Two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, struggling with grief over a series of untimely deaths in her immediate family, told the story of a man's audacious attempt to overcome mortality by creating a human being in his own image. His hubristic proposal does not end well. More than a century and a half later, playwright Robert Kauzlaric, struggling with grief over the death of his own father, found in Shelley's parable a voice for the confusion accompanying upheaval in his immediate universe and the frustration arising from outsiders' inability to recognize the extent of damage engendered thereby. Now, in 2018, he recounts the story of a woman whose grief over the death of her beloved father compels her to create an imperfect replica of her late sire, assembled from her memories and her refusal to "move on" as her friends and family have. Kauzlaric's entry in the season's unplanned Franken-fest (Lookingglass, Court, and Remy Bumppo also have Frankenstein productions planned) honoring the 200th anniversary of the horror classic's publication is less an adaptation of Shelley's neogothic fable than a wholly re-imagined narrative based in an earlier concept. Our heroine is Victoria, a young woman whose emancipated mien and scholarly pursuits were championed by the parent whose loss she feels deeply. The monster conjured by her crippling bereavement is a grotesque mannequin beseeching his surviving kin to endure the sorrow of separation and to embrace its inevitability. The abstract construct of a single individual's spiritual journey is not easy to depict visually, but the collective agility exhibited by the ensemble convened for this Lifeline Theater production weaves its many elements into an unbroken thread leading our heroine (and us) on the turbulent path through depression threatening to engulf both the living and the dead and ultimately, to recovery and acceptance. Embodying this metaphor is Cynthia Von Orthal's towering rod-puppet Lazarus whose countenance reflects a myriad of expressions and whose multiple-operated limbs facilitate a dexterity allowing him, at one point, to physically overpower his distraught reanimator, portrayed with steely resolve by Ann Sonneville. Oh, and since an uneasy mind often resembles a mad scientist's laboratory, a virtuoso tech team supplies a kaleidoscope of hissing lights, eerie music and evocative shadows.
