In a program note, Ms. Wolf writes that she wanted to explore “the connections between the author and her Monster from a woman’s point of view” — links that “may have been unconscious to Mary” but are “glaringly clear” to Ms. Wolf. Beyond the obvious one, the motherlessness of both Shelley and her monster, those connections are not, alas, clear in Ms. Wolf’s text. She puts much emphasis on the deaths of Shelley’s children and on a harrowing miscarriage, but most of that pain was yet to come when Shelley wrote “Frankenstein” in her late teens. In the program, Ms. Wolf writes that this “Frankenstein,” like her ensemble’s other shows, is intended to be “more than a concert or a play.” It is more than a concert. “We will each write a ghost story,” Byron said, and from that prompt came “Frankenstein.”But Mary Shelley noted that Byron and Percy, a pair of poets, had experienced trouble assembling their tales.

Source: New York Times December 28, 2017 02:37 UTC