Goode Productions (with Associate Producer Meredith Packer) will present the World Premiere of AMP, a solo horror piece written and performed by Jody Christopherson, directed by Isaac Byrne (The Other Mozart; In Vestments) at HERE (145 Avenue of the Americas, entrance on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street), December 5-19 with performances Tuesday, December 5 at 8:30pm, Wednesday, December 6 at 8:30pm, Thursday, December 7 at 8:30pm, Friday, December 8 at 8:30pm, Saturday, December 9 at 8:30pm, Sunday, December 10 at 4pm, Wednesday, December 13 at 8:30pm, Friday, December 15 at 8:30pm, Saturday, December 16 at 4pm, Sunday, December 17 at 4pm, and Tuesday, December 19 at 8:30pm. Tickets ($35) are available in advance at www.here.org or by calling 212-352-3101. AMP will run in rep with the World Premiere of Greencard Wedding. Both productions are part of SubletSeries@HERE: a curated rental program, which provides artists with subsidized space and equipment, as well as technical support.

AMP is a multi-media solo horror piece about scientist Luigi Galvani’s discovery of animal electricity in 1790 and how it informed the creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as the development of electroshock therapy in the 1950’s.

In AMP, Mary Shelley begins the process of writing Frankenstein on stage. Mary’s monologues are interwoven with film interviews of a woman who auditions for the Boston Symphony during their first historic “blind auditions” and is committed to an asylum.

AMP will feature sound and projection design by Martha Goode, with video and still photos shot on location inside abandoned asylums on the East Coast. Additional text is from the writings of Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Luigi Galvani. AMP will also feature the voices of J.Stephen Brantley (NYIT 2017 Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award; Difficult People on Hulu) as famed philosopher (and Mary Shelley’s father) William Godwin, Chloe Dirksen as the architect of modern feminism, (and Mary Shelley’s mother) Mary Wollstoncraft, Ryan McCurdy as Percy Shelley, and Jonathan West as Lord Byron with the help of Dialect Coach Chloe Dirksen.

AMP was previously developed through residencies at Write Out Front and All For One Theater. For the play AMP, Jody Christopherson is the recipient of a 2017 New York Society Library grant, for emerging female writers writing about history and literature. AMP will run in rep with Greencard Wedding, which stars Jody Christopherson and Ryan McCurdy.

AMP is an hour-long multimedia show that jumps through time as writer and actor Jody Christopherson tells the story of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and how she came to write such a tale, interspersed with text from Lord Byron, her husband poet Percy Shelley, and her parents, authors William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Inspired by Luigi Galvani’s 1780 discovery of bioelectricity, when he caused a frog’s leg muscles to twitch with an electrical spark, the 19-year-old Shelley is galvanized to write Frankenstein as she recounts her life story, a tale involving her British feminist mother, who died shortly after her birth in 1797, and how she spends her life chasing “the love I] almost had.” She goes on to detail her life, including the troubled relationship with her stepmother, a neighbor whom her father married because “it was the only thing he could do”. She has a better relationship with her stepsister, Clare Clairmont, who goes on to marry the poet Lord Byron. The live action on stage is spliced with a film of a woman (also played by Christopherson) in an asylum in 1952 Massachusetts, when they practiced electroshock therapy. The unnamed woman played the cello and was …Read more