Finally, a Victorian Period Piece About Accomplishment

In a Victorian era air, the play “Shelley and Lovelace Never Met” follows its tropes—witty conversations about extramarital affairs, the travails of betrothals, and class between women in bell-shaped skirts and puff sleeves—á la the society gossip papers of the day. But this story is not just another Jane Austen ‘who am I to marry?’ spin-off, instead, with a gothic twist it cleverly lets time and space collide in a fictive meeting between Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace where both vulnerabilities and talents are exposed. It is a veritable feminist explosion staged at Theater for the New City through February 16, 2025. The two icons, Mary Shelley the founder of science fiction who wrote Frankenstein, and Ada Lovelace, the first programmer who created a new vision for computing, were contemporaries, but surprisingly never met. The play is as much about their life’s work as their private lives.

“But you are the genius. Don’t you understand?” Lovelace, played by Allison Fletcher, exclaims to Shelley in exasperation when the latter praises her husband, the poet Percy Shelley. In the play, the two characters run into each other at Lord Byron’s grave. Throughout props are sparse (a bottle of wine and a human heart in a jar) against a simple set animated by flickering lanterns and the headstone: “Byron.” Unabashedly, it is the actresses that carry the play. Lovelace was Byron’s daughter and Shelley was part of his circle of friends—we find out that Shelley’s step-sister, who also had an affair with her husband Percy, had an affair and child with Lord Byron. While Shelley was rumored to have gotten the idea for Frankenstein after Byron prompted his group to come up with a ghost story while on vacation in Switzerland. Shelley, played by Robin Zerbe, waves her hand, laughs, and scoffs, rightfully—after all, Shelley wrote the book why should Lord Byron take any credit?

Packing a punch, the piece charts the biography of these two women engagingly, where poignant questions peppered with details revealed the ins and outs of their lives and choices. A Chatgpt prompt would have gone something like this: Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace meet in a place that will make Gothic literature fans cream their pants where their herstories are revealed during a conversation in a Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’ tempo with Steampunk elements. Make it pass the Bechdel test but not let us forget that the patriarchy is still at large. The Canadian playwrights Becky McKercher and Sarah Thuswaldner are simply brilliant—adding to the play’s feeling of everyone knowing each other Thuswaldner and its director Alex Sisk have been friends since high school.

Both characters are plagued by living in the shadow of a parent, in different ways. Lovelace only met Lord Byron as a baby and craved to know more about him, even though he was a “scoundrel.” Shelley’s mother was the illustrious feminist Mary Wollenstonecraft who died during childbirth. Yet, the two women and their animated conversation show us that their lives are more relevant than anyone—parents, spouses, children—they mention, especially Lord Byron whose silent tombstone says it all—despite them also being, as we understand later in the play, dead. The dynamic between the two women quickly oscillates between sharp, tense, warm, and supportive during the 90-minute piece. For his directorial debut, Sisk has expertly guided the actors in deftly creating divides between their characters egging the other one to further the piece with humor and playfulness. “Are we competing over who suffered the most?” Both say ‘I.’ At times the conversation is interspersed with a memory, where one actor stands in for the other to play a character, Fletcher as Shelley’s boasting father, Zerbe as Lovelace’s guilt-tripping mother. Nothing is taboo in this 21st-century conversation that the production successfully persuades me should have taken place in the 1850s, or before.

Shelley and Lovelace Never Met runs through February 16, 2025, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM at Theater for the New City. Tickets $20.

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