Community Calendar

Dramatized by Tim Kelly from the classic by Mary Shelley

Directed by Tony Copper

Opening Night Gala October 26 @ 6:30 pm $20

October 27, November 2 and 3 at 7:30 PM

Sunday November 4 at 3:00 pm

$14 and $17

 
Story of the Play
Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant young scientist, returns to his Swiss chateau to escape a terrible pursuer. No one can shake free the dark secret that terrifies him: not his mother, nor his fiancée, nor his best friend. Even the pleading of a gypsy girl accused of murdering Victor's younger brother falls on deaf ears, for Victor has brought into being a creature made from pieces of the dead. The creature tracks Victor to his sanctuary to demand a bride to share its loneliness. Against his better judgment, Victor agrees and soon the household is invaded by murder, despair and terror!
 
A Banned History
A nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley created the story on a rainy afternoon in 1816 in Geneva, where she was staying with her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their friend Lord Byron. Byron proposed they each write a gothic ghost story, but only Mary Shelley completed hers. The novel was published two years later.  2018 marks the 200th Anniversary of the publication of what many consider to be the not only the first Gothic horror novel but the first science fiction novel as well.

Frankenstein was banned in 1955 in South Africa for being "objectionable and obscene" and was removed from school shelves. It was challenged in some schools in Texas, but was ultimately not banned. People stated that the idea of monsters coming to life was witchcraft and not science.

Xenia Area Community Theater
45 E. Second St in Xenia
372-0516  www.xeniaact.org