Marki Shalloe’s Promethea Unlaced

Prometheus Bound by Reinhold Begas. 
Photo by James Steakley [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)],
via Wikimedia Commons

I promised myself not to get distracted, and particularly, not to let this blog get waylaid by Mary Shelley and her monster. Today's post is on the cusp, as it deals with the death of the woman known by that point as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and with the birth of the girl introduced to the world by the same trinomial.

According to the Decator Minute, on Tuesday and Wednesday there will be dramatic readings in Georgia. (Not a million miles from North Carolina, which in 2009 put on a play called Rights and Wrongs.)

Atlanta playwright Marki Shalloe’s Promethea Unlaced, the story of the birth of Mary Shelley and the birth of her famous novel, Frankenstein. Shalloe is a local playwright with a penchant for finding stories in unusual places. “Of daydream and nightmare, always choose the nightmare. It makes the better tale,” says Shalloe in Promethea.

Shalloe said that once her research landed on Mary Shelley’s mother – Mary Wollstonecraft – everything changed. According to Shalloe, “This woman fought for the emancipation of women in the 18th century, believed in free love before anyone really knew what that was, and knew the most irreconcilable sin is the sin against oneself or self betrayal.” Shalloe knew then the story that needed to be told: the legacy of immortality through written expression.