Creating a Monster

Posted by Scott Parkinson, actor -

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”...(more)