MUSICALS FOOL AROUND WITH THE CLASSICS : FRANKENSTEIN AS TRAGIC HEROIC SCIENTIST

Imagine Frankenstein played as a handsome young scientist--as a tragic hero.

Place him at the center of a fully staged jazz opera. Call the work--which was created by an English professor, an artist and a composer, and conceived as a critique of Western science--”Monstrum,” and you have some idea of the show that will premiere Friday at the San Diego City College Theater.

Actually, the Victor Frankenstein of “Monstrum” is much closer to the character in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 Gothic romance than to the crazed scientist in the 1931 Universal picture that featured Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s horrific creation.

“It’s a classically Romantic story,” said Bart Thurber. “The young scientist in the novel is like Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights’ or Ahab in ‘Moby Dick.’ In the original novel, he’s a young, handsome, dynamic scientist.”

Thurber is chairman of the English Department at the University of San Diego. Thurber, who initially wrote “Monstrum” as a two-act dramatic poem, felt that no one, certainly no one in Hollywood, had ever done justice to the ideas behind Shelley’s novel.

“I think Mary Shelley herself had more there than she even realized,” he said. The novel, according to Thurber, is “a comment on the Western intellectual tradition, based upon the mastery . . . of nature.”

Thurber wrote the first version of “Monstrum” in 1984. It was a distillation--with some changes-- of Shelley’s book. He showed the poem to artist DeLoss McGraw, who was taken with the idea and responded by producing a series of gouache paintings on paper.

Composer Nancy Rees read the poem, looked at the paintings for inspiration, and penned a score to accompany several dramatic readings of the poem made in connection with exhibitions of McGraw’s paintings in 1984 and 1985.

McGraw’s art was a key inspiration for Rees. “I’d see a set of three paintings he had done, and it would give me a color, a mood,” she said. “The deep blues, the brilliant reds. All were suggestive to me of a place to begin.”

Although Rees wrote the music in a single style, she has imbued the vocal and choral scores with allusions to several genres including jazz and blues. Indeed, she has allowed for improvisatory sequences periodically throughout the performances.

Rees has scored the music for a seven-piece combo and will use computer-generated tapes made at the UC San Diego Center for Music Experiment to augment the pit band.

For Thurber, who has studied and taught the book “Frankenstein” for years, its themes seem particularly timely with the advent of the modern technology of gene splicing and efforts at synthesizing life.

“Scientists assault nature and attempt to take it on in order to understand it,” Thurber said. “I think Mary Shelley’s point, and my point, is there is more to human life than that.”

He decided to work in full collaborative effort with Rees and McGraw “to undermine Frankenstein’s (solitary) search for perfect knowledge. Frankenstein’s mistake was in trying to do everything himself,” Thurber said. “If he has ethics or aesthetics, they are solitary, full of romantic overreaching. The point we try to make is to undermine Frankenstein’s search for perfect knowledge.”

McGraw, whose paintings over the years have served as collaborative inspiration for writers such as the American poet W.D. Snodgrass, looked as much to Mary Shelley as to her book for his inspiration, calling it “a redemptive story of the life of horror she had been living.”

Indeed, her own life reads like a Gothic novel. Mary Shelley’s mother died at her birth. Her father, William Godwin, was a free-thinking writer and philosopher who promoted atheism and anarchism. At the age of 16, she ran off with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was married.

In the four years spent with Shelley before writing “Frankenstein,” Mary had two children, one of whom died. Percy Shelley’s wife drowned, and Mary married him. Society disapproved of the Shelleys’ kind of open living arrangements. Mary’s sister had an illegitimate child by Lord Byron while they were living with the Shelleys.

“I think the whole situation of ‘Frankenstein’ is very morbid, hopeless,” McGraw said. “There’s no light . . . no relief, and no irony. It would not interest me to paint straight horror.”

Instead, McGraw took a different tack, saying, “the opposite of horror is beauty. I really spun in the opposite direction. My contribution to this is the blues.” His first paintings were mostly done in the colors of black and blue.

McGraw created larger versions of his original paintings, designed to dwarf the characters, as set pieces for the show.

Taking another cue from Shelley’s book, members of the troupe, directed by Will Roberson, will present scenes from “Monstrum” as street theater throughout the city.

“ ‘Frankenstein’ was deeply unconventional, an assault on the social conventions, the family,” Thurber said. “It expresses Frankenstein’s hostility toward what’s normal.

“We decided let’s use theater to assault the conventions that the play occurs in the theater and take it to the streets.”

Thurber said he does not want “Monstrum” “to say how terrible” science is, but to “raise the issues in other kinds of ways. It goes beyond discussing specific experiments. The point is to get at why scientists do experiments in the first place.”

“Monstrum,” which runs through Aug. 9, will be taped for broadcast on KPBS-TV (Channel 15).