After a couple of hours watching a revival of Neal Bell’s Frankenstein reboot, Monster, temptation overwhelms moral sense, and we reach for the easy metaphor. This lumbering effort, cast in part with students and recent graduates from Middlebury College and Boston University, has stumbled out on thin ice, far from its native environment. Frankenstein’s monster may lurch up to the North Pole to evade his creator, but nothing could be more arctic than an audience watching what seems to be an undergrad production out of context.
Bell’s 2002 play takes us through the familiar terrors—corpses become a man, that man becomes a murderer—but (on the page, at least), the script leavens melodramatic motifs with modern mores. Here it’s all yelling and shambling and passionate clutching at one another; every actor’s worst instincts are on display. The PTP/NYC company presents a season of its hybrid pro-am productions every summer, and frequently the experienced actors can carry the work. This time, that burden rests primarily on not-so-mad scientist Victor Frankenstein but actor Joe Varca’s portrait collapses into two dimensions under Jim Petosa’s lugubrious direction and so can’t offer much help to the younger performers.
None of this would be a sin if Petosa just kept the project in the lab where it belongs, where the actors could ham it up to their hearts’ content. Instead the poor, stitched-together creature has been trotted out and told to mingle with theatrical beings who have had time to evolve. Bringing this production to New York seems shortsighted, and for my part, reviewing it seems more than a little…monstrous.—Helen Shaw