the same, however: to bring back to life the woman
he loved.
Damien Mosco
performed the monologue, which was serious and brooding, rather than comic.
Unlike the story of Frankenstein's monster, the tale of the mummy originated as
a film, though mummies have appeared on stage from time to time. Charles
Ludlam's The Mystery of Irma Vep, for
instance, contains a memorable Egyptian sequence with a mummy.
Koch performed
the final monologue himself, taking on the persona of Quasimodo from Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
He portrayed Quasimodo in the tomb with the body of Esmeralda, the two finally
united if not in love, in death. During a talkback after the reading, Koch said
that of all the numerous adaptations of the novel, he could not think of a
single one that kept the book's original ending.
A number of
years ago, I did see a puppet version of The
Hunchback of Notre Dame that ended in Quasimodo's skeleton clutching the
skeleton of Esmeralda in the tomb, but by in large, Koch is right. Even Victor
Hugo didn't keep Victor Hugo's ending when he wrote a stage adaptation of the
novel called Esmeralda (though he did
keep multiple deaths).
