Greater Than The Sum of Its Parts

The new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” by the Flying Machine has an air of having been cobbled together. Certainly not in the hurried sense; there are hallmarks of careful development all over this rich, strange little fable. But everything in this vigorous young company’s workshop seems to have been been bolted onto this creature. The ensemble’s achievement is staggeringly charming and ambitious, even when the story itself lumbers a bit under all that weight.All previous notions of the story need to be stowed. Avoiding cliches of black-and-white, square-topped monsters trailing wires, this adaptation folds in elements from a dozen other books. The look, all sepia-tones and warm lights shining behind windows, is Dickens. The relationship between maker and monster is Dostoyevskyan. And, with their peaked ears, bonkers teeth, and long brown overcoats, this could be a village of boggarts or hobbits or out-of-work Christmas elves.Young Victor Frankenstein (Robert Ross Parker) has a genius for electricity, but a blind spot when it comes to his fellow human beings. His social life lies dead as a shot duck, as he carts a toad around, demonstrating his ability to pump life back into dead limbs. When an altercation with the thieving drunk Gershon (Richard Crawford) ends in a terrible accident, Victor thinks his duty lies in “putting nature right.” Lashed back together, Gershon goes on begging and bewailing his fate, but now with a little more murderous intent.The revenge that drives Mary Shelley’s monster has evaporated in the face of Mr. Crawford’s far more contemporary invention. His Gershon was already nine parts tragedy before Frankenstein got his hands on him, having betrayed his family and lost his livelihood long since. His sort of “broken” just can’t be wired together again.Mr. Crawford, a co-creator with director Joshua Carlebach, wrestles the entire piece around to his drama. Poor Victor’s storyline has no chance in the face of such a charismatic creature. Roped into the text are plot points for the young inventor: a deeper understanding of his mother, a new relationship, a better rapport with children. But these journeys seem false beside Gershon’s progress towards grace.As always, the Flying Machine designers outdo themselves. Instead of ice fields, we get gentle falls of snow. Instead of Shelley’s bleak vistas, the brilliant Marisa Frantz offers winding wooden streets.Perhaps we owe the claustrophobia to the nasty locked room of Victor’s mind, trapped as he is in his own massive intellect. But her structure, made out of cannibalized windows and doors, actually seems to breathe on its own. Joined by the lovely homespuns of costumer Theresa Squire and the deep shadows from James Japhy Weideman, they build their own divine monster.Nothing is left to the subliminal in this “Frankenstein” – there’s no campy delight in the violence, no repressed urge that goes unexpressed. Mr. Carlebach has muffled Mary Shelley’s gothic story, binding it up in long scarves and layering it with the psychological developments of Dostoyevsky.In doing so, he and his team rescue the big re-animated lummox from cheesy melodrama, remaking him in an endearing combination of their own images. But not unlike the title character, this production may have been patched together from one too many parts.A dozen concepts tumble about – from Maxwell’s Demon to the Watchmaker God – all of which bear in some way on the topic at hand. But Mr. Carlebach has so much going on that we scarcely have the attention to assimilate these connections, and we definitely don’t have the time to let them assemble into suspense.“Signals of Distress,” the Flying Machine’s earlier piece at Soho Rep, shared the same problem. The group has astonishing powers over text and texture. They make beautiful work: physically sophisticated, cinematically fluid, and profoundly thoughtful. But both shows share pacing troubles – once they hit a stride, they never speed up or slow down. The sameness of each moment makes their work seem longer than it is.In “Frankenstein,” even moments of great menace and terror have been abraded into sameness by the constant closing and opening of the stage’s “gates.” This time it was a horror tale that they drained the adrenaline out of – and that’s not something the genre can stand. There’s genius here, clearly; It just needs a little fine-tuning in the putting-together.Until January 8 (Soho Repertory Theater, 46 Walker St., between Broadway and Church Street, 212-868-4444).

Greater Than The Sum of Its Parts

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