Who’s the real monster? Monstress, a new Trevor Schmidt thriller, launches the Northern Light season, Theater News

By Liz Nicholls,

Trevor Schmidt calls his latest play, launching the Northern Light Theatre season Friday, “my Lady Frankenstein show.”

Playwright Schmidt, NLT’s long-time artistic director, has long been fascinated by the female perspective, female windows on the world, the female voice and vision. Ah, and much to the delight of female actors, roles for women. And Monstress, as its title wittily conveys, re-imagines Mary Shelley’s celebrated Gothic novel of 1818 — the complicated relationship between a doctor and his creation — in female terms.

“There have been lots of different versions of the Frankenstein story,” says Schmidt of the Shelley novel in which Dr. Viktor Frankenstein creates a living being from interred body parts. Some versions, he says, even have a female Dr. Frankenstein. But this question intrigued him: “what would be the difference if the two (Doctor and Creation) were both women?…. Might it be maternal in some way? What if the doctor doesn’t necessarily feel maternal? I wanted to explore the relationship,” he says, along with “a lot of ideas that were present in the original Frankenstein — hubris, doctors thinking they’re God, creation and what responsibility (the creator) has.”

The seed of it was planted in the Schmidt brain as a one-person show, then with a cast of two or three. “It shifted a lot” before Schmidt settled on the show as a two-hander.

In Monstress, a doctor, a woman in the male-centric Victorian world who’s been expelled from medical school for experiments outside the curriculum (or possibly just for being a woman), “brings a dead woman back to life,” at the request of the dead woman’s rich father. The deceased has apparently been thrown off a horse and broken her neck.

It sounds, on the surface, as if there are similarities with the Emma Stone movie Poor Things that came out after Schmidt’s idea had become a script. And the playwright was much relieved to find that they, and their stories, are very different.

“I was a bit nervous about this,” says Schmidt of his dark new play. “People don’t realize how nerve-wracking it is to write a play, hand it to people, and hope they like it….” The excited  response he got back from designers Larissa Soho (lighting) and Dave Clarke (sound) turned things around for him. “It’ll be something!” he felt. Maybe not something for everyone, but “something!”

The design pair found the script “so creepy, so dark,” says Schmidt. “Weird?” He hadn’t quite realized it. “Well, OK,” he thought. “I had to think that maybe my taste level is skewed after years of weird work!” He leaned into it, “and now it’s quite unusual…. I think it’ll be quite unsettling for people.”

A designer himself (he does set and costumes for Monstress), Schmidt thinks the NLT production will be beautiful to look at. “Both Larissa (lighting designer Poho) and I really like intense saturated colours … the colours of the show are green and purple.”

Schmidt offered the role of her choice to Julia van Dam, who’d starred in his production of A Phoenix Too Frequent a season ago (she’s just finished a run of Putrid Brat’s production of The Maids). She chose to play The Body. Another hot up-and-comer, Sydney Williams, plays the doctor.

Gradually, a blurring of identities seems to happen between the doctor and her creation. When he was announcing this season’s NLT lineup, Schmidt wondered “which one is the real monster?”

“I’m always interested in plays with protagonists who are conflicted — what is best for themselves vs what is best for others — society, relationships, love.” In this case “notoriety, success, fame” are the lure. Hubris and ego have roles to play. “Does the doctor’s personal advancement take precedent over the human aspect of the woman she’s brought back (to life)? Where does the doctor’s responsibility lie? If she brought her back, does she have to care for her?”

“I could shape her any way that I want to,” thinks the doctor, as Schmidt describes the play. “Nature vs nurture … someone with the wrong motives gets their hands on an innocent lump of clay…. Ah, but conversely, is that person an innocent lump of clay once they’ve died and come back to life. How have they been changed?”

Monstress is a capper to a year and a half’s “creative surge as a writer,” as Schmidt puts it: no fewer than seven new plays, including two (Robot Girls and Candy & The Beast) last season and three (The Black Widow Gun Club, Microwave Coven, Mass Debating) at this past summer’s Fringe. With more to come.

“We’ll see if some of it is too much for audiences,” he says of Monstress, the opener to a season christened Making A Monster. “There’s disturbing stuff in it…. It’s not like anything that’s happening in town right now.”

PREVIEW

Monstress

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Trevor Schmidt

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Julia van Dam and Sydney Williams

Where: Studio Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Friday through Nov.23

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com