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Mary Shelly's novel comes to life with three clowns and barely a prop in sight.

Monday Jul 02, 2007.     By Kate Rockwood

Theater Feed

I saw "500 Clown Frankenstein" the same night a couple hundred high school students filed in to see the show as some sort of mass field trip—let's just say the cards were stacked against the clowns and their play based on a book written in the early 1800s. Of course, anyone who's familiar with 500 Clown won't be surprised to learn that as soon as the lights went black at the end of the performance—literally before the actors even took their bows—the entire audience had leapt to its feet in ovation.

So what is it that drives audience members to their feet, creeping back for second helpings before the memory of the first show is even faded? There's no doubt that the three clowns onstage—Kevin (Molly Brennan), Bruce (Adrian Danzig) and Shank (Paul Kalina)—boast whip-smart comedic talents and a chemistry rarely witnessed.

The three bring the story of Frankenstein to life using nothing more than a candle, a podium and a table (and oh, how they use that table, for all manners of climbing, riding, crushing and grappling). Bruce is the crazed and preening doctor, Shank the doctor's assistant turned monster and Kevin almost every other role in the play, including narrator. The costumes, beautifully designed by Tatjana Radisic, become a sort of fourth member/Frankenstein that is as funny as it is shockingly improvised (on the night I saw the play, Brennan secured a fanny pack from the audience and promptly strapped it to her shoulder as the assistant's hump, to the delight of the donating audience member).

As in all 500 Clown productions, the stage extends far beyond the elevated space at the front of the theater—the clowns shriek their way up and down the stairs, into the rows of the audience and out into the lobby. In one particularly revealing moment in this particularly amazing play, Shank tears Mary Shelly's novel apart, page by page, echoing the deconstructed production itself.

"500 Clowns Frankstein" runs through July 29 at Steppenwolf Theatre. 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday; 5 & 9 p.m. Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets cost $20-$50.