Dr. Frankenstein's Creature

My brother Ben gets the call when he’s at my parents’ house, staying for a week to help out as our dad, mom, and I adjust to the sudden shift of my dad being home on hospice, trying to manage new intense pain, bedridden.  

[Ben White as Creature]

“I got the part!” Ben says. “I’m the Creature.” He’d already told us about trying out for Frankenstein. He tells us now, after the call is over, that the director said he got the part because he had the best physicality for the role. He says he’d already started running to make sure he’d be in condition for practices.

We all give our congratulations. He’s excited. We’re excited for him. It’s a blessed thing to have some joy, hope, validation, future, excitement within these walls.

Already invested, he prints out the script and one afternoon I sit at the table and read with him. He records us so that he can play the scenes back while he drives the three and a half hours home. So that he can start hearing cues and practicing the emotion to make the Creature come to life, to sympathy. I scan ahead through the pages and see the scripted violence; murders, a rape. And I’m glad I don’t have to act. I’m glad I don’t have to act out those things in front of an audience. I prefer to stand outside of emotions, outside behaviors within the safety of writing.

When his week is up, he goes home. My sister arrives from Mexico to take over some of the roles Ben had filled off stage, with us.

With my parents’ 50^th anniversary creeping nearer, and my dad’s health spinning outside his control (how quickly this happens), I tentatively schedule a party for the weekend of August 19. Trying to get all my siblings here at the same time becomes the proverbial herding of cats. I’d wanted to have the party on Saturday (the actual anniversary is Friday) but Ben has play practice. It’s always something, isn’t it? And I find myself grudging against his priorities. Celebrating my parents’ time together is a big deal, but we’ve never been ones to force each other into celebrating (to my admitted dissatisfaction more often than not). Apparently, the anniversary has become a big deal to me and I have to accept that that has to be enough. And yet, it’s a big deal to my dad too. I want to make this something special because he no longer can do his part in the planning. Anyway, I’ve never been in a big play production, so I don’t know what’s involved in that, but, soon enough, because it doesn’t profit me, I let go of my grudging attempt at control. It’s not about me anyway, I remind myself. All I can do is my best to be flexible, adaptable. In the end, we settle on Sunday afternoon for a party. Even so, we still might have to cancel everything all together anyway, I’m not sure if my dad will make it until then.

As the day nears, and my dad fades more and more, bit by bit, I want to tell him that his goal was to make it to his and my mom’s anniversary and that he’s almost there. To make him do what he’d wanted to do. But I also don’t want him to suffer anymore. I also don’t want to boss my father around. My mom has already told him if he needs to go, that’s okay.

Every so often, I tell my mom that we can cancel the party at any time. I’ll cancel it right then if she wants me to. We continue to wait and see.

The week of the party, my sister Michaela, in tune to something (for instance, that we now have a twenty-four hour hospice nurse at the house with us) and with her finger still on the pulse of the family, manages to communicate to everyone that my dad’s condition is dire. Phinehas surprises us by arriving on Tuesday. Noah drops by after work, comes by when he can. Michaela and I decorate with a Happy 50^th Anniversary banner and balloons (our cousin and some visiting friends are conscripted to helping blow them up). Siafu and her roommate shift their travel plans by a few days and come in on Wednesday. Then like a miracle, somehow even Ben and his family are able to be at the house on Friday. I don’t know what happened to that weekend’s play practice, I forget to ask. The feelings I’d had (and arguments I’d wanted to have) about importance and priority and family love are shared by each one of us, after all. We are all here. We are all together on the actual anniversary. My dad is there, but not there, under the pain-relieving blanket of morphine. It’s a celebration, it’s a goodbye.

My dad dies the next morning, my mom by his side.

We shift the party to a celebration of life. This time my dad isn’t there with us. Not physically.

A month later, my mom and I take the first trip without my dad down to San Marcos for a variety of events with my sister Siafu and her roommate, Ben’s kids, Ben, and his wife Marie. On Sunday morning, before heading back to Dallas, Ben and his daughter drive the half hour to meet Siafu, her roommate, me, and Mom for breakfast. Siafu, Ben, and I are at one end of the table and we’re talking about emotions, the brain, and acting. The practices for Frankenstein are amping up. Ben talks about how being the Creature is giving him a chance to act out anger. Providing an outlet for the anger about my dad getting cancer, the decline of his body, his death. I can’t remember if he says those exact words, but that’s the impression that stays with me. How helpful to have an outlet for the anger, I think. Even so, anger is not something he’s used to expressing in that way, not at someone, not at anyone other than himself. The director has told him that he’s great at showing the Creature as a character worthy of empathy. He tells him for one scene when he has to aggressively menace a child character, “I know you don’t want to, but you have to yell in his face. If you hold back, everyone will know you’re holding back.”

Siafu asks if the acted emotions are felt as strongly as the emotions experienced on a daily basis. I hear but don’t record the answer (my brain perhaps holding too much anger of its own and not enough memory space). My twelve-year-old niece listens in.

Siafu asks if the acted emotions are felt as strongly as the emotions experienced on a daily basis. I hear but don’t record the answer (my brain perhaps holding too much anger of its own and not enough memory space). My twelve-year-old niece listens in.

Another month goes by.

I don’t realize Ben’s playing the main role, the starring role until my mom and I travel down to Lockhart and go to the opening of Frankenstein on Friday the 13th, at the Gaslight-Baker Theater. We settle into our seats up in the balcony and the lights shine down on a torturous looking platform chair which my brother as the Creature is tied upon. His hands, un-nimble claws, struggle to loose him from his restraints and, finally successful, he falls to the ground. It’s a painful, slow opening. The Creature rising, trying to get his sewn-together legs to work. Flesh hitting stage. Another attempt at uprightness. A stumble, another fall. A monster learning to move limbs that have muscle memory from their previous (now corpse) owners. What must that be like? Ben puts that question into his acting and we feel it.  

I’m apprehensive about the violence. I haven’t read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein since college. And I can’t remember exactly what happens. I don’t remember a rape, but my memory isn’t known for its sharpness and complete accuracy (I write things down for accuracy). Chances are high that I have blocked the ugliness out. This adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, told from the perspective of the Creature, was written by playwright Nick Dear and premiered in London in 2011. The cast included Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller who alternated between being Dr. Frankenstein and the Creature. Both actors won Best Actor in Leading Role in a Play for their parts. (Turns out the rape was not in the book but was included in the stage adaptation. So my memory, though still not completely reliable, wasn’t entirely unreliable.) I’m not keen on violence anyway, and having one’s brother play out murders and rapes doesn’t sound like the usual Friday night good time (like I know what that is anyway). Especially sitting next to our mom.

Fortunately (for my sensibilities), the majority of the violence is done offstage. The murder of Dr. Frankenstein’s little brother is not seen and the rape of Dr. Frankenstein’s (very neglected) new wife is implied from behind the thick drapes that close around the bed.

The Creature’s role is a physically demanding one. Ben leaps and runs and climbs and jumps, up and down, from the different levels of the stage, at times six feet high or more. Scaling a ladder in a way that seems as if he’s floating from rung to rung, he makes it look easy and graceful. He’s also in every scene in the first act; learning to walk, being beaten and shunned by the villagers, going hungry and thirsty, fleeing, meeting a blind man who teaches him to read and philosophize. With this man to listen and instruct, the Creature comes to ask questions like, “How long are we meant to be alive for?” and “What is love?” and to make statement such as, “I am the one who stands outside the door. I see inside. But I daren’t go in.” He soaks up all he can from books and conversation until he is reviled by and turned against by the blind man’s family. This action, which the Creature had dreaded, is what turns him dangerous—taking the humanity that he’s cultivated and turning it bitter. He burns the blind man’s family’s fields and their house, catching them in it where they die. 

[Michael Vybrial as Frankenstein]

From there, the Creature goes after Dr. Frankenstein. Trying to get his attention and his love. When that fails, he settles for Dr. Frankenstein’s anger and hate.

In the second act, Dr. Frankenstein is shown as the real monster; incapable of love and unable to see his scientific experiments as the evil they are. Unable to see himself as evil for creating a humanlike being but not protecting it, nurturing it, or taking responsibility for it. Dr. Frankenstein is bent on revenge against the Creature and in his unspeakable actions, drives the Creature more fully against him.

As time goes by, the Creature leads Frankenstein on a frigid chase across the Arctic Circle. For the Creature, so lonely, so love-starved, this being chased almost fills the need within him—he’s forced Frankenstein to be with him, to acknowledge his existence. They argue, they talk. Frankenstein blames the Creature saying, “You have brought [pain, prejudice, hate] upon yourself.” But the Creature doesn’t let Frankenstein get away so easily. “Did I ask to be created? Did I ask you to make me from muck in a sack?”

While Frankenstein can only see the need to destroy the Creature, the Creature can see a little more. He says, “You and I, we are one.” And “While you live, I live. When you are gone, I must go too.” Their existences are inextricably connected; one being full of humanity and forced to be a monster because of how he looks, one being full of scientific self-interest forced to confront (still unwillingly) what he’s created.  

As the play ends, the Creature, played fantastically by my brother, lopes off into the icy distance, with a frostbitten Frankenstein struggling to follow.

It’s a powerful adaptation showing through the Creature’s perspective the need to be loved, moral conflict, what it is to be human, the problems of society, and people’s fear of what they regard as “other.”

After it’s over, we find my brother to congratulate him on an amazing opening night performance. His skin glistens with sweat. Bruises, real and make-upped on, cover his body. He’s lit with adrenaline and joy. He’ll be exhausted soon.

“You were amazing,” I tell him.

He’s pleased with how it went. A good opening night. As we stand outside, audience members come over to talk with him, to gush, to ask for pictures with him next to the poster on the outside of the theater.

It’s gratifying to see someone when their hard work pays off. To see how hard work, talent, and skill can come together to make a show. I’m gratified.

Because his absence is felt, I wonder what my dad would have said about the play, this adaptation. My dad who hated injustice and unfairness. Who would have empathized with the Creature. I know he’d have been proud of my brother, impressed by his skill, acknowledging of the hard work he put into making his character come to life.

The weekend concludes and my mom and I head back to Dallas. We talk about the weekend, about the play, about Ben’s extraordinary embodiment of his role. About how Ben had paid tribute to my dad and to my mom in his playbill bio: “to ChaCha for sharing the legacy—whenever you put your energy towards something, give it your best—and to Lainey for being the best moral support any creature could ever ask for.”

It’s been two months since our family was all together for that one last time. It’s been two months since my dad passed. Of course, I think of him all the time. As I write this, I wonder if my dad would also have asked, “How long are we meant to be alive for?” the way the Creature asked, the way I sometimes want to ask. Would he have liked to have had a stage to use for expressing his anger? What part of the Creature would he have related to most strongly?

We all have a Creature inside us. The ugly, stitched together parts that we ostracize (or others do), the beautiful remnants of philosophy and the dream for love, the need for companionship, the need to be acknowledged. We have a bit of monstrous Dr. Frankenstein too; the unquenchable greed for knowledge, power, and creation, and, sometimes, (for him, like him) the inability to take responsibility for actions or creations.

We are all Creatures in our own way. Me, for all my flaws, with my need for control. For order. For things to unfold how they should. For the anger I experience when they don’t. For the anger at the unfairness of my dad’s having had cancer and dying from it. That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. But life, like Dr. Frankenstein, doesn’t give us the choice to be created. Doesn’t give us the chance to choose what muck our sacks are made from.  

We just have to live, day to day, as the Creatures we are, trying to make sense of the body, the life, the trials, and the joys we’ve been given. And hope we are lucky enough to be able to play our role as well as my brother did his.