KRCB-FM: Second Row Center

“Am I supposed to be retelling my creature’s story or confessing my own?” – so asks Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly, author of Frankenstein and the protagonist in Petaluma playwright (and former Second Row Center Host) David Templeton’s latest theatrical piece Mary Shelley’s Body, now in its premiere engagement at Sebastopol’s Main Stage West. Templeton, whose previous plays are autobiographical, ventures into historical fiction with this stage adaptation of his same-named novella published last year in Worde Horde’s anthology “Eternal Frankenstein”. The play opens, as most good ghost stories do, in a graveyard where we find Mary Shelley (Sheri Lee Miller) atop her tomb and coming to grips with the realization that she is dead. She finds herself trapped by an invisible force and begins to review her life with the hope of revealing the reason for her purgatorial existence. Her upbringing by a stern father, her romance with the married Percy Shelley, their eventual marriage after the suicide of Shelley’s wife, an