A Man of Parts 

Frankenstein 

The Joffrey Ballet adaptation of Mary Shelley’s landmark novel Frankenstein, now in its Chicago premiere at the Lyric Opera, should not come as a surprise to anyone, given that this ballet received its world premiere at London’s Royal Opera House back in 2016.  Still, it’s a little startling to contemplate the notion that anyone could have ever concocted such an esoteric production and managed to pull it off successfully.  Even after seeing it, I was still left wondering whether it ever even did make sense or could make sense to produce a ballet about the mad ambition of an inadvertent monster maker.  

The issue is not so much the creature itself.  Disabuse yourself of the notion that Victor Frankenstein’s monster must “lurch,” as it is invariably depicted as doing in the innumerable Hollywood movies based on Shelley’s novel, and the concomitant assumption — true enough — that lurching is incompatible with ballet.  That’s a non-issue in this production, and Hyuma Kyosawa’s sinuous, strange and homunculus-like (re)incarnation of the creature successfully conveys to the audience the uncanny and upsetting otherness of a partially human but fully animated “thing.”  Watching this production, it was not hard to think of the horrors that await us with the advent of both AI-generated deep fakes and, even more forebodingly, the clones and conjoined man-made creatures that gene splicing technology is going to bring us, whether we like it or not.  The makers of this ballet (especially given the fact that it was first produced more than 7 years ago), probably didn’t intend for these considerations to be first and foremost in the minds of audience members, but the idea that carelessly assembled monstrosities can kill us all has been a part of human consciousness since Biblical times. 

No, the real issue with a ballet version of Frankenstein is that Shelley’s source novel is so damned talky.  It’s preceded by a laborious narrative framing device, is extremely heavy on exposition as only an early 19th-Century novel can be, and the creature itself, hardly the grunting golem of the movies, spends extensive swaths of the novel recounting his life story (near-life story?), talking his creator’s ear off (oh, the irony) and being chased around the North Pole.  It’s one of the dullest of all the literary classics, and the creature is so loquacious and disconcertingly articulate that it’s hard to accept it as a monster at all, except, of course, for all the murdering. 

The Joffrey production doesn’t suffer from literal talkiness, needless to say, but it’s just as exposition-heavy as the novel, in the process giving short shrift to Victor Frankenstein’s experiments and the monster’s terrifying genesis.  Thus, we are given scenes of tavern revelry, an orphan in a storm named Elizabeth who is adopted into the Frankenstein family, and the love story between Victor Frankenstein and the now-adult Elizabeth.  All of these scenes are true to the novel and make for beautiful if rather conventional dance performances (the choreography is by Liam Scarlett) that, in their traditionalism, are sharply at odds with the nearly avant-garde depiction of the monster.  The music, by Lowell Liebermann, is sweeping and grand, but never approaches the eerie realms that the subject matter demands.

And yet, despite these shortcomings, the Joffrey production, staged by Kristen McGarrity, Laura Morera, Lauren Strongin and Joe Walsh, is deeply absorbing and impressive, an absolute triumph of stagecraft.  The scenic design, by John Macfarlane (who also designed the costumes) employs moving scrims, projections and lighting effects (lighting design is by David Finn and projection design is by Finn Ross) that are startlingly effective and manage to convey, much more so than the music or the choreography, the essential eeriness of the idea of a half man, half monster constructed out of dismembered human parts.  The laboratory scenes, where Victor Frankenstein assembles and galvanizes his horrifying alter-ego (a common interpretation of the novel is that Victor Frankenstein and his creature are two aspects of his divided self), are especially well-staged and memorable, though it could be argued that they would be just as memorable if staged in the context of a straight play, without any dance at all. And the creature, despite his strangeness, makes for a chillingly lonely, yearning, wretched and pathetic figure, both all too human and yet not quite human enough. 

Sigmund Freud in one of his essays used the German term “unterheimlich” to describe the “realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread” and refers to another analyst, one E. Jentsch, describing this sensation as one of “doubt as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not perhaps be animate.”  It is this sensation that the Lyric’s production most effectively evokes — the strangeness of the creature and, for that matter, the strangeness of the ballet itself, both of them stitched together from disparate parts, and both coming alive in the most surprising of ways.  With lingering reservations about the advisability of this mad experiment, I nonetheless was thoroughly impressed by this innovative production.  

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Presented October 12 – 22 by the Joffrey Ballet at the Lyric Opera House, 20 North Wacker Drive. 

Tickets are available at Joffrey.org or at the Lyric Opera box office.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found at www.theatreinchicago.com