Many, many years ago I wrote a short play and staged a reading at the Burien Actors Theatre with five readers. Two of them were friends, but three were recruits that I had never met before. All did a wonderful job at the time, but I noticed that one of my then-readers was in a play down at the Renton Civic Theatre, which is just down the hill from Grubb Street. So I made a rare evening excursion into Renton to a theater I had never attended before.
And a word about the Renton Civic Theatre, which is community theater at its best. From the street it is an unassuming theatre marquee sandwiched between a realty company storefront and a Japanese restaurant. The venue inside is excellent, the house and stage both larger and more comfortable than the Taproot's. The lobby is small, and has handbills from the 40s when this was a motion picture house. There is a bar this particular evening there was no alcohol, because the only volunteer at the counter was underage and could not serve. It's really a nice place. On this Friday night the house was mostly full, and there were more than a few attendees who ignored the whole "turn off your phone" warnings. Ah, well.
The play itself is an excellent adaption of the original novel. The novel is epistemological in nature, which is to say that it is presented as letters, diary entries, and other first person accounts. Moving it to the stage results in a series of vignettes where the characters recite the letters, then move seamlessly into scenes with the other characters. As a result they're doing a lot of their own stage management as they haul chairs, tables, and coffins on and off the stage.
Adapting to the stage also involved other changes. Quinton Morris, the cowboy in the book (and you did read the book as a kid, right?), gets a slight mention but never appears on stage. Neither do the brides. The finale remains in London as opposed to fleeing back to Transylvania. Yet that doesn't change the story itself, and helps retain the sense of the characters being overmatched by the Count. The production also gender changes Renfield, which actually works better.
The actors are all excellent. My reader, Michael Yichao, is the hapless Jonathan Harker, the lawyer dispatched to Castle Dracula to help Dracula move to London. The heart of the play belongs to Mina (Dani Davis) who hits everything precisely and sharply. Angela Martin does double duty as the manic Renfield and the supportive Sister Agatha. Lucy Westenra captures the coquettish nature of Lucy. David Breyman posts an almost-comic Dr. Seward, Cameron Widmark is very British nobility and honor as Arthur Holwood, Lucy's fiancé, and Phillip Keiman is an endearing Abraham Van Helsing. And Tadd Morgan is our Count, shedding the Hungarian accent early as he modernizes for London and makes himself a holy terror.
There is humor in the horror, and most of it comes from the characters themselves - Harker's naivety, Lucy's shallowness, Seward's moroseness. It is subtle and effective. And that's a challenge given that Drac himself has been parodied to death over the decades. There's one sequence that created inadvertent giggles among the audience, contrasting Jonathan and Mina's wedding with the death of Lucy, but in general the actors kept the audience in check and enthralled with a story that many of them knew since childhood.
You want a Halloween play? Here's your Halloween play. Go enjoy,
More later.
