Adapting Dracula (Part Sixteen)

This is a series of posts sharing my ideas/considerations while getting ready to adapt Bram Stoker's novel Dracula for the live stage.

Sixteen: "A Girl Named Mina"

Arguably Dracula's most important victim, and the only one who seems to fight back.  A devoted wife, ending up with a circle of devoted followers.  Religious and benevolent to the point she insists others pity Dracula himself--yet is herself seared by the touch of a holy wafer.  Mina Harker (nee Murray) remains among the most commonly portrayed characters from the novel and the focus of most modern adaptations.

Not only modern ones.  The 1920s (a period with disturbing parallels to our own) saw the first of what
 ultimately proved many versions to have Mina herself destroy the vampire.  In F.W.Murnau's Nosferatu she does so alone, without any advice or aid of any kind.  Disturbingly, she does so via deliberate self-sacrifice, giving her own blood and life to save an entire city.

As written, the novel really  has only two (maybe three) female characters of any note--Lucy and Mina.  Lucy too often becomes the focus of what seems like all that is frail in womankind.  Mina on the other hand comes across as her opposite, everything positive.  An utterly devoted and obedient bride, for example, who fiercely protects her own with great (but modestly presented) skill, accepting men's devotion and totally unwarranted condescension.  

Wee bit of a peek into Bram Stoker, in my opinion.

In recent decades this has changed quite a bit.  In the popular musical as well as arguably the most important adaptation since Hammer's Horror of Dracula (maybe even the Lugosi version) graduates from helpless waif needing rescue to the actual slayer of Dracula himself, in both those cases said death blow delivered in pity and even love.  No real complaints on that score!  It proves a nicely faceted approach in many ways!

It has also become a cliche.  Dracula's one true love (often his reincarnated bride) has been done so many times it makes me groan.  Other versions interest me many times more, up to and including her portrayal in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (both film and graphic novel, the latter far superior in pretty much every way) or some stage versions, one of which explicitly portrayed her as trapped in a Victorian London which was no less a feminist dystopia than The Handmaid's Tale.

Apart from discarding the vampire and she falling in love, here seem to me the most fascinating building blocks for Mina in my adaptation:  She and Lucy are best friends, despite their class differences.  Mina fell in love with and was chosen by Jonathan Harker--a man pretty openly desired (in Stoker's original notes) by at least two other women.  She travels across Europe without protect or escort, then handles evidence of her new husband's possible insanity with calm precision and patience.  She felt genuine horror at the idea the Almighty might turn from her as "polluted" yet urged pity towards the creature who so polluted her.  She also demonstrates considerable intelligence, imagination and a strong will as well as genuine courage throughout the tale.

I would argue--as many have--this helps make her one of the most fascinating and compelling people in the book, as well as giving us a strong clue as to Harker's true personality.  Frankly, their marriage seems to me woefully under-explored.  Some might accuse me of defining this interesting woman by her husband but my view is that I'm doing the opposite--defining her husband by the fact she chose to wed him.  This works both ways of course, and opens up some powerful storytelling possibilities.

To be continued

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

The playwright of The Resistible Rise of Auturo Ui never saw his show produced.  Just prior to WWII and weirdly during it then for years after the play proved too controversial.  Or not so weirdly, given how uncomfortable the central premise...

Ui (pronounced "Oo-ee") is a gangster in Chicago, during the Depression when the genre of mob bosses began to take its modern form.  In a series of skits/scenes, in many ways a blend of clown show, cabaret and gangster movie, we watch members of the Califlower Trust--a group of corrupt businessmen--try to make a deal with the seemingly incorruptible Dogsburough (Troy Dunn) and through a slippery trick to compromise him.  At this point the gangster Ui (Andrew Loviska) slides into the whole process offering "protection" for various shop-owners and businessmen.  Via violence, charisma, a total lack of integrity or scruples coupled with bottomless vanity and greed, we witness an analog of Hitler's rise.

One may wonder, where the controversy?  Mostly from the deeply uncomfortable criticism of capitalism.  Americans don't generally understand how the Third Reich was born.  They want to blame Hitler as some unique Satanic master of mesmerism, as if that explains millions of people not only voting for but collaborating with the man.  Or point to the word "Socialist" in the Nazi Party's name, ignoring the way captains of industry openly supported and profited from Hitler's regime.

That way, they (or we) can pretend it could not possibly happen here.  We can go on acting as if Hitler were a one-of-a-kind problem, instead of a particularly loathesome symptom of a greater problem.

Arturo Ui shows us precisely how yes It Can Happen Here.  Worse (in some eyes) how it already has.  More than once.

City Garage's production captures many of the tricks and skillful theaticalities Brecht worked into his plays.  We never wholly accept this world of an alternate Chicago, but then we aren't meant to.  The details jar because they are designed for that effect--not once should the audience ever get too comfortable.  Never should they feel at the expense of thinking.  When a murder trial turns into a horrific mockery of justice, up to the open drugging of the defendant lest he defend himself, and witnesses threatening the judge from the witness stand, we can hardly look away.  It stirs a dreadful fear based on an oft-ignored truth--the rules only matter so long as we actively protect them.  Likewise when Ui all-but-rapes a widow (Lindsay Plake) at the funeral of the man Ui had murdered, we actively wonder--how can he be stopped?

Just as we are supposed to.

The play may seem off-putting to many, given its over-the-top style and message about a subtle as a sledgehammer.  Others may simply agree with its allegory about America (including America today) and Germany during the rise of the Third Reich.  On the level of being smoothly entertaining, with a uniformity of style, and some kind of emotional climax, the play simply fails.  But that seems much like complaining a dentist didn't make you a gourmet meal.  Such is not his or her job.  Just as this play is not at all intended to sooth or allow anyone to escape thinking.  It is intended to disturb, which it does, often in ways that prove very compelling to watch.

Other standouts in the cast include Angela Beyer as a variety of roles, most obviously the scantily class Emcee, and Lindsay Sawyer who (like most of the cast) has many roles, up to and including a grimly obvious victim of violence whom the audience watches murdered (in a nice touch, from the angle it seems certain the gunfire cutting her down comes from the audience).  Others in the cast include Clifford Irvine, Michael Cortez, Nathaniel Lynch, Geraldine Fuentes, Beau Smith, Sandy Mansson and Trace Taylor.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 8pm through August 12, 2018, at City Garage, Building T1, 2525 Michigan Ave (across the street from the Bergamot Train Station) Santa Monica CA 90404.

Adapting Dracula (Part Fifteen)

This is a series of posts sharing my ideas/considerations while getting ready to adapt Bram Stoker's novel Dracula for the live stage.

Fifteen: "Just Follow the Book"

Every time I (or probably anyone) polls multiple fans about Bram Stoker's most famous novel about how to adapt it, one answer pops up again and again.  "Just follow the book!"

Forgive the rant, but here is why that advise helps not one tiny bit.

Visually it may seem clearer by looking at the covers of different editions.  All those here belong to the same novel, word for word identical texts.  Yet look at them. One pretty clearer shows what looks like a walking corpse of an old man, decomposition delayed but hardly halted, a creature of shadows whose steps make whispery echoes in the long-abandoned hallways of that castle.  

Now examine the second.  Here we see a lithe, athletic form, hugged by cape in the wind, looking out across a brightly lit (presumably by moonlight) vista.  This Dracula stands straight rather than slouching.  He has hair, revealing a younger man.  One can imagine him speaking in a clear, resonate voice while the previous version looks as if his speech would sound guttural, gasping, maybe unpleasantly liquid.

In short, this Impaler appears the opposite of the previous rendition of the same character.  You may prefer one over the other.  Or not.  It hardly matters because no matter which you may like other fans--with exactly as much right--prefer one or the other.  Plus many more besides.

Bram Stoker's novel remains so complex, all its facets and characters so open to interpretation no one can honestly claim to have any final answer.  Or, put another way, lots of fans can and do posit their own, equally valid final answers.  

Is Van Helsing some kind of madman?  Or a genius?  Lucy--girlish innocent or would be slut?  I've seen Quincey portrayed as a stereotypical cowpoke as well as something akin to a hillbilly.  "Follow the novel" allows such decisions in part because Stoker really didn't differentiate between most these characters.  They aren't the hero, after all.  Dracula of course fills in the role of villain, but like Lord of the Rings the hero of this novel remains its setting--England.

Which proves extremely difficult to portray in a dramatic medium, hence the focus on the characters instead.  

To be continued

Coriolanus (review)

Credit: Ian Flanders

Spoilers ahoy!

Hardly anyone does Coriolanus these days (although it was once Shakespeare's most popular play in this country).  However, that seems to be changing.  To my knowledge the Theatricum Botanicum's production marks the third such within the last twelve months here in Los Angeles!  This tale of a General during the early days of the Roman Republic seems to strike a chord.  Some see it as a tale of a would-be tyrant trying to put down the common man, whereas others call it an indictment of mob rule.  Recently I most often hear it referred to as revealing what happens to the battle-hardened war veteran when they seek to return of civilian life.

Credit: Ian Flanders

The title character (David DeSantos) is indeed a great warrior, one who relishes the 'high' of battle, honors his fellow soldiers and officers, routinely downplays his own accomplishments.  He also despises civilians who are not, like him, Patricians i.e. of the wealthy class who control government.  When they almost riot because they lack food, he feels rage not only that they dare complain but that the Senate is so weak as to feed them!  Clearly much of this he learned from his charming dragon of a mother Volumnia (Ellen Geer), who finds delightful the idea her beloved son might die horribly in battle, hopes her grandson might die as well, but bewails the fact ordinary people despise him for hating them.

Credit: Ian Flanders

In the wake of a war, Coriolanus wins enormous renown and would in the natural course of events then be elected Consul (the kinda/sorta equivalent of President).  Yet to do so he must win the approval of the lower classes.  It physically disgusts him to ask them for anything.  The Tribunes (Alan Blumenfeld, Christopher Wallinger)--sacrocanct representatives of the common people--remind citizens of how he has always treated them, and deliberately goad him into declaring his hatred of those very same citizens, even threatening the Tribunes which is treason.  The city banishes him, so he seeks out Rome's enemy Aufidius (Dane Oliver) to join with his forces and lead them into sacking the city in revenge for his humiliation!

Credit: Ian Flanders

One can see how interpretation becomes key in judging this story and its characters.  That frankly is the one huge gaping problem with this specific production.  Pretty much the entire cast does a wonderful job, overall.  Staging is about as wonderful as one might ask in terms of using the magnificent outdoor theatre at their disposal.  Sets and costumes and fight scenes were great.

But all we the audience got was the plot, with individual actors portraying the emotional truths of their moments.  All well and good that, especially since the plot proves compelling.  Lacking a unifying idea, however, the play becomes nothing but a plot.  Note please this is different from taking sides or necessarily pushing a message, but more like focusing on what questions does this production wish to explore?  What moments and decisions are most important?  Without that, pretty much any of Shakespeare's plays becomes nothing but a well done soap opera.  Including the puzzling, challenging piece that is Coriolanus.  I enjoyed the show.  Felt wrapped up in events.  But other than appreciation for a well told tale I carried nothing else with me when leaving the theatre.

Coriolanus plays in rotating repertory Sunday July 1 at 8pm, Saturdays July 7 and 21 at 4pm, Sunday July 29 at 4pm, Friday August 3 at 8pm, Sunday August 12 at 4pm, Saturdays August 25 and September 1 at 4pm, Sunday September 9 at 8pm, Saturday September 15 at 8pm and Sunday September 23 at 4pm.  Performances are at Will Geer's Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 North Topanga Canyon Blvd (midway between Pacific Coast Hwy and the Ventura Freeway), Topanga CA 90290