The ensemble A.B.L.E., Artists Breaking Limits & Expectations, presented a 90-minute “re-wiring” of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein April 25-27 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Upstairs Studio. Nine neurodivergent actors, including a team of black-clad facilitators, portray the narrator versions of the characters alongside the performers playing the scene. In this version, music writer Roberta Walton is reporting on the closing of the punk rock club The Arctic, where she finds Victor, who shares the story of how he got there and why he “seeks the everlasting anarchy of the Arctic.”
The theme is punk rock, so the apparel throughout the play includes bad-ass leather skeleton jackets, provided by The Alley Chicago. Interstitial music (managed by Nicholas Pope) includes songs by the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, Billy Idol and Radiohead’s appropriate “Creep.”
Photo by Joe Mazza, BraveLux.
The ensemble moves around the mostly bare stage, using large, stickered black trunks as moveable, morphable furniture while slides depict scenery behind them like a video game (projection design by Brock Alter and Alex Sokol), including supertitles of the dialogue. Both the novel and this play underscore the idea that “I am not less than you.”
Frankenstein’s Creature is the OG outsider, ridiculed and ostracized much like modern-day neurodivergent people. Author Shelley is often marginalized as well, not given credit for creating the gothic horror genre at the tender age of 18 on a dare. Shelley was basically motherless, losing her own famous feminist mother shortly after she was born. Her work underscores this lack of mothering, her yearning “to want somebody to show me kindness,” as the Creature says.
This is a most meaningful cast for this work, showing that all creations deserve love, understanding and community. After his maker wholly abandons him, the Creature asks his “father” to fashion him a mate so he won’t be all alone. Victor agrees, but then betrays his promise, showing yet again that he is the monster, not the human he assembled. The Creature and this cast ask the audience to consider, “I can’t be the only one like me.”
The acting ensemble includes Colleen Altman, Marissa Bloodgood, Rachel Buchanan, Benjamin Collins, Ryan Foley, Erin Harvey, Andrew Kosnik, Matthew LaChapelle and Zachary Wandel. The facilitators are Kara Davidson, Jo Jennings, Erin Nishida, and Haley Schroeck, with co-directors Lawrence Kern and Katie Yohe, also the company’s executive artistic director who founded A.B.L.E. in 2010.
Now under new leadership, Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s programming includes more non-Shakespeare offerings like Frankenstein, such as:
Hymn, 4/29-5/25/25 (a musical set on Chicago’s South Side)
42 Balloons, 5/24-6/29/25 (a musical from the producers of Six)
Circus Abyssinia: Ethiopian Dreams, 7/10-8/3/25 (for all ages)
Billie Jean, 7/18-8/10/25 (about tennis great Billie Jean King)
Ain’t Misbehavin’, 9/3-28/25 (the Fats Waller musical)
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