Flirting with Facts (Part 2): The Great Inheritance

Posted by DCA Theater on September 20, 2010 in July-December 2010 Season, Hideous Progeny

by Benno Nelson, Dramaturg for Hideous Progeny

For the second part of this series on the in’s and out’s of making a play based on real people and events, dramaturg Benno Nelson speaks with four of the actors who played characters based heavily on their historical counterparts.  Hilary Williams plays Mary Shelley, Tom McGrath plays Percy Shelley, Danielle O’Farrell plays Claire Clairmont (Mary’s half-sister), and John Taflan plays George Gordon, Lord Byron.

BN: What was it like playing a real person?

DO’F: It’s fantastic! It’s a little terrifying and a little wonderful.  You feel a great responsibility to get it right while still telling the story that the play is telling.

HW: Well, I’ve never played a real person before.  You want to be true to the text you’re given, but it’s really easy to over research.  There’s a difference between enhancing the beauty of the text and enhancing the beauty of the person.

JT: It was great because the play itself was so well researched. I kept finding things in my own research that Emily [Dendinger] had already snuck into the play, and that made the whole thing feel so much more real and important

To read the full interview by Benno Nelson CLICK HERE to visit LiveWire Chicago Theatre’s blog.

Flirting with Facts (Part 1): Writing About the Truth

Posted by DCA Theater on September 14, 2010 in July-December 2010 Season, Hideous Progeny

by Benno Nelson, Dramaturg for Hideous Progeny

Dramaturg Benno Nelson sat down with playwright Emily Dendinger to talk about the pleasures and pains of mixing fact with fiction in Hideous Progeny, a world premiere play about the summer of 1816 when some of history’s most well-known poets and authors, including Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, lived and wrote together in a villa by Lake Geneva.–

BN: Nearly all of the characters in this play are now famous writers, Byron was massively famous at the time the play is set, and they wrote about themselves constantly – letters, diary entries, memoirs – how did this help you in writing the play?

ED: Claire Clairmont and Lord Byron were so colorful in their own accounts that they basically wrote themselves.  Byron is so flamboyant and witty. You can argue he’s one of the first people to understand his artistic persona and how it affected the public.  He really was like a rock star.  So, he’s a ton of fun to write and very easy to write because he’s so deliberately dramatic. Claire is the same way because she’s such a big personality, she seemed to be sure that people were going to read her diaries.

But Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley were a little harder.  Mary was so reserved.  She was also very aware of people reading her letters but she didn’t revel in it in the same way.  She censored a lot, and she censored so much of Shelley’s papers [when she published them after his death].  So those people were a lot more difficult to write and a lot more creative for me personally.

Emily Dendinger

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Hideous Progeny: Post your review

Posted by DCA Theater on August 27, 2010 in July-December 2010 Season, Hideous Progeny

August 26 - September 26
Storefront Theater

It was a dark and stormy night in a house by the lake, when Mary Shelley famously took up her host Lord Byron’s challenge to write a terrifying story and created Frankenstein, one of the most famous novels in the Western canon. Witty, salacious, and often melodramatic, Emily Dendinger’s world premiere play directed by Jessica Hutchinson depicts the larger than life Romantic figures as the normal teenagers they were – overeducated, egotistical, and ready to change the world.

View photos by John W. Sisson, Jr.

What did you think about the show? Share your comments here.

Historical Moments

Posted by DCA Theater on August 23, 2010 in July-December 2010 Season, Hideous Progeny

by Benno Nelson, Dramaturg for LiveWire Chicago Theatre’s Hideous Progeny

Emily Dendinger’s Hideous Progeny is part of a small but fruitful subgenre of historical/biographical fictional works that focus on the true-to-life confluence of interesting people in a specific moment.  Unlike a typical biographical work that takes a long view of a person’s life and times, these “Moment plays” take advantage of the clutter of historical and personal forces in a discrete period of time that’s easily playable – an evening, a summer, etc. Here are some examples from literature, theater, and film:

The Symposium, Plato – 4th Cent. B.C – Socrates, Aristophanes, a famous tragic playwright, a doctor, a lawyer, a student, and the Navy Admiral that would doom Athens in the Peloponnesian War, all get together to get drunk and give speeches about Love.

La cisma de Inglaterra, Pedro Calderón de la Barca – 1627 – This play treats the divorce of Henry VIII and his first wife Katherine, and his excommunication from the Catholic church.

Travesties, Tom Stoppard – 1974 – Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and a English consular general Henry Carr converge around an production of The Importance of Being Ernest in Zurich during World War I.

Gothic, dir. Ken Russell – 1986 – A horror movie that’s also about Byron and the Shelleys’ summer in Geneva. Gabriel Byrne plays Byron and Natasha Richardson plays Mary Shelley.

Shakespeare In Love, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard – 1998 – Inasmuch as Richard Burbage, Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, William Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth are all running around getting into scrapes, while Shakespeare is composing Romeo and Juliet. This one’s a stretch because it’s a total work of fiction, but, hey, it’s fun.

Copenhagen, Michael Frayn – 1998 – This play dramatizes a meeting between the quantum physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941, touching on the ethics and science of atomic weapons.

Million Dollar Quartet, Floyd Mutrux and Colin Escott – 2006 – A musical about a recording session at Sun Studio in Memphis where Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash were all present.

Little Ashes, dir. Paul Morrison - This movie was released in 2009 and depicts the young lives of Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Federico Garcia Lorca who were friends at the University of Madrid in the early 1920s.

Can anyone think of any others? Frost/Nixon perhaps? I don’t think I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! should count, but…

Hideous blog post #1

Posted by DCA Theater on August 18, 2010 in July-December 2010 Season, Hideous Progeny

by Joshua Aaron Weinstein, Executive Director of LiveWire Chicago Theatre

Fun Facts from the Hideous Progeny creative team:

From Danielle O’Farrell (Claire) referencing Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation - We’ll be opening our show 194 Years TO THE DAY that Shelley, Mary, and Claire left Lake Geneva. (Well, planned, Dendinger… You sneaky minx.)

From Emily Dendinger (Playwright) in regards to bears - When Byron found out that Cambridge had rules against bringing dogs to the school, he brought a pet bear with him instead.

Danielle re: Frankenstein-lore - A pleading letter from Claire to Byron said, “A Creator ought not destroy his Creature.”

From Emily - There’s some pretty entertaining podcasts about these guys on “Stuff You Missed in History Class” (11/9/09 - “How Lord Byron Worked”, 10/26/09 - “The Birth of Frankenstein and the Vampyre”, 11/11/09 - “Who was the Enchantress of Numbers?” (about Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter)

From Jessica Hutchinson (Director) - Here’s an interesting passage I came across in Frankenstein”>Frankenstein—“But he found that a traveler’s life is one that includes much pain amidst its enjoyments.  His feelings are forever on the stretch; and when he begins to sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also he forsakes for other novelties.”  (Sound like anyone we know?)

From Eric Branson (Lighting Designer) - So, the reason everyone was stuck inside due to the rain was because 1816 was the Year without Summer.  Due to a huge volcanic eruption and unusually low solar activity global temperatures dropped a full degree causing widespread crop loss and food riots.  It also lead to the founding of the Mormon Church and the invention of the Velocipede.

From Jess - Mary & Shelley’s shared journal in 1814—Thursday, July 28: Shelley writes about their escape together: “The night preceding this morning, all being decided, I ordered a chaise to be ready by 4 o’clock.  I watched until lightning and the stars became pale.  At length it was 4.  I believed it not possible that we should succeed; still there appeared to lurk some danger even in certainty. I went; I saw her; she came to me.”

Hideous Progeny opens August 26th! Purchase tickets now by clicking HERE