Front Row

This event features a staged reading by six Seattle actors celebrating "Red Rain and Monsters: A 200th Anniversary of the Shelleys and Byron at Lake Geneva." In 1816, the writers Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin Shelley, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and Dr. John Polidori crossed separately through the continent to meet at Lake Geneva . "Red Rain and Monsters" is an examination of the full story of these young individuals' origins, the complicated connections between them, the lives they were fleeing, and the deep intellectual influences and radical principles they were trying to embody. Following the reading, critic Robert Horton, author of "Frankenstein," discusses the myth's cultural endurance.