Atlanta’s Found Stages is Having a ‘Frankenstein’s Ball’ (Q&A)
We drop in on the innovative theatre company to ask about their new Frankenstein series
Nichole Palmietto is a director, producer and developer of new plays. She is a co-founder and executive director of Found Stages, an Atlanta-based theatre company whose mission is to take plays out of theaters and into real-world spaces, often incorporating technology in the process by producing podplays and text message plays.
We caught up with Nichole over email as the company prepares the second in a series of six Frankenstein-themed events, including a New Year’s Eve ball, just in time for the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s novel.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
No Proscenium: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your background in the immersive arts?
Nichole Palmietto: Found Stages began in 2014 with a project called Beulah Creek, which we created for Dunwoody Nature Center just outside of Atlanta. The story — of two women who meet at a Baptist Camp retreat in the 1930s, fall in love and decide to leave together — was told in real time through four scenes, each set in a different location within the nature center. The audience traveled with the characters, led by a chorus of women. In the final scene, audience members traded in the candles they were given at the beginning of the play in exchange for jars of cornbread and milk for a shared meal with the characters.
Between that first play and now, Found Stages has created a series of site-specific PodPlays about Atlanta history, a text message play called The Year Without Summer that will launch December 17th, and an immersive experience inspired by Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club for the NEA’s Big Read. In that experience, three audience members sat at a card table with one character, who taught them to play Mahjong, shared green tea and butter cookies with them, and told them a story of her mother.
In 2015, Found Stages was accepted into the prestigious Reiser Atlanta Artists Lab at the Alliance Theatre. Our yearlong residency at the Alliance allowed us the time, resources and mentorship to develop our own style of collaboration in regards to script and story creation.
NoPro: What, in a nutshell, is the Frankenstein’s Ball project about?
Nichole: Our New Year’s Eve Frankenstein’s Ball will be the second event in our Frankenstein series. The story of this event is set at the home of the radical Romatic poet Lord Byron, who has invited the audience to attend his New Year’s Eve party. Mary Shelley is in the middle of writing Frankenstein, as well as enduring the love affairs of her husband, Percy. As the frivolity of the party becomes too much for Mary to bear, the nightmare characters she imagined for her novel come to life, haunting the party.
Just like at any large party, audience members will be able to mingle — both with each other and the characters — and explore, observe and interact with scenes in various rooms. The audience will be invited to learn period dances and play period games. They will be enlisted to mix concoctions with Victor Frankenstein and assemble a wedding bouquet for The Monster’s Bride. There will even be a poetry battle between Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Lady Caroline Lamb.
This event will be a much different experience than our First Look event in October. Both because the space is much bigger and because it’s set on New Year’s Eve, the audience won’t be split into tracks or guided through a specific narrative sequence, like they will for other events in the series.
While most of the events in this series will happen once and then never again, Frankenstein’s Ball is one that we hope to make an annual tradition.
NoPro: How did the overall Frankenstein project come about? What drew you to the world of Frankenstein?
Nichole: A little over a year ago, I was asked to direct a student thesis play about Mary Shelley’s first weekend writing Frankenstein. That was the first time I read the novel. And I was in awe. The monster stood out to me the most. He was so different than any portrayal I’d seen before — eloquent and intelligent, with an absolute capacity for goodness if not for his abandonment and shame. I wanted to tell that monster’s story.
The more I dug into the story of the author behind the novel, the more I realized that the monster’s story was Mary’s story. She had been abandoned, rejected, misunderstood, distrusted, and cast out of her family and society. The sympathy she conveys for her monster, while still condemning his actions, is humbling and empowering at the same time.
So often Victor Frankenstein is presented as the hero — the scientist ahead of his time, harnessing the power of machines and his own intelligence. In reality, he was most likely modeled after Mary’s lover, Percy Shelley. Percy shared with Victor a hero complex, a selfish indulgence, a disregard for the feelings of others and the belief that they alone could save damsels in distress, only to cause them more harm. Percy’s worst traits were so intertwined with his best — his creativity and idealism, for a start — that Mary loved him both because and in spite of his actions. In modeling him after Percy, one could say that Victor is the original anti-hero that we see so frequently in TV shows today.
NoPro: Do audience members need to attend all the events to understand what’s going on?
Nichole: Each event is a cohesive story experience. While attending all of the events will make the experience richer, audience members may pick and choose which events they attend. Each event will offer different scenes, designed site-specifically for its own unique venue.
In October 2019, these events will culminate in a production that combines all of the work of the previous events into a new experience throughout an old Gothic church.
NoPro: As this work is being developed what influences did the team find itself coming back to?
Nichole: In addition to reading the novel, we all read Romantic Outlaws, Charlotte Gordon’s biography of Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. This biography influenced how we interpreted the novel from Mary’s perspective and how much of Mary’s real life we included. Women had very limited legal status in both Shelley and Wollstonecraft’s times, yet they were both staunch, pragmatic feminists and advocates for all marginalized people. We find ourselves continually coming back to that notion as we create this work. We want our adaptation to highlight the women in the novel and behind it because they couldn’t get the recognition they deserved when it was written.
NoPro: How is the audience incorporated into the work? How are you designing around audience agency, consent, and safety?
Nichole: The audience is incorporated into the work differently in each event in this series. For Frankenstein’s Ball, the audience members are cast as guests at Lord Byron’s New Year’s Eve party. They’ll be given a lot of agency to engage as much or as little as they’d like to. While there are a few major scenes meant for the audience to observe and learn about the big picture story and character relationships, most scenes are intimate interactions with a single character. In these moments, characters might share a secret or teach an audience member a period dance.
We believe it’s important that audience members feel invited into the story, but never like they’re put on the spot.
This belief guides how we design for audience agency, consent and safety. The audience is part of the work from the very beginning — we write space for them in the script, build room for them in rehearsals, and create opportunities for them to engage and discover through the design of the world.
We try to approach every aspect of the work from the audience’s perspective.
NoPro: Who is the ideal audience member for this show?
Nichole: Someone adventurous, curious and empathic who enjoys innovative storytelling.
NoPro: What do you hope participants take away from the experience?
Nichole: We hope that participants leave Frankenstein’s Ball having shared a fun, memorable experience with their community. We hope that audience members leave feeling closer to each other, more engaged to the classic story of Frankenstein, and personally connected to Mary Shelley, the people who influenced her life, and the work she created from their inspiration.
Throughout the full series, we hope that participants gain an appreciation for those who share this world with them. We’re living in an age where it’s easier to paint someone who disagrees with us as a monster, rather than considering their humanity. We can either spend our whole lives — like Victor Frankenstein — chasing down the monster of our own creation, or we can embrace each other with the empathy and compassion we owe each other as co-members of the human race.
Found Stages’ New Year’s Eve Frankenstein’s Ball will take place December 31 in Atlanta, Georgia. Tickets are $60–175.
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