Letter to The Journal

Letter to Albuquerque Journal

by Claire C.

Being the common theatre go-er that I am had to see at least one play for the passed Halloween. As it turned out, my luck fell rock bottom, considering I chose the seemingly worst play I could've chosen. I landed at UNM, in Rodey theatre, with a program and high expectations.

This happened to be a surprisingly mediocre "abstract" version of Frankenstein. Frankenstein was a short and bald, pot-bellied man whose voice reminded me of a pre-pubescent cartoon character. He was not in the slightest fitting the profile of a pitiable man whose life has been destroyed. The only thing I could bring myself to pity him for, much less any of the other actors and actresses, was for being cast in such a pitiful play. He reminded me of a pervert you'd see laying under bus stop benches.

The play began with several mangy looking women, howling and twitching like a coyotes in the midst of a terrible seizure. This neither intimidated nor scared me. The trauma was that of the poor women's voices! Their screaming hurt my voice just to listen. These actresses obviously had no experience in theatre screaming, and I'm positive they'd lost their voices by the end of the run.

Then there was a deluge of feverish scenes consisting of actresses who were sometimes dead, and sometimes not, but always the same character. I was completely unable to discern the plot of the story and would have been completely lost if I had not already known the plot of the story.

Frankenstein's sister, Elizabeth, scared me deeply. Not for her character, but for her real-life sanity. This woman belonged in an interpretative dance studio, and not a college theatre. She was constantly dancing, making it extremely hard to concentrate on the overly dramatic lines the two were constantly spewing out of their mouths. At one point in time, after bluntly stating that another character in the play wanted to kill her brother, she made a gesture as if she was decapitating him herself. This caused the entire audience to burst into a series of muffled giggles, myself included.

As if this weren't enough, this version of the play was corrupted by amounts of incest between the two. Frankenstein and Elizabeth were to end up married. This aspect threw off my entire perspective on the couple's relationship, which confused me further!

The most perplexing thing in the entire play was the placement of costume designer jobs. I was bewildered by the design of Frankenstein's creation's costume. This was a white spandex jumpsuit. The spandex was obviously too small, and exposing, for the actor. He wore white six-inch platform laced boots that could only remind me of a disco dance. His entrance also caused a sudden eruption of snickering. And during the second act, his second entrance was even more obtuse. His once blank white spandex was covered with jewels and ornate hand made designs. He wore a cape. It can only be described as Liberace. And it was repulsive.

The only useful object in this play was the sound design. It created a relentless pattern in my mind, always setting the mood and reminding me of the intensity of this play. The down side to that is the ever-present 2-platform sounds played in the background. It was always sad music or high-tension music, but there was no calm. No median, and never silence. This left me annoyed and continuously humming the two tunes days after the performance. So, as you can see, the only upside has been canceled out by an equally important down side. The cast and crew managed to ruin every part of this play, be it acting, sound, costume, and plot. I am extremely disturbed that such people can call themselves actors, much less theatre folk, if they can not put on a decent, classic play. Frankenstein is one of the easier plays, and was extremely disturbing to see fail in a college level theatre.