Frankenstein’s Babymama & Friends

That whole thing with Lord Byron and Mary & Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Polidori and all, up in that mansion near Switzerland’s Lake Geneva back in the more Romantic day, right?

The director Ken Russell filmed it as Gothic, as you likely already know, unspooling the wild weekend of writing and various levels of alcohol-fueled debauchery that resulted, most famously, in Mrs. Shelley beginning her still popular (and ever more relevant, gods help us) tale of Victor Frankenstein and his attempts at advanced biotechnology in the early 1800s.

And, did you know? The playwright Howard Brenton also wrote of that gregarious gang of entitled young creatives, in his 1984 stagework Bloody Poetry.

It’s the latter, Bloody Poetry, that’s getting a production at Austin’s Sekrit Theater this week – as staged by those Invulnerable Nothings from out of Brooklyn.

But there’s more than “just” that play being presented, O citizen, O lover of all things British-and-still-almost-pre-industrial. There are also readings from works by that Byron and those two Shelleys: Cain and Prometheus Unbound and Frankenstein.

We’re telling you all this because, even if you’re not a lover of live theatre in particular (?), if you’re living in ever-so-literary Austin – the city in which the Harry Ransom Center radiates its indomitable and world-class belles-lettres power, for instance – there’s a good probability that these performances will be right up your baroquely ornate and opium-chased alley.

So check our listings and grab you a Sekrit Theater seat, friend, and prepare to get your Byr on.