Dark shadows

The vitriolic satire of Brown's Dracula

by Bill Rodriguez

DRACULA. By Mac Wellman. Directed by Pannill Camp. With Benjamin Percy, Emily Wartchow, Diana Fithian, Greg Shilling, Kevin Landis, Michael Linden, Josh Shulruff, and Patrick Halliday. At Brown University Theatre through April 22.

If there is a more intensely outlandish excursion than Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, it is Mac Wellman's serio-comic play Dracula. This is a tale dripping with psycho-mythic juices that the playwright has squeezed out and boiled down to dark and caustic essences. The current production by Brown University Theatre/Sock and Buskin may not negotiate the tricky comic shoals without foundering, but credit is due for it going down thinking.

The vitriolic satire is sweetened -- somewhat -- with cagey humor, to distract us from the fact that most of our primal human responses are being lampooned: love and lust, bravery and fear, even pride and prejudice (vampires are such a misunderstood lot). Music and songs, sometimes very brief and always evocative, enchant us and merge moods with incidents.

The main characters of the numerous Halloween-time adaptations of the novel are all here. Transylvania's infamous count (Benjamin Percy) is joined by his first victim, Englishman Jonathan Harker (Greg Shilling), and his wife Mina (Diana Fithian), who visits him in a lunatic asylum. Her husband now calls himself Scardinelli and eats flies to extract their life force. Mina's young friend Lucy (Emily Wartchow) is as flirtatious as in any adaptation, here exaggerated by Wellman into an outrageously libidinous, if coy, Victorian.

Dr. Jack Seward (Michael Linden) heads the mental hospital, and his lust for Lucy and Mina is his undoing. (Wellman has the doctor confess and loath his Jewish heritage as he recites Irishman Stoker's anti-Semitic slurs.) Prof. Van Helsing (Kevin Landis) is the vampire expert who discovers that the count and his three voluptuous "Vampirettes" have smuggled themselves into England in four dirt-filled coffins on-board a ship whose crew has one-by-one mysteriously disappeared.

However, if the oft-told story rather than its significance is your main concern, you might want to read the book instead. The playwright goes so far as to leave the dramatic death of Dracula until after the final curtain, as if bored by the obvious.

Since part of this send-up is Wellman arching an eyebrow at the pretentiousness of patriarchal societies, Fithian's Mina and Wartchow's Lucy give the most convincing performances, allowed to play them naturally. (Wartchow's segue into super-slut is also a delight to behold.) Patrick Halliday as a corrupt servant at the asylum and Josh Shulruff as a wealthy American suitor are also allowed to present their characters directly, and thereby convincingly. But everybody else has to filter their roles through the highly stylized conventions of melodrama -- then ratchet up a few notches -- so they, and we, have a much harder time of it.

This deconstruction of mustachio-twirling melodrama needs to establish an outside reference point, or all we're left with is the melodramatics. In this production, the humor that tries to rescue such an outcome is an off-again, on-again thing. Wellman offers High Seriousness as well as High Camp, and the choice made here was to not let us forget our superiority to these fools and madmen. The humor takes itself too seriously and, rather than lighten the tone, falls back into thematic darkness. I'm not calling for slapstick, just balance.

Humorous opportunities do abound. In the big seduction scene, Count Dracula lets Lucy chirp on lubriciously and seduce herself. There are more references to masturbation than you can shake a stick at. But even when a character is played mostly for laughs, the leaden atmosphere muffles the volume: though Van Helsing has a fright-wig and is given an intentionally half-hearted accent by Kevin Landis, he might as well be trying out knock-knock jokes at his dissertation orals.

Despite the joke cues, Wellman certainly didn't make director Pannill Camp's life easy in the laff-riot department with the narrative compaction he presents. Characters stand and recite long descriptions of events that a play usually presents as action. Entire chapters of development are related in a few dense sentences. Nevertheless, Camp finds many ways to keep the stage active during the recitals. Characters pop out from under a block of audience seating, or clamber along overhead walkways. Emotions are constantly physicalized: in perhaps the most striking image of the play, Percy's Dracula effortlessly swings along a pipe and suspends bat-like over Mina as he pierces his arm and drips blood to feed her.

Set design by Michael McGarty disorients us, appropriately, as soon as we step into Leeds Theatre: audience seating is where the stage area usually is. We know we're in for an evening of audio assault: glinting speaker cones are aimed at us like high-tech ack-ack guns. They are put to good use by the sound design of Keith Crowder and Joshua Eichenbaum, and the original score of Jeb Havens and Joshua Schulruff. The elements of this Dracula that succeed do so as sharply as a freshly filed pair of eye teeth.