Glad to see that someone is reviving one of my favorite stage adaptations of the myth of the monster, Barbara Field's Playing with Fire. Those of you in Syracuse can see a church performance [gods and monsters, what a combination] of this interesting interpretation.
Barbara Field herself told me that she didn't really like the novel when she read it. Encouraged by her friend, the director of Minneapolis's Guthrie Theater, she let her mind wander -- and saw an old man sitting in a Regency era chair on an iceberg. From that vision sprang her play, which pits two pairs, man and monster, old and young, together.
See more of her thoughts on the monster myth in my book, FRANKENSTEIN: A CULTURAL HISTORY.
Find it at your local bookstore!
Susan Tyler Hitchcock's Frankenstein: A Cultural History
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2 comments:
Thank you for the shout out about Appleseed's Production of Playing with Fire here in Syracuse. I am the director of this production of Barbara Field's play.
I first read the script over three years ago after an exhaustive search to find an adaptation of the novel that recaptured the image of the novel that first gripped me over 30 years ago. As you know, there are a lot of adaptations... I even went back to 1823's Presumption (which, if I can find a composer to create a modern score for someday I may tackle).
Here's a review on our show http://blog.syracuse.com/critics/2007/10/playing_with_fire_after_franke.html
And a link to my webpage on the show...
http://home.windstream.net/galahad7/
Congrats to you and Appleseed. You'll see that in my book, Frankenstein: A Cultural History, I single out Barbara Field's play as one of the more thoughtful and thought-provoking modern adaptations for stage. Do you know the book Hideous Progeny by Stephen Earl Forry? It has scripts going back to Presumption and even the music for one vaudeville song for The Man and the Monster.
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