Creating a Monster

            The Third Story is a loving and zany homage to the movies. In one of the play’s subplots, a storyline that turns out to be the first draft of a “lady-scientist-meets-Queen-of-the-Mob” screenplay written by our leading characters, we meet Zygote. There is one short stage direction that acts as our introduction to him: he is an “ageless” being, “eerily beautiful” and “frightening”.  Beyond that description we glean from the script that he is a botched laboratory experiment grown from a test tube, dependent for survival (or so he thinks) on a secret formula that helped him age thirty years in three hours, that he was designed to last only a decade, that he is angry about the circumstances of his “birth” and his creator’s inability to show him true love and care, and that he possesses a distinctive anatomy that includes seven nipples and a “very original intestinal tract”. There is no real precedent for him in the movies that playwright Charles Busch affectionately sends up in the play, and so from these few facts about him in the script we have a jumping off point for the director, the actor and the designer to create a wholly original character, one that could go in any number of directions but will finally settle into a particular reality based on the collaborative and singular energies of these three personalities and their interaction with the text.
            I have participated in that process since the play had its first public reading almost two years ago.  Director Carl Andress and I have known each other since high school, and had been looking for a project to work on together ever since I moved to New York from Chicago four years ago. Given that the role of Zygote is a science experiment gone horribly wrong, I tried not to take it personally when Carl first described the role as “perfect” for me! Going into rehearsals for the reading I confess to having no clue how to approach the character, and I happily took my cues from Zygote’s very imaginative creator, Charles Busch. After subsequent readings, a fully realized production at La Jolla Playhouse, and now a re-tooled production for MCC here in New York, there are to this day a number of facial expressions embedded in my characterization that come directly from Charles’ acting out of Zygote in those very early days of the process!      
When it became clear that a full-scale production of the play would happen and that I would be taking part in it, I began to think more in depth about what this Zygote could be. Because the look of him would be such an important part of the characterization, and because so often those decisions are made before rehearsals even begin, I thought about approaching him first in terms of visual images, hoping that any ideas I might have could be part of the pre-production process. The words in the script about an “ageless” and “eerily beautiful and frightening” being took my mind at first to the film “Powder” about an isolated boy with mystifying electromagnetic powers. The look of the Powder character – completely hairless, albino – seemed an intriguing place to begin. Carl and costume designer Gregory Gale meanwhile had both talked about the idea of a deformity for Zygote, of an “Elephant Man”-like physique, complete with a built up shoe to make it look as though one leg was shorter and less formed than the other. To my mind these ideas created intriguing possibilities.
             Another inspiration came while I was working on the script about a month before we went into rehearsals in La Jolla – while reading the scenes between Zygote and his creator Doctor Constance Hudson, a strange and insistent voice kept whispering in my ear, one that sounded as though it came from the shadows and had a babyish, plaintive, yet seething quality. It was one part Vincent Price and one part Truman Capote, and given the early 1950s setting of the B-movie subplot of which Zygote is a part, that voice somehow seemed instinctively right. When director Carl Andress told me to watch Peter Lorre movies for inspiration, I knew then that the voice was no mere distraction, but that it might become somehow central to the interpretation. From there I began to think of other movies that might stir ideas and fell upon the “monster movies” of the mid-20th century, specifically “Frankenstein” and the performance of Boris Karloff. Since so much of The Third Story”s themes center on the responsibility of a parent to its child, specifically when the child is a repository of the parent’s hidden desires and motivations, this track also felt instinctively right and exciting. 
            It was a costume choice that helped me add a final layer of Zygote’s inner emotional world as well. Into our second week of rehearsal in La Jolla, Carl and Greg were unhappy with the planned costume for Zygote’s first scenes in the play, scenes in which the character is described as wearing an “unflattering” jacket and where his “appearance” is called into question. With an inspiration coming from the 1950s milieu, Greg began to think of Zygote’s first costume as that of a rebellious juvenile, a young and not terribly hip street kid’s version of the period’s youthful fashion. What immediately lit up in my head was Nicholas Ray’s 1955 classic “Rebel Without a Cause,” but beyond the sartorial choices of James Dean’s character what struck me was the performance of Sal Mineo as Plato.  His vulnerability, his yearning for family and belonging, his struggle with being an outsider in a society that demanded conformity; all of these qualities, firmly rooted in a tradition of the tough-but-vulnerable kid from the streets, seemed immediately right for the alienated Zygote. And in my head at least it meshed all the classic movie tropes I’d been thinking of for the character in a potentially interesting way.
The final visual layer for the character was how to approach the make-up, and I was blessed both in La Jolla and here in New York to work with two very creative make-up designers, Pam Stompoly in La Jolla and Karl Giant here in New York. I had always thought there should be something unformed about Zygote’s appearance, something fetus-like, and here in New York that idea took shape with both the pallor of the skin and the sketching in of veins beneath Zygote’s face that Karl Giant helped me create, an idea that I’d had based on the makeup design in the 1994 film “Interview with the Vampire.” For the original makeup design in La Jolla, I had been drawn to the hollowed countenances that populate the film work of Tim Burton, specifically the searching melancholy of the main character in “Edward Scissorhands”, Burton’s own modern-day takeoff on monster movie clichés. The helplessness of Edward’s look seemed to jibe with both of the movie traditions we had been playing with in rehearsals, namely that of the vulnerable youth and the monstrous outcast, and this look was something we carried over into our makeup design here in New York.
            For a play that fondly embraces movie clichés with a touch of post-modern giddiness, it seems only right that so much of the inspiration for Zygote came from the movies themselves! Enjoy…

-Scott Parkinson, actor