The Red Moon marks the first of four vampire plays I know to open this autumn in the Los Angeles area. This one is at Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre, an original musical by Ramon Sanchez.
Honestly, although I do recommend this show as genuinely fun and interesting as well as original in ways rarely seen in vampire fare, the script feels too short and in need of work. The story startled me as something truly interesting, a focus not on tribes or nations or the like but rather the fate of individual human souls.
Yet it wouldn't work without a cast to breathe life into these characters. We would not care, if Roxanna (Lara Lihiya) did not grab our attention so much from the first time she struts on stage. Likewise the first words of the show are spoken by Lauri (Nicole Craig), the most mundane of character, the voice of the ordinary but not with contempt. Rather, she seemed real. A living human being. As did Anthony (Jason Britt), Lauri's friend who catches Roxanna's eye and soon joins her in the night.
In case you hadn't figured it out yet, Roxanna is a vampire. Among other things her role is tricky because she has to jump back and forth between an exultant siren drunk with blood-lust, then a guilt-ridden young woman deeply ashamed of all she's done. No small feat. Yet carried out with great depth.
To be sure all the major roles have their challenges. Lauri, for example, has the unenviable task of holding her own against two powerfully vivid and violent characters. Yet the actress in question carried it off!
Likwise Anthony has this powerful duality the needs exposing on stage--and that is what I saw. Even as the most fierce and reckless predator of humans, we can see his loneliness, his fear of becoming again what he once was.
Of all things, this is a love triangle with a man trying to win back a woman away from that woman's sister--which turns out not be a battle for her soul so much as his. A genuinely interesting, deeply dramatic idea, but little more than an idea without the cast.
Honestly, they saved it. Because the script needs work.
Not that it is in any way bad! On the contrary, the promise it shows really has me feeling a deep desire to see his next draft produced! But the lack of detailed backstory gave the actors more work than necessary (albeit they rose to the challenge). Also, other than the three leads Steven Alloway's Club Bouncer (with no name even) and Paul Carpenter's troubled Minister (ditto) alone seemed like characters really. They did a fine job with the little they had. Jackee Bianchi and Mariale Chiribao had even less to work with and did fine. I long to see what they might have done with more.
Bottom line--lots of promise very neary eclipsed by some extremely fine performances. Director Denise Devin deserves a lot of credit for assembling this cast.
The Red Moon plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30pm until September 26, 2015 at ZJU 4850 Lankershim Blvd (just south of the NoHo sign, north of Camarillo) North Hollywood CA 91601. Tickets are $15 and you can make a reservation at (818) 202-4120 or at ZombieJoes.com
Behold my entry in the AW February 2010 Blog Chain. This month's subject--Love.
Love stories in our culture are everywhere. Orson Scott Card in his excellent book Characters and Viewpoint made the point that when readers see two characters meet (usually of the opposite sex), they instantly render a judgment of whether these two make a likely couple (with advice to the effect of "be aware this is happening"). Likewise, anyone who has delved into the world of fandom should be aware of 'ships (as in "relation"). Fans so very much want certain characters to get together, whether such ever happens in the story or not. Spock and Kirk. Harry and Hermione. Buffy and Faith. Every now and then it even happens (see David Tennant's swan song as Doctor Who).
So writing a love story seems a pretty necessary skill in a fiction-smith. And not that many succeed, at least in my opinion. But then, I suspect my own ideas shape this perception. What many call "love" seems to my mind more akin to "coupling," that is, a pair of folks who form a kind of deep friendship that crosses the line into partnerhood and sex. Not a bad thing. Not at all! Quite delightful, in fact! But such does not meet my standards of what in The Princess Bride is defined as a reason to go on living. Think Cyrano and Roxanne. Aragorn and Arwen. Dekkard and Rachel. Dracula and Elisabeta. Willow and Tara. Susan and Maude. Eli and Oskar. Anne Elliott and her Captain Wentworth.
I'll admit it--when it comes to love I'm a softy in some ways. One of my favorite movies is Love, Actually. Another is A Mighty Wind with the melancholy, sweet tale of Mitch and Mickey at the beating heart of that film. Likewise, I adored the idea of giving the title character a love interest in How The Grinch Stole Christmas. I witnessed the blossoming (albeit rocky) romance between Ron and Hermione with pleasure, and remain fascinated by the pain-born passion between Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and Linden Avery the Chosen.
More--and herein I get very personal--I have been in love. Before her untimely passing, my darling Colleen agreed to become my wife and to this day I regard myself as a widower. I literally needed to be medicated in the years immediately following. Only within the last six months have I even begun to think of women "in that way" again (and with profoundly mixed feelings).
Colleen fascinated me. We shared many but not all of the same interests. We made each other laugh. We enjoyed many of the same things. We both felt intense pleasure at the other's joys, and horror at any pain or sadness they experienced. If given a choice between my duty and Colleen, my choice would have been instantly in her favor. She was the missing piece of my heart, my soul. And without her, I feel maimed.
All of which sounds like the most over-the-top hyperbole, but happens to be true. I adored her. I still do. Her eyes and smile haunt me.
Capturing something like that in terms of writing proves daunting. Dozens of little hints can and do exist to help. One I like is the zodiac. Regardless of how you feel about calculations vis-a-vis birthdates and the like, a good book on the zodiac describes personality types with great skill. Frankly, not all the images make sense to me. So I make my own. Instead of Cancer (a crab) I think of someone being a Turtle. Bear feels more appropriate to me than Bull. Virgos become Unicorns, and so on.
But what makes the biggest difference, at least in my own writing, is some leap of the imagination that seals these two people together in some way.
One love story I've got on the back burner at the moment has its origins a few years back. It really has as its primary image a barely pubescent girl spying on a very young man (five years her senior) swimming in a pool at night. He doesn't know she's there. She hasn't met him, but knows who he is. And she instantly falls in love.
Another I'm working on (with a partner) began as a theoretical idea--a female vampire falling for human male--and then followed some images. They meet on a train, rather like NYC's subway. I frankly saw her initially as Felicia Day, with him as Elijah Wood. Initially, like I said. But what really clinched it for me was a simple phrase: A young soul (the vampire) meets an old one (the human).
Which in my mind makes crafting a love story rather like writing a poem--because it takes more than simply have the meter right to make the thing work.
Vampires are everywhere, and a staple of the genre is the human/vampire romance. Nor am I complaining! The eroticism of the whole idea clearly strikes a chord in many a distracted audience member (yours truly included). Bill and Sookie on True Blood. Edward and Bella in Twilight. The looming triangle in The Vampire Diaries. Henry and Vicky from Blood Ties. The list goes on and on.
But isn't something missing? Or someone?
What about a love story between a human man and a vampire woman? I mentioned this to a good friend on Thanksgiving. Her response managed to intrigue and disturb. "But it is bound to come up," she said, "that the gal can beat him up." Now let us take that apart for a moment. I've been involved romantically more than a few times. Which of us would be able to physically assault the other successfully never seems to have come up in conversation. Never that I can recall, anyway. In response to this, my friend confirmed such had never been an issue in her relationships either.
So why bring it up?
Methinks this has something to do with the notion that be a vampire's lover is in some sense to be a victim, or at least submissive. Male submission is pretty much taboo in our culture -- all the more reason to dip one's toe in those waters, so say I! But then, I also really loved the movie Mishima (check it out, the flick is awesome).
On the other hand must a love story be about any other kind of submission than that to the passion itself? When I think on many of the real wonderful romances of film and literature--from Romeo and Juliet to The English Patient and even A Mighty Wind--relatively few involve submission, overt or covert. Others, such as The Lover and The Secretary, do and do so very well.
Methinks this might be the natural direction for vampire love stories to go. More, to some extent it already is headed there. Consider the underage "couple" at the heart of Let The Right One In, or the adorable pair that are Hoyt and Jessica on True Blood. Nor is this some kind of "modern" idea, as anyone who saw Son of Dracula with Lon Chaney Jr. can attest. Ditto the first filmed sequel to Bram Stoker's famous novel -- said novel itself including an act of near seduction between Lucy Westenra and her still-breathing fiancee, Lord Godalming. Fans of Dark Shadows might also recall Angelique Collins and her "harem" of handsome young men with fang-marks on their throats (at least until she finally bit the love of her life). The first film inspired by the series included an undead Carolyn in nightgown very diaphanous summoning an eager Chris (or was it Tom?) Jennings to her arms.
But things, including story ideas, go in cycles and maybe we're approaching a time for the vampire woman and her male lover/victim. Lord knows there are many a story possibility inherent in the idea.
Towards that end, consider this bit of photo manipulation and the alternate (fictional) history it might represent...heh heh heh...
Every now and then, you fall in love. With a coffee house, or a kitten, or maybe a moment under a specific tree on one particular day.
Sometimes you fall in love with a novel. In this case, a novel about falling in love.
Is this review sufficiently saccharine yet? Wait--it gets better! Really!
Fingersmith is a novel by Sarah Waters. It is also Victorian slang for "pick pocket." In the context of the novel, it also functions as a double ententre. You see, like the writer's two previous novels, its plot concerns a lesbian love story. But not one of those plithy tales of nice girls who fall for each other then stand up to a social order that disapproves. Such can be the stuff of good story-telling, to be sure. Look at Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for example or But I'm A Cheerleader. But Waters challenges us rather more than that. The term "politically correct" having become too degraded to mean much of anything anymore, instead let us call this novel one that confounds all expectations--and makes perfect sense. No small feat.
The first stirrings of the plot you can read on any cover of either the novel itself or the DVD of the miniseries adapted from it. Sue Trinder, raised in a squalid but raucus part of London by Mrs. Sucksby, is hired by a charming rogue known as Gentleman to help fleece an heiress. Said heiress is Maud Lilly, a girl Sue's own age--kept under the thumb of a tyrannical uncle Christopher Lilly in his estate of Briar (love the name of that manor--feels perfectly authentic yet seethes with meaning). It is a cruel plan, a ruthless one, and it hinges upon Sue earning Maud's trust.
As perhaps one might suspect, things do not go according to plan. Sue grows close to Maud, and finds herself in a terrible conundrum. In time, they grow more than close. Herein lies the stuff of tragedy.
Waters, one should mention, has a degree in Victorian literature and it shows. She wields a startling plot (or plots) with a skill one might expect of an expert on Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and like. Or not. Because the creation of story points and satisfying revelations has never been a matter of studying Anne Radcliffe or Sheridan LeFanu. That requires ability, rather than mere knowledge. For that matter, the book is draped with telling details with layer after layer of meaning. Mr. Lilly, for example--he of the purple tongue from ceaseless wetting of his quill pen, and the brass finger on the library floor beyond which servants are forbidden. Or the extra income Mrs. Sucksby earns because one of her windows shows the nearby gallows (quite a boon execution time, with folks willing to pay for the "show").
Lest you have not yet read or seen this work, I offer no spoilers. Precise twists and turns in the plot remain unwritten for this review. What I will mention is that a co-worker, to whom I'd lent the novel, came in one day with less than ten pages left and uttered the words "I have no idea what is going to happen next!"
Maybe my co-worker is not a good judge of such things. You have no way of knowing. But assume for the sake of argument (as is indeed the case) that she is. Consider then what a testimonial she gave in that moment! Let my own testimony confirm it! One of the grave problems with reading or viewing many works of fiction--whatever the media--is that an audience member becomes jaded. One watches a film or reads a book and what happens within too often ends up predictable. This is my major complaint, for example, with the last book of the Twilight Saga--after chapter one, the bones of plot for all the other chapters were naked to my mind's eye. Not so this book!
Alas, my fear is that now readers might halfway expect UFOs to abduct one of the characters, then clone her to become the president of a distant planet of living lawn furniture.
No fear. Surprising, yes. Silly, no.
What I can say without hesitation is that Fingersmith captures the feel of another era, a time before modern forensics or women's rights, before the cataloging of all things had reached quite such a pervasive level, where "class" meant something much than it does to us today (at least, I hope so). Social services--what would those be? London--a place only imagined and barely that without television or films or even photographs. More tellingly--Identity. A more malleable thing in some ways without social security numbers or fingerprints, much less DNA profiles or digital records. Waters' words take us to another place, one not so very far from us in time--hence familiar yet alien. Quaint, and also disturbing. Yet comfortable in some odd way.
More than this, she weaves a constellation of characters in orbit around one another that compel interest and caring. Sue's practicality coupled with a growing shame at her own actions. Maud's ignorance, slowly but surely demolished in the wake of meeting Sue. The charm and cruel honesty of Gentleman. Mr. Lilly--tyrant and cripple (in soul far more than body). And the strange, difficult journey of Mrs. Sucksby as plots unravel and secrets start doing a dance. Yet at its heart--a love story. Two complex and complete human beings who--and why this should be so utterly believable and understandable is the art of the thing--find in each other some part of themselves they've been missing. Sue and Maud are the heart of this tale, with all its mystery and betrayals. They are the ones we care about most, and from whose eyes we learn all kinds of uncomfortable truths. Each becomes a treasure to the other, but under more bizarre and challenging circumstances one might fear to imagine.
In passing I should mention the BBC made a fine adaptation of the novel, starring Sally Hawkins and Elaine Cassidy in the leads. Behold the trailer:
