The Year Without A Summer

SUN FEB 23 12:00PM

In-Development Open Session: THE YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER, A New Musical by Abigail Banister-Jones (she/her)

“Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.”

When the world appears to be ending, you cling to those you hold most dear. But what if you’re really cross at all of them? Year Without a Summer is a spooky historical piece for the future. With music from now and then, dancing with youth and death, and dark ghostly comedy.

Lord Byron; the world’s first celebrity, and Mary Shelly; the mother of science fiction are rising from the dead to reminisce about their summer at Lake Geneva back in 1816. Only there was no summer, just volcanic ash and unusual storms. There was nothing for it but sex, drugs, and romantic poetry. Maybe inventing a genre while we’re at it.

Based on the circumstances that surrounded the writing of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and Dr John Polidori’s The Vampyre, The Year Without a Summer is about fear. The kind of fear that connects us to each other, if we allow it.

Open Sessions offer projects an opportunity to share excerpts from the show and for the audience to provide comments and feedback about their impressions of the work.

Approximate Running Time: 60 minutes with no interval

Part of Antipodes’ inaugural Summer Lab, providing ongoing development support to previous Winter Lab projects (Antipodes’ flagship development program, established in 2020). Each of the seven Summer Lab projects will culminate in either a one-night-only performance, a staged reading or in-development ‘sneak peek’ open session as part of Festival of the Unseen.