Words of Life

As a playwright, I put words on paper. As an actor, I embody words to bring them to life. As a storyteller, I collaborate with artists to give audiences an experience of life.

While writing is mostly a solitary activity, acting is a collaborative one, and storytelling is an art. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to watch my original adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 19th century novel Frankenstein being developed by a collective of storytellers in early 2025 through a series of 15 four-hour weekly workshops. The purpose of the workshops was to specifically develop this story for a public preview on June 25th, 2025.

Left to Right, artists KELTIE NEWMARCH, ASHLEY GILLARD, JEREMIE HUOT, SANJIV KALRA, LOGAN INDEWEY

What a privilege to have a directing team of 3 theatre professionals guide 12 actors through a second draft of my script! What a privilege to listen to actors do a cold reading of a script they’ve never seen before, and then discuss their initial impressions of the plot, characters, themes, and motifs. What a pleasure to watch so many talented people jump to their feet and engage fully in theatre exercises led by directors who designed those exercises to flush out the complexities and nuances of dialogue, movement, characters, and plot for hours on end.

I confess it is quite challenging to then sit down several weeks later and have those same actors do another reading of the script section by section to identify and discuss flaws, weaknesses, and shortcomings in my adaptation...but that is such a big part of the artistic process!

"As a playwright, I put words on paper. As an actor, I embody words to bring them to life. As a storyteller, I collaborate with artists to give audiences an experience of life."

I remember how surprised I was to see the clutter and mess of Shelley’s original handwritten pages of her novel and learned that her father, husband, and others read, critiqued, and advised on her early drafts. Shelley’s novel is a better story because of her collaboration with fellow artists, as is my adaptation. Artists create beauty out of chaos.

It has always been so, according to the story of humanity as told in The Bible: the world was created by word according to Genesis 1 (when there was only formlessness, emptiness, darkness), and creator God spoke. Then we learn in John 1 that the Word was with God in that beginning and that Word became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ - through him all things were made, and in him was life, and that life was the light of men. Different words create a different kind of life.

When Mary Shelley wrote her novel in 1818, she gave a young scientist, Victor Frankenstein, the same power to create life…but the Creature he created was not like Jesus. Instead, Mary was fascinated by Paradise Lost, the epic poem written by John Milton and published in 1667. Victor’s goal was to create another Adam, the first human, but Shelley parallels a Creature rejected by Victor with Satan’s rejection by God in Paradise Lost:

"I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed."

Rejection is a common human experience that is keenly felt by many, so it was no surprise that our actors were compelled to express empathy for a fully functioning autonomous android that I call AdamAI (pronounced Adam-eye), the first of its kind, made from silicon and software. They were initially inclined to relate to AdamAI as if it was made from flesh, bone, and blood—a sentient creation with a conscience—misunderstood and unfairly treated by humans. But it is not. And that is the phenomenon we explored and developed in our workshops.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as a fully autonomous android is not capable of making decisions based on universal human values, morals, or ethics—because there are none. We do not live in a world that is organized on such common ground. We live in a pluralistic world made up of competing values, morals, and ethics—different words creating different worlds.

So, within weeks, as the actors jumped to their feet and “put legs” under scenes in the story, we could see this tension develop at the core of the story: what are we willing to believe about androids? For example, do we believe that an android (a very clever machine) can make “right” moral decisions in complex situations? Can androids actually help us humans solve existential problems of evil and death? If not, is there really a need to create androids to perform tasks as moral agents? And if we do, what are the implications for humanity—what foundational ideas or assumptions about life are challenged by AGI androids? These are just a few of many questions that we’ve explored in our workshops, in our related podcasts, and what we hope to discuss with audiences.

"Shelley’s novel is a better story because of her collaboration with fellow artists, as is my adaptation. Artists create beauty out of chaos."

Artists are often intelligent and sensitive individuals who bring their lives—experiences, emotions, ideas, skills—into a room. The workshop becomes its own little world of transformation, of new possibilities, of imagination. The words on a page come alive through their hands, feet, voices, and bodies! And, by doing so, the concepts, ideas, and meanings of those words are, I believe, more accessible and understandable to our brains. This is a power of storytelling through live theatre: we can think more clearly, converse more directly, engage more fully as humans who have a shared interest in doing the “right” things for each other, for our children, for our future because words create life.

We hope our audiences will catch some of the privilege and pleasure we enjoyed in our workshops and discuss with us, “What kind of life shall we create?”

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GEORGE DUTCH is an actor, director, writer, and the playwright of the original theatrical work Frankenstein A.I. developed by 9th Hour Theatre Company in 2025.

Read more about Frankenstein A.I. and the artists who contributed to its development.