Just over 210 years ago, a bunch of English aristocrats and literary luminaries on a sojourn to Switzerland decided to while away a dark and stormy weekend writing ghost stories. What resulted from that exercise determined the course of not only modern horror but science fiction as well.
Phantasmagoria, the locally based “steampunk” Victorian storytelling and performance troupe, will journey back to that fateful holiday in a stage presentation that dramatizes the creation of Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus and a smattering of other tales that may be lesser-known but are no less capable of chilling the bones.
Shows will be Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. A mini-tour will also visit the State Theatre of Eustis, the Ocala Civic Theatre, the Athens Theatre in DeLand and the News-Journal Center at Daytona State College.
Phantasmagoria XVII will dramatize the circumstances that led Mary Shelley to write her seminal work (later made immortal via a film portrayal by Boris Karloff) and John Polidori to write The Vampyre.
Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their friend Lord Byron also contributed works of supernatural fiction—which are now essentially forgotten despite the renown of the authors.
“In a way, this is me going back to my roots,” says founder John DiDonna, who originally named his ghastly guild of guignolists (you may need to Google that last word) after a collection of German ghost stories that inspired the scribes on that fateful night in a villa that overlooked Lake Geneva.
For their part, Phantasmagoria performers will employ their trademark verbal recitations (both solo and unison) as well as interpretive movement, music and other theatrical techniques to bring the best of those stories to life (or, perhaps more accurately, to life after death).
Plus, the company has again turned to puppet designer Nic Parks (of Orlando Family Stage) to create a crucial prop—an eight-foot-tall puppet of Frankenstein’s monster that the performers will be able to manipulate as the story requires.
Meanwhile, we’ll see a bit of the real psychodrama that was going on between the four wordsmiths and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, who was present at the time but, as far as is known, contributed nothing to the effort. (Spoiler alert: there was likely hanky panky between Claire and both Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Awkward!)
Dr. Phillips Center is located at 445 South Magnolia Avenue, Orlando. For more information, call or visit the website.
