A Good Story
From Oct. 4 to Nov. 3, Frankenstein’s Funeral played through the St. John’s Lutheran Church. It was the last night of the show, but a decent crowd made it through the cold, dark night for it. Audiences followed characters from the chapel to church offices as Mary Shelley not only told her story but reacted to it as well. Frankenstein’s Funeral, directed by Nichole Palmietto, tells the story as Shelley wrote it, but also includes her as a character. The audience observes as her characters come to life before her, and her story takes on a life of its own. Found Stages is a theater that performs outside of the traditional theater both in location and style. Frankenstein’s Funeral is immersive, placing the actors and audience on even ground and in small, closed spaces. The style forces audience members to constantly reorient themselves around both sets and actors. It’s a relatively new form in storytelling but it doesn’t scare audiences away.
“I like the idea of being in the story,” Susana Reyes said. She’s never been to an immersive production, but she wants to.
Palmietto was able to notice the difference in audiences, “The whole show would change every performance based on the audience, which I think is the coolest part of the show in that the audience really does affect it and the energy they bring is contagious.”
Found Stages aims to bring people together through the experiences of their shows, “It’s not necessarily about making friends with a stranger but about having a human connection with someone in the audience which you wouldn’t get if you were just in a dark theater,” Palmietto said.
Still, reinventing old stories like Frankenstein is not exclusive to immersive theater. Palmietto explained she became interested in how a young Mary Shelley created such a lasting piece of art while Synchronicity Theatre brought Shakespeare to 2019 in a traditional setting with rows of plush seats and a raised stage. The theater’s production of Macbeth, directed by Jennifer Alice Acker, transported the play from medieval Scottish royalty to modern day American schoolgirls.
“It’s the same themes as in high school: power and status, play, [and] navigating social places,” Acker said.
Using technology never dreamed of in Shakespeare’s time, the production compared the coronation of Macbeth to the culturally iconic Beychella performance. It substituted written letters for FaceTime and football gear for armor. Just as Macbeth’s story lives on in theater, his- or her- story lives on when her murderers took a selfie with her corpse.
Running alongside Found Stages production, Macbeth played from Oct. 4–27. Both plays explore violent, male-driven stories through the lens of women. Their content, their style, and their form were unheard of in Shakespeare’s, or even the Greeks’, time. Theater for centuries took place in daylight, outside, with food, drink, and chatter. Actors had to fight for the attention of their audiences, and sometimes were condemned for their work. Women were never allowed onstage and possibly never in the audience either. Recent decades seem to flip that entirely, embracing women in roles and spaces they’ve never had access to before. Actors have almost complete trust and attention from their audiences, and in Frankenstein’s Funeral, actors have the loyalty of their audiences, too. When Victor Frankenstein and the Monster fought each other, no one tried to stop the fight, no one was alarmed. So much trust was placed in the actors, in the crew, and in the setting, that no one questioned it.
“Hand me that branch,” Victor said, and without hesitation, an audience member obeyed.
“No, don’t help him,” Someone whispered, but it was already done. Victor swung and hit the monster. No one flinched.
But the Elizabethan theater is not completely gone. Here in Atlanta, the Shakespeare Tavern produces his plays with the house lights up, dinner table seating, and plenty of food for its audience.
“We keep the audience lights up for most of our productions because it helps keep the audience in the same world of the play. Our audience literally become fellow scene members in any production since our actors directly address them, so we communicate with them, and we let them know that we are all experiencing the story together,” Andrew Houchins, spokesperson for the Atlanta Shakespeare Company, said in an email.
The implicit voyeurism that theater is built on is probably so commonplace audiences barely think about it. At the Tavern, they eat and observe, freely observing the characters. For all theaters however, groups of strangers gather for extended periods of time to watch intimate, intense, and sometimes entire lifetimes of characters. We watch Macbeth and Lady Macbeth privately plot the murder of their beloved King, we see their flaws clearly, we see their fears, we see their deaths. We see Frankenstein’s Monster take his first steps and learn his first words. The only time audiences were made aware of their voyeurism was in a scene when Victor and Elizabeth, his fiancé, looked forward to their wedding day. The couple privately spoke, enclosed by a wall with small eye-shaped holes cut into it. Audiences had to press their faces up to the wall and peer through the holes to see Victor and Elizabeth. When the couple stepped near the wall, audience members drew back, despite the barrier between them. When Victor walked out, he was surprised by the audience’s presence.
Macbeth takes that one step further. Fifteen minutes before the show, a young girl dressed in a school uniform walked out from backstage and sat on a couch. She was joined by another and another and another until six girls lounged on the stage. They, like the audience, chatted idly, waiting for a show to start. When it finally did, the actors onstage maintained their duality, watching fellow actors give soliloquys. For the duration of the play, the audience watched actors watch actors.
“It was intentional for the actors to watch each other. It created a world of play for no one but themselves,” Acker said.
Plays within plays and worlds within worlds. How much closer to the stories have we really become? How much closer to the characters have we become? What is it about Macbeth or Frankenstein that we can’t turn away from? What does it matter that Macbeth, like clockwork, murders everything he loves day in and day out? Or why Victor keeps animating corpses after all the destruction they bring to him? Would it really change anything if Macbeth was a woman? If her wife welcomed her home after battle. Would it change anything if Frankenstein’s monster received love from Mary Shelley, the woman who created him, rather than the hate he received from Victor? Would the story mean anything different if Mary told us she lost her baby when it was two days old? Would the blurring of fiction and real-life change anything? Would that bring us closer? Are we close enough? Are we too close?
“Maybe it will stay like this for a time or go back or become something else. Storytelling through theater will always exist. Theater as an art form gets through the scene of what humans are trying to discover about themselves,” Palmietto said. Whatever there is to discover in stories like Frankenstein or Macbeth, we will continue twisting, turning, and examining them for all their secrets.
Found Stages next production is Frankenstein’s Ball. Synchronicity Theatre’s next production is What the Woolf Wore. The Shakespeare’s Tavern’s next production is King Lear. Whatever our proximity to the characters is- whatever our familiarity with their stories- we will keep returning to them. We can’t help but watch a good story.
