Mary Shelley and Her Frankenstein

Tuesday Musical Club (founded in 1889) is undertaking the production of an original two act music drama Mary Shelley and Her Frankenstein by Shirley R. Barasch, a member of the TMC Composer’s Division. It dramatizes Mary Shelley’s life while she is writing her famous novel, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, showing how Mary came to write this first “real science fiction” novel and how her love affair with the poet, Percy Shelley, and her struggles as a woman in this time period influenced her writing.

We see scenes from her famous Frankenstein novel that present her with a difficult ethical problem: how to justify Frankenstein’s quest to create an artificial man. Mary Shelley pleads for a humanistic approach in science fully 80 years before the first successful prosthetic limb, 136 years before the first successful organ transplant’s and the first robot.

She reveals that neglecting the human quality in a story or in life comes at a high price; Mary Shelley and Frankenstein share a tragic finale. Music, words, story, lights, movement, costumes and make-up will be integrated into an artistic whole upon the stage.