Figures of Speech Theatre

“All was again silent, but his words rang in my ears. ‘I will be with you on your wedding night.'”

Victor Frankenstein weds his beloved Elizabeth and prepares for his imminent battle with The Monster.

Having listened to The Monster’s tale, Victor reluctantly agrees to create a bride for him.

“If you comply, I will leave you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.”

In chapter four of Frankenstein the Monster reveals the origins of his intellect… and his hatred of mankind. Watch it all on The Entertainment Experiment.

This June FST will join dozens of other artists presenting new and experimental performances as a part of the 2014 PortFringe Festival in Portland, Maine.

FST artist Ian Bannon is leading a musician and an ensemble of puppeteers in an exploration of Italo Calvino’s short story The Distance of the Moon. The final mixed media adaptation will combine movement, bunraku puppetry, a mercurial set, and actors with a sparse, hypnotic musical score to bring to life this surreal tale. Humorous and heartbreaking by turns, the performance visually explores the beautifully murky depths of longing and pure, unrequited love.

Both of the PortFringe performances will be part of a double-billing in Portland Stage Company’s Studio Theater. Tickets will go on sale in May via the PortFringe website but be sure to mark these dates on your calendar.

(Every once in a while a local performance comes to our attention and we feel the need to share it with you. While this isn’t an FST production, we think fans of our work will appreciate it!)

This weekend John, Carol & Ian are excited to see a Portland Ovations presentation of Who’s Hungry, which is being performed at Space GalleryThursday-Saturday, April 10th-11th.

Poignant and provocative, Who’s Hungry is an evening of experimental tabletop puppet theater that gives a voice and face to hunger in America. A series of plays written by Dan Froot, designed and directed by Dan Hurlin, with music by Amy Denio,Who’s Hungry tells the stories of those of us who, on a daily basis, must choose between life’s basic necessities — food or rent, food or medicine, food or bus fare. The production weaves together the lives of five homeless and/or hungry individuals, incorporating puppetry, dance, music and text.

For more information on the production, please visit the Portland Ovations website.

This week the Frankensteins’ wrongfully-accused servant stands trial for the brutal murder of young William Frankenstein.

Click below to see the film fans are calling, “wonderful! It’s imaginative, interesting, and filled with surprises in form.”

The Monster comes to life in Episode II of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, now available for streaming. Please enjoy & share liberally!

Figures of Speech Theatre’s Frankenstein interprets Mary Shelley’s original text with an alchemic mixture of puppets, shadows, actors, illustration, and post-production magic in a seven episode portrayal of this classic tragedy.

This is the culmination of a two-year collaboration between 18 high school students and 8 professional artists…and the first episode is now live on The Entertainment Experiment. Check it out and spread the love!

Artistic Director John Farrell heads off next week to Ontario, Canada, for a presentation of Four Quartets on March 17. At the invitation of Queen’s University Professor Gabrielle McIntire, author of Modernism, Memory and Desire: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, John will recite the four-poem cycle of Eliot’s masterwork, and then meet with graduate and undergraduate students to discuss the poems, his relationship to them as an actor, and the process of memorizing poetry.

The recitation will take place in the Fireplace Reading Room of the Stauffer Library on the Queen’s University campus at 2:30 on March 17. The public is invited to attend.

In working on arrangements for the performance, John had a lively and interesting exchange with Prof. McIntire, whose book contains some fascinating meditations on the body and corporeality as ways of holding remembrance. Here’s an excerpt from one of John’s emails:

I have been in a kind of tantalizing dialogue with myself recently about the existence in my person of another person’s work, about the intriguing links between a suite of poems very much concerned with memory and their enactment as a work of memory. It may seem implausible, but I really believe that my work over the past three decades with puppets prepared the ground for memorizing and reciting Four Quartets: our philosophy of working with puppets has always had an animistic element to it, a conviction that the spirit destined for a certain puppet character flows through the puppeteer in performance and resides in the body of the puppet, while the puppet lives. (“You are the music while the music lasts…”) In preparing Four Quartets for performance I was very aware of wanting the poems to transit me as cleanly as possible, for them to assume an invisible corporeality in the space between me and the audience. I’m also aware of having a strange and complex relationship with Eliot through my role as the reciter of his words, though I haven’t really figured that one out and probably never will!

Something I really had no way of knowing before embarking on this project is the degree of enrichment I would experience in having a great work of literature available to me at any moment. It’s hard to put into words, but carrying this poem around inside me is an intense and wonderful thing. And sharing that experience (the ineffable experience of having the poem be a part of me) is definitely central to the joy I have in performing it.

Preliminary set model for the little match girl passion.

January 24, 2014
Dear Friend of FST,

I have some great news to share with you.

The Art Works program of the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded Figures of Speech a major grant to support the creation of a new performance.

How big a deal is this? Of the 160 grants awarded nationwide in the theater discipline, only 2 were made to theaters in Maine.

The performance will be a visual tapestry of puppets, objects and film projections surrounding the four singers called for in David Lang’s extraordinarily beautiful composition, the little match girl passion.
Lang won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2008 for the score, which refigures the Hans Christian Andersen story about the suffering and death of a young match seller as a Passion, drawing from the Andersen text and from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Of the piece, Pulitzer-juror and Washington Post columnist Tim Page said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so moved by a new, and largely unheralded, composition as I was by David Lang’s the little match girl passion, which is unlike any music I know.”

I was deeply moved by the music when I first heard it two years ago, and the piece seemed to me a perfect vehicle for Figures of Speech’s visionary weave of puppet and actor theater. Lang agreed when he granted permission to work with his music, saying, “I know how much puppets can do in telling a story like this one.”

I will be leading a team of five artists in the creation phase of the project, which will focus on the integration of actors and puppets with projected film details and animated scenery, timed to the music. Once we have the stage work figured out, we will add four live singers to the production, and begin touring the work nationally, and perhaps internationally.

The NEA’s $10,000 grant must be matched 1:1, and I hope you will join us in this exciting venture by contributing as generously as you can.

Wishing you the very best in the coming year!

John Farrell
Artistic Director