Monster
Opening Night: July 3, 2012
Closing: July 29, 2012
Theater: Atlantic Stage Two
A brutal beating… the menacing scrawl of graffiti… a bloody baseball bat… Detective Tang Tran investigates the mysterious case of a missing Vietnamese-American high school student on the heals of a hate crime. But the monster he finds may change him forever…
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July 13, 2012
Carry the small moments of a play, and the big themes will take care of themselves. That’s a notion too often ignored in Neal Bell’s “Monster,” a proficient adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” that shouts out its grand ideas but forgets that quiet gestures also have the power to awe.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 11, 2012
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has enthralled audiences ever since it was first published in 1818. Since it’s appearance on bookshelves the story has undergone a series of facelifts and alterations, but it has never disappeared from cultural memory. Neal Bell’s Monster is the latest incarnation of the famous novel, which opened this week as part of the Potomac Theatre Project’s annual summer presentation in New York City. The story is still the familiar tale of the hubristic doctor who plays God and reanimates a corpse; however do not expect to see the green man with a flat-top and bolts protruding from his neck.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 10, 2012
Playwright Neal Bell returned to the source of the Frankenstein legend when he adapted Mary Shelley’s 1818 fantasy novel to the stage in 2002. Instead of the mute murderous brute seen in James Whale’s 1931 Hollywood horror classic, Bell’s creature is closer to Shelley’s original: an articulate soul, yearning to understand why he was brought to life by the questing scientist who assembled his body from corpses. Similarly, this Victor Frankenstein is no wild-eyed madman; he’s a conflicted scholar seeking to comprehend the mysteries of existence. As in the book, the story is told in flashback by the scientist to a sea captain in an Arctic wasteland, where the former is trailing his creation to destroy it. Michael Greif’s original production for Classic Stage Company effectively combined scary suspense with philosophical debate.
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