Back in 1998, a movie titled “Gods and Monsters” told the semi-fictional story of the last days of James Whale, an English movie director best known for having directed “Frankenstein,” “Bride of Frankenstein” and a clutch of other horror movies in the early 1930s.
As with a lot of British-born self-defined artistes in early Hollywood, Whale felt like he was remembered for his pap while his greater work, especially for the theater, was forgotten. He was also openly gay throughout his career, a genuine rarity in Hollywood during that era, the doors of the celluloid closet mostly remaining tightly shut. The Bill Condon movie, which was based on a 1995 Christopher Bram novel, starred Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser and Lynn Redgrave and won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. Whale has retired and falls in love with his gardener. That man, Clayton Boone, was a fictional creation by Bram, the younger half of the core relationship in the film. The affair points to Whale’s late-in-life misery and his unwise imposition of that pain on Boone, a figure who almost becomes like Frankenstein, the very figure Whale came to despise and yet on whom his legacy remained so dependent.
In the film, both Whale and Boone are white. In Tom Mullen’s new stage adaptation, now in a Chicago world premiere well worth seeing, Boone is written as a Black character, a cautious man and military veteran who wears fake eyeglasses so as not to threaten Hollywood’s studio elites, and thus the already fraught relationship is further complicated by race.
This new, Equity-affiliated commercial production, directed by Paul Oakley Stovall (an immensely talented multi-hyphenate of the Chicago theater), does not look at all like a typical small show at Theater Wit, from the glossy program (a welcome rarity) to the rich, digitally enhanced scenic design from Ben Lipinski and Mike Tutaj.
This live “Gods and Monsters” is a very potently performed affair, too, thanks to the veteran Chicago actor Scott Westerman, who plays Whale as a man stymied not so much by the closet door but by his own demons, and Rashun Carter, who offers a measured and sophisticated performance that feels like it really captures the lot of a Black gardener in 1950s Hollywood. Most notably for me, Mullen’s adaptation is vividly evocative of how we all lose power as we age. With that loss of power but with the maintenance of increasingly frantic desire, the show seems to say, comes a dangerous vulnerability of the kind that can get people into trouble.
Then there’s the flip side to which Stovall pays equal attention: Needy Hollywood men might offer beguiling entrees into posh pool parties and the like, but they also make for perilous friends, only enhanced in this telling by the racial disparities. Here, the piece is very much in “Sunset Boulevard” territory as it suggests that aging toxicity can end up with someone dead in a pool. There’s even a Max-like enabler in Whale’s longtime help, Maria Ramirez, warmly played by Doreen Calderon, but not without a certain inscrutability and withheld approval.
To be compelled by all of this, you have to be interested in somewhat overripe Hollywood stories and I wouldn’t claim that any of the issues in front of you here will feel new or especially subtle. But the small cast (Michael Stejskal and Ethan Check also are featured) pulls off this assignment most handsomely and you’ll surely be transported to old-school Tinsel Town, where much ruthless ambition, pain and loathing awaits you, along with what I’d describe as a spirited kind of melancholy as the show careens toward the tragic ending you always knew is coming. Everyone involved here clearly understood that nothing would work unless the audience could see past the now-worn idea of gayness as a marker for sadness and truly cared for Whale, trapped by his life and times.
And so they surely do.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Gods and Monsters” (3.5 stars)
When: Through June 2
Where: Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $37.75-$47.75 at 773-975-8150 and godsandmonstersonstage.com
