The actors were clearly having fun and, gauging by the laughter the night I was at the show, lots of people in the audience were enjoying themselves. I’m not here to yuck anybody’s yum, but my personal reaction is that I was bored. So bored. I would rather have been at home folding laundry. Vacuuming. Anything.
Let me explain.
Written by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen, Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors is a parody of Bram Stoker’s vampire classic, so it’s meant to be funny. And, with five actors playing a more than dozen characters, it’s supposed to be virtuosic. But the material fails on both counts.
A recap of the story. When mild-mannered realtor Jonathan Harker visits Count Dracula’s Transylvanian castle on business, he shows the Count a portrait of his betrothed, Lucy Westfeldt. The Count, who is immediately smitten, sets sail to England, where he — not to give too much away — endangers Lucy’s sister Mina and sets his seductive sites on Lucy. Sidebar: Lucy’s father, Dr. Westfeldt, staffs their home with his mentally disturbed patients, including the insect-eating butler Renfield.
For this to work for me theatrically, there would have had to be some kind of narrative tension created by a baseline of reality. I would have had to care about the endangered Mina, for instance. But, as written, Mina is almost exclusively a comic device — and a mean one at that. I’m not knocking actor Jeff Meadows, who’s playing Mina (more about the performances in a moment) but casting a tall man as Mina and then making repeated cracks about her undesirability reduces her to little more than a trope. And trying to make comic mileage out of Mina’s unattractiveness, especially in contrast to Lucy’s prettiness, is surprisingly retrograde in this script which, in other ways, tries to present itself as feminist. (The Count is a classically self-obsessed male, for instance.)
So that was my first problem: for me, there was no story worth investing in. If you’re tempted to say I’m expecting too much from light entertainment, here’s my counterargument: better comedies — everything from The Importance of Being Earnest to The Play That Goes Wrong — all take full advantage of the propulsive force of narrative tension. Comedy is built on tension.
Okay, so, virtuosity. I get it: watching actors transform in front of your eyes is fun. It’s essential theatrical magic. And it’s not that difficult. Becoming other people is what actors do all the time, although usually with fewer witnesses to their moments of transformation.
There are a couple of quick changes in this Dracula as actor Steffanie Davis flips between Dr. Westfeldt and his straitjacketed servant Renfield but, if we take something like Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep, in which two performers transform between multiple characters at breakneck speed, as an example of true virtuosity, the skills required here pale.
So I was longing for an intermission that never came.
But Donnie Tejani’s costumes are excellent. And, as I said, the actors are having a good time.
When I saw the show on Friday night, Alexandra Lainfiesta replaced Synthia Yusuf “on an emergency basis”, script in hand, for the second night in a row. But, as Lainfiesta poured herself into the role, gyrating, posing seductively, and hitting her comic marks with impressive subtlety, the script-in-hand virtually disappeared.
As she jumps between Dr. Westfeldt, Renfield, and a ship’s captain, Steffanie Davis is wonderfully relaxed, which gives her access to a lot of grace notes.
And, to his credit, actor Jeff Meadows resists the temptation to further coarsen Mina. Within the character’s gormlessness, he also accesses her vulnerability, and he plays things remarkably close to the chest.
Kate Besworth has the least to work with as she plays her core character Lucy, the script’s “straight woman”, but Besworth does earn laughs with Lucy’s gritted-teeth responses to the misogyny that restricts her ambitions.
And Vincent Tong is some kind of wonderful as Lucy’s betrothed, Jonathan Harker. Tong is playing a nerd but, because he’s so confident in his comic timing, he never allows Harker to disappear and he delivers all sorts of surprises, including — wait for it — a smattering of tapdancing.
How can I have all this praise for the performers and still call the show dull? Simple: in my opinion, the material they’re serving sucks.
DRACULA: A COMEDY OF TERRORS by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen. Directed by Josh Epstein. An Arts Club Theatre Company production. On the Lindsay Family Stage on Granville Island until November 15. Tickets and information.
PHOTO CREDIT: Compare and contrast? No thanks. (This photo of Kate Besworth and Jeff Meadows is by Moonrider Productions. Costumes by Donnie Tejani.)
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