It's Alive...Again! A conversation with Quinn Mattfeld about his new adaptation of FRANKENSTEIN, which opens this weekend at Southwest Shakespeare Company

Quinn Mattfeld

by Haddi Meyer

“It’s alive!”

Even if you don’t know anything about Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein," you probably know at least that quote, probably accompanied by crackling lighting and booming thunder.

Now, in Mesa, Quinn Mattfeld has reanimated the dead once again, in his new adaptation of the famous novel.

Mattfeld is an accomplished actor, performer, director and writer and his show comes to life this weekend at Southwest Shakespeare Company, where he was recently named the co-Producing Artistic Director.

Although the company isn’t new to Arizona, Mattfeld is, and is kicking off his time at Southwest Shakespeare with a version of Frankenstein that Mattfeld says pays true homage to Mary Shelley, her classic novel, and the undeniable strides she made in the genres of science fiction and horror.

For those familiar with the horror classic, don’t expect the satire of Young Frankenstein or the mindless beast of the 1931 Frankenstein film, but something more true to the original book.

Mattfeld took some time to sit and talk with me, and give a little insight into what brings his work to life.

I know this is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Shelley's novel. Was that the reason for your decision to present this play? 

“[Mary Shelley] started writing it in 1816, and in 1818 it was published, I believe that’s the timeline. We realized it’s the 200th anniversary and then we found out after the fact that ASU was doing this enormous Frankenstein project and they were going to have events all this year and it was a real focus. I found out they were doing that and that they had this new annotated novel...I thought ‘That’s a pretty good place to start for me’ in terms of an adaptation. We wanted to do it because it’s so topical. That story is so important in 2018, the questions that we’re asking ourselves in terms of technology and progress. What does it mean to be human? What is life? What is the responsibility of a creator?”

What can you tell us about your adaptation and some of the challenges you had in creating it?

“One of the tasks that I came up with was how do I translate the literary, into the theatrical? How do I take a novel, and put it on stage? They have done a lot of film adaptations of Frankenstein and they’ve done some stage adaptations [too]. To me, the thing that I found, is that Mary Shelley gave her creature three sources from which he could learn English and learn history and philosophy. One of them is Milton, one is Geothe and the other is Plutarch’s Lives which is a comparison of Greek and Roman figures and it puts two characters next to one another and asks the audience to compare them morally, historically, etc. She does that with Victor and the creature, putting them next to each other and forcing you to compare their actions. Then I started reading and going ‘wow, there’s a lot of sort of plutarchian energy in the language too’. Like when the creature says ‘I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.’ The thing that I realized is that the other famous writer who also used Plutarch as a source material is Shakespeare .I was like, wow there’s this common denominator of antithesis and setting these characters against each other. What I did is I just sort of updated the books that the creature reads in order to learn language, history and philosophy. So now we have a creature who learns how to read from Shakespeare and quotes Shakespeare and frames his ideas from Shakespeare and because Shakespeare is so consumed with the question of what does it mean to human, it was sort of a perfect fit. What happens in the book is what happens on stage, but the way we get there is through a framework of the theatre of Shakespeare.”

How closely does your show follow the original story, and if it strays why did you decide to change a part of the story?

“There are a couple of places where I do change something. All the names are the same except for one. It’s Justine Moritz. She’s the woman who gets blamed for William Frankenstein’s murder. I changed it just because I could not continue to type the name Justine, and not see Justine Bateman. So I changed the name to Mary Walliser which is kind of a wink to Mary Wollstonecraft which is Mary Shelley’s first and middle name and also her mother's name. The reason why I strayed really, if I did at all is just to make it more theatrically interesting. For example, there’s a question in the book about who killed William Frankenstein and Shelley tells you that Victor knows three or four chapters before it’s revealed (who the killer was) and there’s no drama or question to it. I thought, in a novel this is cool you don’t have to hold that tension but on stage it’s interesting if you have to see characters not knowing. For me I just found that Mary Shelley gave me all these dials in her story and I could look at them and go ‘oh great that one’s already a 10, I don’t have to mess with that one but this one is at five and if I’m going to make this theatrically interesting, I’m going to have to dial that one up a bit.’ Really if there’s any time that I’m straying from the original story, it is hopefully in a way to enhance or augment what’s already there and interesting in the story but in a way that works better in terms of the conventions of theatre.”

While it seems your play is fairly faithful to the original novel, "Frankenstein" has been adapted into many different movies, plays and short stories. How does your adaption differ from some of the more popular adaptations such as the classic Boris Karloff movie or even a spoof like Young Frankenstein?

“Well, I think in the classic movie the creature is kind of this speechless tongueless monster and I think he learns some humanity, he’s got a good scene with the little girl by the lake. That one feels like it’s very much an adaptation of the novel. It’s telling a different kind of story, a different kind of monster. I think that one is predominantly because all the mediums are different. If you’re going to put "Frankenstein" on film you’re going to want to make it visually very interesting. The same is true theatrically, but I think there is something more visceral about it. We get to include sound, and you being in the audience. I think what’s different from a lot of the other versions is that I am using a lot of Mary Shelley’s language, a lot of Shakespeare’s language, and some of my own and directly addressing the audience. What’s unique is that it is very much a play. The characters step out to the audience and tell them their story.”

There have been dozens of films, TV adaptations, and stage versions of this story. Why do you think we are still fascinated with story of Frankenstein?

“I think we’re so fascinated by it because it asks us something that Shakespeare does. It asks us to define ourselves in a fundamental way. In a weird way, in this version of the play and also in the version that Mary Shelley wrote, some of the irony is that Victor creates a creature that is more human than he is. We have to go ‘well, then who's the real human being?' That’s sort of central to my adaptation and I think that’s something that we ask ourselves with Frankenstein is 'what does that mean?' It’s us confronting the limits of science and the limits of our abilities to categorize ourselves in a way that we feel comfortable with and I think that’s where the existential part comes into the horror genre. It’s my favorite kind of horror, the kind that unsettles me in a very fundamental way, a very human way. Suddenly I have to reevaluate everything and myself and my place around people and what it means to have a commonality with other human. I think those questions, if asked in the right way, there’s no sort of end to it. It’s also set in the 1800’s and so it’s sexy Victorian people making monsters and there’s something to the aesthetic. I mean, Mary Shelley invented the dark and stormy night. How can you not love that? I think there are certain aesthetics pieces that we’ll gravitate too because she framed it for us to go ‘ooh, that is cool. A castle and a laboratory and a mad scientist and a monster that lives in there and secrets and the guy can’t tell anyone but he’s a super genius’ and there are all these great little things that we would now consider tropes that are kind of trite, but those things captured our imagination and they haven’t stopped.”

This play is being presented in repertory with Pericles which you are directing. What can you tell us about Pericles? And how do you see the two plays fitting together?

“Pericles is such a great antidote to it because it’s also a human story. It’s also about what it means to be human but Pericles is an adventure story. Shakespeare late in his career got into writing adventure and romance plays, like Tempest, Winter’s Tale, and Pericles and this is a hero who goes on an adventure, goes to sea, loses everything and there are wizards and gods and horrible monstrous kings and it’s not what you think of when you go to a Shakespeare play. It’s a fantasy, it’s a fairy tale. It’s a huge epic story that takes place with this prince island hopping and going through these terrible situations where he is losing his family, and then having them given back to him. It’s really sort of a wonderful fantasia of Shakespeare outwardly projecting a lot of the stuff that he writes inwardly in his characters early on. And he takes that drama of  the internal conflict of what’s happening in people and projects it out into these wild amazing fantastical colors. The cool thing is that both plays are very storytelling theatre, we’re acknowledging that we are in a theatre, that we are a group of actors talking to you and putting on this performance, telling you it’s theatre. There is a lot of live music and a lot of physical fight choreography so it’s a very visceral sensory experience, both of these shows, but in very different ways.”

After I asked the next question, Quinn was kind enough to pull his wife, Betsy Mugavero his partner in crime and in theatre aside to talk about their new lives and new positions. Betsy is, much like Quinn, an accomplished actress and has had her hands in many different theatre companies and organizations across the nation. 

Quinn Mattfeld and Betsy Mugrvero

You and Quinn just recently took over as the producing artistic directors of southwest Shakespeare. What are your plans for the future of the company?

“We wanna make it grow and that encompasses a lot. We want to grow the operating budget so we can produce more material. We want to be able to grow artistically and grow our talent base. We are already so fortunate to have actors and technicians and designers who are super skilled and creative but we want to let them follow their bliss with the company being the vehicle for them to do that. Obviously we really want to grow our audience. There is a lot of love for Shakespeare in Phoenix but it would be great if it were even bigger. We’ve got a really loyal subscriber base, but it’s always important to keep introducing people to Shakespeare. It’s something that people are afraid of, but Shakespeare really is for everyone and we a want to spread that message.”

What is the most exciting about working with Southwest Shakespeare? 

“The newness of it all for us. We are brand new to Arizona. We don’t know anything about anything. Not only do we get to work in a new space, new facilities at Southwest Shakes, new people, but we’re also learning about an entirely new culture. Quinn is from the Pacific Northwest, and I’m from the east coast and it’s brand new for both of us. It’s a shared learning experience for both of us about who the people of Arizona are, and I will say they have all been awesome. We’re really excited to get to know the fabric of this space and of this community that we’re in here in Mesa and in Scottsdale. So that’s really exciting.”


CLICK HERE for more information on both Frankenstein and Pericles, at Southwest Shakespeare Company, playing in repertory from October 26th to November 10