If you’re horrified by the hubris our species displays every day – through our often easy carelessness with the environment, and with each other – A NOISE WITHIN’s spring 2019 season, called They Played With Fire explores the idea of transformative action, both the change it engenders and the often unforeseen cost it imposes.
Beginning August 11th, director Michael Michetti (Artistic Director at Pasadena’s Boston Court) will direct his 11th production for A Noise Within ,with his staging of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. A Noise within has “become a home away from home,” says Michetti of his guest director duties. And he’s extremely excited about this latest opportunity.
“I think the parallels in Frankenstein to today’s world are undeniable,” he says. “As science and technology blur lines and raise questions about ‘playing god’, I think Mary Shelly sounds so prophetic…we see her themes echo all around. Certainly it’s timely, relating as it does to Victor Frankenstein’s responsibility to his creation.”
Frankenstein’s responsibility to his creation.” To better illuminate the cost of such a failure of responsibility, and society’s corrupting influence on the innocent, Michetti is taking the novel approach of telling the story from the creature’s perspective. “Because this adaptation begins literally at the moment of the creatures birth and we begin to understand the world through his eyes, it becomes very much a story about society’s corruption of an innocent soul. About an abandoned child (and the cost of that abandonment.)”
The themes at work here are clearly dear to Michetti, and he’s putting together a production sure to make them resonate deeply. “I’m working now with the design team to create what the world is,” he says. “We keep talking about how to do that through the lens of the creature. And to find a minimalistic method to suggest everything from a laboratory to the streets of Ingolstadt to the German countryside, to the Swiss Alps, to a little hunt in the Orkney islands. The most exciting challenges are when the script is asking you to accomplish something nearly impossible and you have to grapple with limitations and come up with exciting interpretations that work.”
From the novel by Mary Shelley
Directed by Michael Michetti
This electrifying tale of a creature cast away by his creator into a hostile world—only to wind his way back in a dangerous game of destruction—has captivated audiences for over 200 years. The gothic story comes to life with Nick Dear’s adaptation of the chilling fable by Mary Shelley, animating the themes of social rejection, intellectual hubris, and the nascency of good and evil.
Check here for show times and dates.
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