What if some of the world’s most famous literary monsters aren’t so evil after all?
Performance trio Shadow, Sound, Spectacle will bring their show Literary Monsters to Easthampton Media on Saturday, Sept. 12, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., followed by a Q&A. The trio features Jess Martin on music, Amy West on shadow puppetry and Abby Hanna on cinematography and special effects.
The show uses those mediums to revisit the stories of monsters in works by authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Washington Irving, Bram Stoker, Emily Dickinson and Anne Rice — characters like Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula and the Headless Horseman.
“Literary Monsters” will also kick off with another performance: the world premiere of “Dorian Gray Is a Sodomite,” a 20-minute original work written by Devin Dumas, president of Why’s It Gotta Be? Theater Group. That performance will feature five actors retelling the narrative of Oscar Wilde’s story “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” which is about a man who keeps a youthful appearance even as a portrait of him grows withered and decrepit.
“In adaptations of ‘Dorian Gray’ that I’ve enjoyed, they’ve often explored Dorian’s monstrous qualities, but not necessarily touched on the queer themes and suicidal pressures related to that,” Dumas said. “And while I was conceptualizing what I wanted to write, I hadn’t really been considering how his inherent queerness made him monstrous or vice versa, but more so how a lack of freedom of queer expression makes him do monstrous things.”
Martin has a lifelong love of monsters. She grew up watching “creature feature” movies on Saturday mornings and particularly loved movies with dinosaurs.
“I kept coming back to this idea of, ‘I’m so interested in King Kong. I wish he would survive,’ and ‘Here comes Godzilla, he’s gonna fight Mothra — who’s gonna win?’ … ‘Now we’re rooting for Godzilla — wait, are we terrified of Godzilla?’
“I love all of these complicated things that monster movies ask,” she said.
The show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” later inspired her to think further about how to define good and evil.
“That’s become such an interesting question, and the more I dip into the literary record, the more I realize, ‘Oh, those questions have always been asked,’” she said. “So monsters, to me, are a compelling dramatic tool.”
“Literary Monsters” also looks at the concept of monsters through an explicitly queer lens. Martin, who grew up in Texas, identifies as a lesbian and nonbinary. She noted that monster stories really spoke to what she felt like and experienced growing up, because “people could justify hurting someone if they were different, and they could say, ‘Well, that person’s a monster because they’re terrible. They’re gay, or they’re just not doing the right thing. They’re not following the protocols of what it means to be in society.’”
In the song “Bride of Frankenstein,” for instance, the narrator makes out with Mary Shelley one night — “she’s a real good kisser in the full moonlight.” That kicks off a toxic relationship that starts the very next morning, and Shelley tries to turn the narrator into her ideal partner — the Bride of Frankenstein. Shelley calls the narrator “my sweet specimen” and “knits me together with needle and thread / Says it won’t hurt if I pretend to be dead / She put a bolt in my neck!”
“It’s reflecting that queer lens of, ‘Maybe I don’t deserve happiness,’ that idea of, ‘Since I don’t fit into the larger picture of what’s right and what’s picture-perfect, maybe I get what I deserve,’” she said. “And so while it’s sort of a funny song, it has these dark humor elements that reflect on the queer experience.”
Martin has a particular fondness for the Headless Horseman, who inspired the song “Headless.” When she reread Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” she realized that she didn’t know or had forgotten the character’s tragic circumstances: the Horseman was originally a soldier who had come to America from what is now Germany (albeit to fight for the Loyalist cause) and was then decapitated by a cannonball in “some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War,” Irving wrote.
“I just have so much empathy for this poor guy who was like, ‘I was just trying to make a better life for myself, and now I’m doomed to keep looking for my head.’ And how do you do that? It’s an impossible task!” Martin said.
On a February night several years ago, Martin was riding the Norwottuck Rail Trail and looked out at the fields in Hadley, where she saw an orange glow.
“I thought, ‘Oh, wouldn’t that be funny if that was the Headless Horseman?’ And then I started thinking about, ‘What did Ichabod Crane feel when he was alone on that road?’ and … ‘Who was really the monster in that story? Was it the town that didn’t care when Ichabod disappeared?’” she said.
The last song, “Done,” is a reggae-inspired tune about the monster throwing away the “monster” identity themselves. During that song, a 7-foot-tall puppet comes out into the audience. By that point in the show, however, “People are so won over by our monster tales that she’s a happy surprise and not a scary one,” Martin said.
“I don’t think the show is ever truly terrifying. It’s not that kind of show,” Martin said. “But what it does is it [makes people think], ‘Oh, maybe I’m not scared of a giant walking skeleton Grim Reaper.’ And then people want to take photos with every monster.”
Admission is $20 in advance via Eventbrite or pay-what-you-want at the door. The show is recommended for audiences 12 and up.
The cast of “Dorian Gray Is a Sodomite” is Devin Dumas, Zachary Kinsley-Greeley, Terry Fables, Mal Sillars and Matthew Gover.
