SOURCE: Barker, Clive. “The Painter, the Creature, and the Father of Lies: An Introduction.” In Incarnations: Three Plays, pp. ix-xvi. New York: HarperPrism, 1995.

In the following essay, Barker outlines the three plays—Colossus, Frankenstein in Love, and The History of the Devil—which comprise Incarnations.

The dictionary defines incarnation variously as the action of being made flesh, the assumption of a bodily form (particularly of Christ, or of God in Christ) and as the creation of new flesh upon or in a wound or sore: thus, a healing. I cannot imagine an apter title for this collection of plays. Story-telling has always been for me a process of putting on skins; of living lives and dying deaths that belong to somebody else. And the more unlike me I look with these borrowed faces the more interested I am to see the world through their eyes. The thrill of...