With Makeup Transformation by "Wicked" Artist Joe Dulude, Lindel Gum Hart Stars in "Frankenstein"
By Julie Perine on June 13, 2015
In his senior class play, “South Pacific,” Lindel Gum Hart played Lt. Joe Cable. After his 1981 graduation from Bridgeport High School, he periodically appeared in stage productions including “The Drowsy Chaperone,” “White Christmas,” “Legally Blonde” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”
He's at it again. Now a resident of Greenfield, Mass., where he operates his own yoga studio, Hart has found himself starring in a production of “Frankenstein” - an adaptation he penned himself.
“Doing my own work is really incredible,” Hart said. “It’s incredibly rewarding and fulfilling.”
And it’s icing on the cake that Joe Dulude II, a Broadway makeup artist whose credits include the Tony Award-winning “Wicked,” is his makeup designer.
Performed in an old abandoned bank building, the three-person play was a major hit with local audiences.
In August, the show will be performed in Edinburgh, Scotland as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, an offshoot of the largest arts festival in the world.
Hart started writing in June of 2013 and completed the first version of the script in April of 2014. 
“Then we pretty much immediately went into rehearsals for the production of the show which was July of last year,” he said.
The way it all came about is a story in itself. Hart’s first introduction with Linda McInerney - the woman who became the show’s producer/director - took place about five years ago when he was doing some theater work. A producer and director who has a passion for fostering new works and new artists, McInerney took quite an interest in Hart.
“She had seen me in a show and we were talking about doing something together and started trying to figure out what kind of theater piece we wanted to do - what shows might work," he said. "Nothing really quite resonated until she reread ‘Frankenstein’ and said she thought that was the project we should do - and that I should play the creature."
Hart, whose interest was piqued, read the adaptation of the play which had been performed a few years earlier by The National Theatre in London. He then preceded to call McInerney and tell her he thought the play was doable.
“I liked the adaptation. It streamlined Mary Shelley’s original novel and I liked that it was broken up into shorter scenes with dialogue,” he said. “It actually worked well in a modern era.”
But because that adaptation of “Frankenstein” was included in a series of live theater films which were being broadcast in movie theaters, Hart and McInerney couldn’t obtain the rights to perform it live.
“That was kind of a drag, but then I got to thinking that the story was public domain. The book had been written almost 200 years ago. I realized we could do our version of it,” he said. “Linda had read some things I had written and she said if I wrote it and played the creature, she would produce and direct it.”
They both began rereading the novel, studying it and dissecting it, looking at ways to bring it to life on stage in a way that made sense in today’s world, Hart said.
“There was a renaissance for a lot of the issues that the world faces today,” he said. “Basically, a lot of that interfaced between science and mankind - things like the whole mapping of DNA, cell research and cloning - all these things that are big science and technology issues right now.”
It dawned on Hart and McInerney that Mary Shelley had written the novel at the height of the Industrial Revolution, when there was a real fervor for “new” science” and a fascination with elements of the time.
They took their research to the next level, reading biographies about Shelley, who penned the novel when she was about 20 years old and whose own life dovetailed with her writings.
“The novel was actually published anonymously and when she finally admitted she wrote it, no one believed her because they didn’t think a woman could have written it,” Hart said. “It was kind of a controversial novel in its day.”
Upon completion of his very thorough research, Hart spent about 10 months writing the play.
“We did the initial run here in Greenfield in an abandoned bank building that was built around 100 years ago,” Hart said. “It was a big, beautiful building in ruins and we made use of that space as the backdrop for this theater. It was a perfect marriage of the story and the architecture. The building had been abandoned for over 40 years and no one in town had been in it during that time. Some remembered being inside it when they were kids.”
It was perhaps part curiosity, but the town’s people came out in droves to see the play.
“We did nine performances that sold out before we even opened so it was pretty exciting to know that there was such interest,” Hart said.
After the show’s initial success, Hart made some revisions and he and McInerney reconfigured the show before taking it to Springfield, Mass. for a pair of September shows.
“Then we started getting it ready for Edinburgh,” Hart said.
The renowned annual festival takes course over a three and a half week period. The Edinburgh Fringe features over 3,400 productions and more than 50,000 performances.
“The whole city basically turns into the festival and places that are normally not theaters are converted temporarily into performance spaces,” Hart said.
The team started researching venues, made application - a very time consuming procedure - and upon acceptance, made the remainder of their travel plans.
“It’s very costly because you not only have to produce the show in a foreign country, but you have to find a place to live for the whole time so it’s kind of a big deal,” he said.
It was an economical benefit that the production was streamlined to feature just three actors - two of whom play multiple characters.
“There are a total of five of us going, including the director and technical director/designer,” Hart said.
It’s perhaps ironic that Hart is making the transformation back into theater by playing such a challenging role.
“It’s been amazing because it’s not just playing a monster. There’s really a lot more to it than that,” he said. “I think we’re all familiar with the story through movies and popular culture, but one of the biggest misconnects is that Frankenstein is actually the creature, but he is in fact the creator of the creature - who remains nameless.”
Perceived to be almost zombie-like, speechless and virtually an uncommunicative cationic monster, the creature is sensitive, intelligent and has a great capacity for emotion, Hart said.
“He is really in search of acceptance, love and compassion - like most human beings,” he said. “And he is rejected at every turn, mostly because of the way he looks and so one of the themes we wanted to explore when we first started working on this was the sense of what it’s like to be different in the world. It’s kind of a universal thing. Everyone at some point in their lives has that sense of being different from their peers or their colleagues. In a broader sense, what is it like to be so drastically different that you can never really fit in?"
Needless to say, Dulude was able to capture the ideal makeup artistry to bring Hart’s character to light. It was, of course, a very time consuming process.
“We did a lot of experimenting and tried multiple designs, but ultimately went with much more of an abstract version of what the creature looked like,” Hart said. “The first time he did my make-up, it took about two and a half hours and that wasn’t full body, just my face and torso.”
With practice - and by adding an assistant makeup artist - Dulude got the process down to a science, transforming Hart into the creature in just about an hour.
In full make-up, he is literally covered head to toe.
“It’s very elaborate. The only thing not made up are the soles of my feet,” he said. “They even use tooth paint to make my teeth look rotten and I’m sprayed from head to toe with a fixative - kind of like a hairspray - to keep the makeup from running.”
Hart was a little taken back, he said, when people would face to face tell him about seeing the show - not recognizing him as the actor who had played the creature.
“It’s kind of fascinating and it really ramps up the ensue of the ‘otherness,'” he said.
The Edinburgh Festival runs Aug. 7-31. “Frankenstein” will run Aug. 7-22.
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