Alex Lehr, Staff Writer
To put it bluntly, “Dracula,” as hosted by Theatre at Southeastern, sucked something huge: my full attention. Walking into the dimly lit, tightly enclosed Visual and Performing Arts Center chamber, the audience was met with stands that encircled the portrayal area as if they were creatures from another world, surrounding them on all sides.
“Dracula” hosted a series of fine, fine performances. Now, I have seen some wonderful performances before from SE’s theatre troupe, probably my favorite being “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” However, “Dracula” brought out a test of wonderfully executed performances and dedication with a limited budget and decent space for the production, the room being sizable enough for impact.
From the start, anyone in the audience could tell that each actor was putting everything into their roles, from Ashley Faulkner’s feminized and highly intelligent Abel Van Helsing to the suck-worthy demon himself, Dracula, as creepily portrayed by Nick Growall.
The lighting was a gem, flashing manic red during manic times and unsettling blue in moments of fear and suspense. Gunshots were emphasized by fast-flickering red and blues, giving the sensation that actual bullets were being fired. Simplicity at its finest. The play was never too bright, and always filled with a creeping darkness that surrounded both the audience and the players in an almost psychological fashion.
On a personal level, I found the most enjoyable performance, out of so many amazing ones, to come from one Ezrah Brull, who portrayed a cackling, insane Robert Renfield. Brull put so much time and dedication into his role, as audiences could tell with his jittery speech patterns, unstable facial expressions and fast, erratic movements as he bounded about the place, screaming threats like a madman and expressing the joys of eating bugs. Similarly, Amy Ethridge convinced me that she was full-out Irish with her accent, displaying hours-worth of hard study into the linguistic patterns. There were so many celebrated portrayers in this play, each one with their own fine take on both character and portrayal.
The effects beyond the lighting were of a fine tune. For Dracula’s beastly, wolf-like form, Samantha Brownlee put amazing effort into the prosthetics of the mask, which was demonic in form and intimidating to behold. Coupled with blazing red eyes as reinforced by lasers, the technological, almost steam-punkish feel to it made the suspension of disbelief a fun form of self-denial: we could see the technology that applied to the special effects, and yet seeing that technological aspect did the opposite of suspending belief. It made it feel like a traditional play, dare I say it, like an opera of sorts, where you can tell that the effects are almost genuinely created to give a false feel. I like that aspect. Sometimes, too real is, well, too real.
I attended a Saturday show at 7:30 p.m., but part of me wishes that I could have attended a midnight showing, if only to amplify the already creepy feeling. The atmosphere was awkwardly cold and Victorian in its stillness. I also like to admire the music played throughout the show, the only instrument being a single drumset which would emphasize certain moods and scenes with dark drumming and distant, surreal tingling of chimes.
One of the things that truly made the experience noteworthy were the screams and bloodcurdling sense of illusion. Dracula uses telekinesis and mind control to make puppets out of his victims, and the choreographed synchronization of movement and speed that interconnected him and his victims onstage was well-practices. If Dracula motioned for his victim to move their arm, they did so with perfectly matched movement to his own. It gave the illusion that the onstage Dracula did indeed have a mystical power over their minds and bodies.
“Dracula” comes to us at a time when the trees outside fade away, when death is but a passing acknowledgment to daily life in how the world around us fades away. But, as fall shows us, this passing is amplified by colors, ranging from orange and red to yellow and brown. “Dracula” emphasized this for me: it could be colorful with its insane, mad characters, but also acknowledged that foreboding death and unholy atmosphere that came with someone such as Dracula, king of the vampires.
I want to convince, nay, beg Theatre at Southeastern to make sure that every year gives us that creepy, foreboding presentation. We need to visit Sweeney Todd’s barbershop again and have our throats slit for the purposes of pie-making. We need to have Dracula bite us hard and never let us forget it. The creepy and spooky of Southeastern is a much needed, very beautifully elemented piece to a raging compound on campus, taking students and staff out of their work obligations and transporting them to a world of terror, not of this earth in the least.
“Dracula,” to me, was a fine example of this much needed macabre, and every actor and behind-the-scenes member who made this play a reality deserves bigger roles in the future, and they personally have my recommendation for Hollywood.
