Hideous Progeny: Post your review

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.

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Historical Moments

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

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 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