Love, loss, and creation merge in unexpected ways as the Studebaker Theater and Fine Arts Building co-present Manual Cinema’s thrilling version of the classic Gothic tale Frankenstein. The Chicago-based performance collective imaginatively combines shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, sound effects, and live music in haunting shows like nothing else you’ve ever seen.
Manual Cinema stitches together the classic tale of Frankenstein with the biography of the original novel’s author, Mary Shelley, to create an unexpected story about the beauty and horror of creation. The real-life and fictional narratives of Shelley, Victor Frankenstein, and Frankenstein’s monster expose how family, community, and education shape personhood – or destroy it by their absence.
Court Theatre presented the World Premiere of Frankenstein in Chicago, November, 2018. Frankenstein had its New York premiere at The Public Theatre’s Under the Radar Festival in January 2019 and its international debut in Scotland at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August, 2019.
Photos by Tiffany Bessire, Elly White, and Michael Brosilow.
