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Frankenstein - Playing with Fire

Prize(s) Winners in Theater Performance Design

Company Cat Tate Starmer

Lead Designers Cat Tate Starmer

Completion Date September 2018

Project Location Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis MN

Entry Description

In September 2018, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota presented Frankenstein-Playing With Fire. The production was immediately hailed as visually innovative by Guthrie leadership and press alike, with reviews describing the lighting as “eerie,” “beautiful,” and "foreboding."

Barbara Field's play is not so much a retelling of Frankenstein as it is a response to the original story, dramatizing a hypothetical last conversation between Frankenstein and his Creature, at the end of the world--The Arctic Circle. For our design, director Rob Melrose and the creative team strove to impart the feeling of danger that arctic exploration brought to Mary Shelley's 19th century reader. Combining this vision of peril with the idea of science and technology taken (perhaps) too far, allowed our design to venture into an otherworld of extremes, bordering on the surreal.

Dir: Rob Melrose
Scenic: Michael Locher
Costumes: Raquel Barreto
Music/Sound: Cliff Caruthers
Lights: Cat Tate Starmer