by Robert
W. McDowell
September 26, 2008, Greensboro, NC: More than 20
years ago, in another journalistic lifetime, I wrote a video column
for the Raleigh News & Observer about horror movies that
could still scare the pants off you in what we today would call your “home
theater.” After recruiting a couple of teenagers as guinea pigs,
we three settled down for a Saturday-afternoon videotape marathon that
included Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, which Ben and Scott laughed their way through.
Then we got to The Hitcher; and the boys sat squirming in
their seats, silent as the dismembered corpses that the title character
of that 1986 scary movie left scattered along the roadside.
The Hitcher has what I call a “squirm factor” that
is lacking in the other three movies named above and is entirely absent
in the inaugural UpStage
Cabaret presentation of Dracula,
Triad Stage co-founder and
artistic director Preston Lane’s adaptation of the classic 1897
horror novel by Irish
author Abraham “Bram” Stoker (1847-1912), who
incidentally was business manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre
and personal assistant to the famous English actor Henry Irving.
Triad Stage guest director Jay Putnam goes for a film-noir effect,
staging Dracula largely in the dark on scenic designer Holly
Joy Griffin’s T-shaped skeletal set that bisects the intimate
80-seat UpStage Cabaret on the top floor of The Pyrle Theater. The
problem is, the shadows upon shadows of Kate Devine’s lighting
design obscure the actors’ facial expressions at so many key
moments that it is difficult for the audience to share the terror of
Dracula’s victims. Even seated ringside, in splatter distance
from poor, anemic Lucy Westenra’s sickbed-turned-deathbed, it
is hard to feel the horror of Dracula.
Two actors with dramatically different body types and hair styles — one
short-haired and clean shaven and the other long-haired with a scruffy
moustache and beard — play the vampire king at the same time,
one in London and the other in Dracula’s native Transylvania;
and that alone requires more willing suspension of disbelief than most
Triad Stage patrons will be able to muster.
Beefy Lee Spencer, who plays a John Cleese-like Dracula in Transylvania,
also portrays Abraham Van Helsing, but without the charisma of the
fearless Dutch vampire hunter. A noticeably thinner and scruffier Alexander
Windner Lieberman, who resembles Tom Cruise at his grungiest in the
movie Born on the Fourth of July, not only plays Dracula in
London — without even a hint of that special something that makes
him catnip for a succession of impressionable young women — but
also impersonates the bug-eating raving lunatic Renfield and the hapless
estate agent Jonathan Harker, who becomes the latest guest to check
into Castle Dracula, but never check out.
Lee Spencer gives a workmanlike performance as Dracula and Van Helsing,
but Alexander Lieberman makes a better wild-eyed vampire henchman (Renfield)
than a vampire king. As Dracula, Lieberman is merely creepy and grotesque,
not terrifying and never sexy. Where is Bela Lugosi when we need him?
Joshua Purvis not only plays the stolid Dr. Seward, superintendent
of the asylum where Renfield is bugging out more and more as Dracula
comes nearer and nearer; but he also adds an intentionally comic cameo
(in drag) as a furtive Innkeeper who tries to warn Jonathan Harker
about his infamous client, Count Dracula, and an unintentionally comic
cameo as Vampire No. 1, who looks too much like a bare-chested version
of Dr. Seward to be credible.
Caitlin Watkins likewise fails to give her three characters — Dr.
Seward’s fiancée Lucy Westenra, Mina Harker, and Vampire
No. 2 — distinctive personalities. Watkins’ cameo as Vampire
No. 2, when she teams up with Vampire No. 1 and Dracula to attack
Jonathan Harker, is ho-hum, neither seductive nor scary.
The UpStage Cabaret version of Preston Lane’s Dracula,
which runs just 70 minutes, without intermission, never quite grabs
its audience’s heart with an icy hand, like the novel does. With
the actors almost constantly — if frequently dimly — in
view on the minimalist set, the opportunity for Dracula or his henchman
to sneak up on the hapless citizens of London is virtually nonexistent.
The audience sees them coming, and last Friday night the only chills
in Triad Stage’s UpStage Cabaret production of Dracula came
from the theater’s air-conditioning system, which seemed to be
set on Blizzard.
Note: This production
continues through November 1. For details, see our openings
page.
