Frankenstein’s Blogster: They’re Baaaa-aaack

Hey we opened last night, everybody! I am beyond thrilled to share this exciting Horror Rep production with you all! Rehearsing and performing in repertory is no picnic, as I’m sure you can all imagine, so we’re all very excited to get these shows rolling and for you to see our hard work. And to celebrate opening, I will speak to you at length about monsters!

I spent so much time last week talking about similarities between Shelly and Poe, it seems only fair for me to go the other way this time, and get into some of the similarities between Frankenstein and Dracula. And the biggest thing that they both have in common, and which they DON’T share with any of Poe’s stories, is a monster. Poe was primarily concerned with Man’s struggle with Man, or with Himself, and seldom felt the need to include a hideous unknowable force for evil to complicate matters for his already thoroughly confused and desperate protagonists. So I’m leaving Baltimore’s ill-favored son on the bench this week.

First things first. Using the term “monster” to describe the Creation in Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein is, in my opinion, neither entirely accurate nor fair. No incoherent shambling horror he, Shelley’s Creation is articulate, sensitive, even refined…and far more dangerous. Throughout the devising process we were careful to avoid referring to him as The Monster as much as possible, in order to keep ourselves from mischaracterizing or, especially, underestimating him. The Creation is less monstrous even than Dracula, with whom he shares many of these sophisticated traits. But he lacks the Count’s arrogance, savagery, and predatory nature, being driven to evil against his own inclinations. I considered using the term “Villain” for this post, but I don’t find it as evocative or accurate for the types of creatures that I wanted to talk about. Also, there is enough room for debate on who, exactly, is the ‘villain’ of Frankenstein that I am less than comfortable blithely assigning that label to the Creation. And it is inescapable that the Creation shares this trait with his more typical monstrous brethren. So for my purposes tonight I will grit my teeth and accept the pejorative, along with the inevitable Boris Karloff image that it conjures, and needlessly justify it to all of you with this 200-word paragraph.

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s Monster, from Bride of Frankenstein, 1935.

As you might remember from my previous discussions of monsters there are certain things that they do, traits they have, which serve to separate them from humans; ugliness and anthropophagy. Today I want to discuss a third; tenacity. Relentless and inexorable, horror monsters pursue their seemingly arbitrary victims with the single-minded patience of a clock. Sometimes this tireless pursuit is literal, like the continual forward motion of the Unstoppable Sex Monster in It Follows. Sometimes it is more subjective, an implication of being watched or a tendency to appear when least expected, such as the unseen cultists awaiting their opportunity to strike in The Call of Cthulhu, the low-key but everpresent menace of the zombie horde in Dawn of the Dead, or the jump-scare appearance in the mirror or behind the door in every single slasher movie that has ever been made. You can neither run nor hide when a monster has marked you.

Eron the Relenless, from Magic: The Gathering, Homelands. Art by Christopher Rush,  1995.

In addition to being implacable hunters, monsters are also nigh-unkillable. Monsters are much more durable than their human victims, to emphasize just how fragile we are. Sometimes this manifests in secret knowledge needed to penetrate their defenses, like silver bullets for werewolves, headshots for zombies, the phylacteries of liches like Koschei or Voldemort…you get the idea. More frequently, however, it is just a maddening refusal to die. Michael Myers gets stabbed and shot more times than I can count in Halloween. The Terminator [and if you don’t think The Terminator is a horror movie you and I watched different movies, the T-800 fits these criteria so perfectly I can’t believe I didn’t base them on him -KH] walks through a hail of bullets in pursuit of Sarah Connor. Ghosts, by their very nature, cannot be even killed. No one can go toe to toe with such hideous strength.

Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-800, from The Terminator, 1984.

Frankenstein and Dracula obviously fit these qualifications to a ‘T’. Even when the Count is (seemingly) on his heels returning to Transylvania he threatens, taunts, and discomfits his would-be hunters, staying a step ahead of them all the way to the Carpathians. And Dracula’s seeming invincibility allows Van Helsing to spend almost an entire chapter listing off the veritable host of vampires’ traditional vulnerabilities: mirrors, sunlight, mountain rose, garlic, fragments of the consecrated Host, ash-wood stakes, running water… Meanwhile, the Creation has a nasty habit of turning up no matter where his Creator goes, regardless of how unlikely it seems that he could find out where he was. And, in addition to shrugging off Frankenstein’s pistol shots, the Creation bears with equanimity the frigid cold of the glacier and the Arctic in his ceaseless quest to torment the doctor.

The upshot of both these traits is that monsters negate both the ‘fight’ and ‘flight’ response in their human victims. Traits, you might recognize, we inherited from our animal ancestors. Knee-jerk instinctual reactions, our initial response to danger, won’t work on the supernatural; we have to dig deeper. We can activate our humanity and take advantage of cleverness, compassion, and friendship, as Harker and co. do in Dracula. Or we can surrender to our latent capacity for monstrosity and take on our pursuer’s ruthless viciousness, as the doctor does in Frankenstein. Which path would you take? Come see the shows and maybe you’ll find out.

What Makes Vampires So Monstrous?

Hi there, everyone. Blogslave Keith Hock here with a SPOOK-tacular October blog post! I’m sorry I couldn’t give you anything creepy or scarifiying last week, focused as I was on historiography, so this week I tried to make the blog extra terrifying to make up for it.  Last time I talked to you about vampires I told you about one of their most important and recognizable trait (their sexiness) and the way that that separated them from the other monsters. Today I want to talk to you about something they share with other monsters, and their OTHER most recognizable trait: the blood drinking. Or, to broaden the synecdoche a little bit, people-eating. Anthropophagy. And, most importantly, cannibalism, because Dracula and his coterie at one point WERE human, even if they are no longer. That ‘if’ is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.

Eating people is shorthand for monstrous. Always has been. It is a simple shorthand: to give a good indication of how awful a creature is, have them not merely kill people but to devour them as well. It makes audience understand exactly how dangerous the creature is, and how little regard it has of the rules of society. The first thing that Grendel does when he assaults Heorot is snatch up a warrior to eat. Ancient Greece abounded with these monsters. Seemingly half of Hercules’ quests revolved around him dealing with some sort of man-eating animals, be they horse or bird or lion, and between Scylla snatching sailors out of his ship, the Laestrygonians spear-fishing his crew, Polyphemus gobbling up his men in the cave, and Circe’s abortive barbecue, it seems likely that Odysseus had more men eaten by monsters than killed in battle during the Trojan War. Fairy tale giants and witches from Jack’s Beanstalk to the Baba Yaga would literally announce their intentions to cook and eat their victims. It is hard to think of a monster that DOESN’T eat people.

“To Serve Man”, The Twilight Zone, 1962.

But what happens when the the man-eater is human? There is precious little stopping one sufficiently motivated person from eating another, after all. We are little more than skin suits holding together a heap of muscles and fat cunningly wrapped around a skeleton in such a way that it becomes ambulatory. It’s not like human bodies are poisonous (unless you eat too many brains) or made of wood or iron or something indigestible. From a purely practical perspective there is no reason for humans to NOT eat other humans. And yet, with a few isolated cultural exceptions such as [allegedly] the Caribe and New Guinean mountain tribes, cannibalism is regarded as an ultimate taboo. Eating manflesh serves as an indicator of abandoning your own humanity. To treat your fellow man not as a fellow traveller but as a source of food suggests that you have surrendered your commonality with him.

Allow me to present some examples, starting where else but Ancient Greece and my second-favorite cursed bloodline, the Atreides. This familial curse began with Tantalus, who killed and cooked his son Pelops into a dish as a sacrifice to the gods. Why exactly he thought the gods would like this the stories do not make clear. The gods, being gods, immediately knew what he had done and were horrorstruck by it. Again, being gods, they resurrected Pelops, and then laid a familial curse on the bloodline and sentenced Tantalus to eternal torment submerged up to his head in water he could not drink and surrounded by grapes he could not eat. But wait! Having somehow not learned the lesson from his Grandpa, family namer Atreus took revenge on his brother Thyestes for stealing his wife and crown by killing Thyestes’ sons (Pleisthenes and another Tantalus), cooking them into a pie, and feeding them to him. You may recognize this plot point from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, where it serves a similar purpose: to explore the hideous depths of depravity, the risks to one’s own soul, that will be explored in the search for revenge. Atreus, like Titus, took care to ensure that Thyestes actually ate before the secret was revealed, and Thyestes was rewarded for his accidental cannibalism with exile and a doubling-down of the familial curse. Atreus would go on to be killed by Thyestes’ other son Aegisthus, who would be killed in HIS turn by Atreus’ grandson Orestes. I find it particularly striking that even the Greek gods, perhaps the most deviant pantheon I can think of, drew the line at cannibalism, and even the accidental consumption of human flesh called for expiation.

But perhaps they had a reason to dislike the idea. “Saturn Devouring His Son”, Francisco de Goya, 1819-1823.

Lest you believe that the only thing I know anything about is the Greeks and Shakespeare, let me share a non-European example as well. The Wendigo is a Native American legend from the Great Lakes region, occupying the nebulous territory between a monster and a curse. A Wendigo encountered in the wild, as it were, was ash-grey and rail-thin; think a skeleton that has been wrapped in skin and then vacuum-sealed. They were voracious man-eaters who thrived on winter, cold, isolation, hunger, and darkness. But the more interesting element of the Wendigo, especially for my purposes, is not this “monster-of-the-week” aspect, but their cultural cachet. There was a pervasive idea in the Algonquian tribes that a human could become a Wendigo if they were overcome by greed, or ate human flesh. The need to consume would trigger a transformation within them, and their humanity would be surrendered in exchange for an unending hunger, an insatiable need to have more, and more, and more. The Wendigo legend is not dissimilar from the European werewolf, as it depicts a human literally abandoning their humanity in the service of their dark appetites.

“Wendigo”, by Marcelo de Souza, 2010.

Cannibalism appears in modern culture, too, except that instead of legends and fairy tales we have movies and tv shows and books. Cannibalism is used as shorthand for an abandonment of civilization, the rejection of and contempt for rules, norms, and mores. Often in post-apocalyptic scenarios, such as Neil Marshall’s Doomsday or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it is an acknowledgement that society has abandoned them, and so they are right to return the favor. In science fiction scenarios, such as Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves or (with a somewhat different intention) Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, it carries the idea that the cannibals think they have more important issues to think about than their humanity. In suspense and crime thrillers, like the various iterations of the Hannibal Lecter character and the tv show Bones, it signifies a character believing himself to above the rules, too smart to be tied down by the laws of society that keep the ‘normals’ in check. In each of these settings the cannibalistic characters believe that they have something to gain by losing their humanity. It is a clear trade that is being defined in each of these situations, and it is a trade that they are all glad to make because they place no value on their conscience.

Dracula and his vampiric children fit very neatly into this trade-off. Dracula consciously and positively identifies himself with predators, particularly the wolf. In his mind the human world is little more than a herd of sheep or cattle for him to toy with and prey upon at his leisure. He willingly accepts the gifts of the monster, the strength and cunning and charisma and ruthlessness, and regards the faith and compassion which he has lost as liabilities. Because he has willingly surrendered these human traits he holds them in faint regard. But his scorn for humanity, especially human companionship and loyalty, ends up being his downfall.

If you want to SEE this downfall, you’ve still got a couple more chances this month! Dracula will be returning to Spectre Arts down in Raleigh this weekend if you feel like taking a road trip down to beautiful North Carolina. If travelling to the Tar Heel State is not in the cards for you, fear not! We have a few additional performances here in the Nation’s Capital as well, including one at the Southeast Public Library on the 26th and another at CHAW on the 30th. I hope to see you there!

Why Are Vampires So Sexy?

Monsters are gross. That’s their whole point, is to be unpleasant and horrifying to behold. Your mummies and wolfmen and Creatures from the Black Lagoon and Frankenstein[‘s Monster]s and g-g-g-g-ghosts are all designed to be hideous and repugnant. To go old school here for a second, their vile outward appearance is meant as an external reflection of their monstrous inner nature. Its how we know Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees are bad news and why we burned gross-looking old ladies as witches; because their appearance told us that they were trouble. I don’t mean to imply that the only kind of horror story is the kind with supernatural monsters (our own experience staging Poe would put the lie to that claim) but in those kinds of horror stories the villain is grotesque and wants to kill the heroes, and the heroes are right to fear them for their appearance.

Yet not so for Dracula. Dracula is a refined and sophisticated gentleman with an indefinable and foreign magnetism and he has a castle full of beautiful and nubile women. Sure, he starts off as a decrepit old man with bad breath and hair on his palms, but after a few midnight child snacks he turns into a STONE COLD FOX. And the Brides? Presumably their regular consumption of babies keeps them looking Fresh to Death as well, cuz, damn. Harker decries them time and again because Harker is a prude engaged to someone we are universally assured is the World’s Greatest Woman, but even he is ensnared by their beauty and must be saved by the Count. Lucy Westenra is so gorgeous she turns down an engagement to a cowboy so she can marry a lord (please take a moment to appreciate the absurdity of this actual plot point from Dracula). But even she gets hotter, in a dangerous, ‘wanton’ way, after the Count gets his teeth, and blood, and [EXPURGATED FOR REASONS OF PROPRIETY -ed.] into her. And, lest we assume that hotness is a newly added facet to accommodate the perverts and sex-starved teens and, ugh, “Millennials” who consume our pop culture, I must inform you that Dracula and his Brides have been super sexy from the jump. If anything, earlier interpretations on film UNDERplayed their attractiveness.

Looking at you, Orlok.  Max Shreck as Count Orlok, from W. F. Murnau’s Nosteratu, 1922.

A cursory glance through other, later vampire fiction bears out this odd inversion of the monster trope. It seems like the only argument in the Buffyverse is whether Angel or Spike are hotter. True Blood and the Southern Vampire Mysteries novels it was based on might as well be grouped in the “Vampire Erotica” section of your local library, and I assure you they would not be the only books on those shelves. I probably shouldn’t admit in a public forum how much I know about the lesbian-vampire subgenre of Italian Giallo films of the 1970s. Vampires are almost universally the Hot Monster, to the point that when they aren’t, like I Am Legend or Stakeland, the very fact of their ugliness becomes part of the point of the piece.

Its Angel. I will die on this hill.   David Boreanaz as Angel, from The WB’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

It seems clear from this evidence that sexiness is an integral part of the vampire’s identity. But what purpose does it serve in a horror story, seeing as it directly contradicts what I said in the first paragraph about monsters?

The difference is the intention of the story, and of the monster. Most monsters and monster stories represent a physical attack: wolfmen and zombies want to eat you, ghosts want to drive you away, slashers want to punish you, usually for having sex. But vampires represent a psychic assault. Vampires do not aim to kill, their desire is to corrupt. Despite being entirely in his power throughout the opening the Count doesn’t kill Harker, though it would have been the tactically sounder move. And it is significant that the only targets of vampirism we see are young women and innocent children [the doomed sailors of the Demeter are driven mad, not fed upon]. Dracula has no interest in Arthur or Seward or Morris, because they aren’t beautiful unmarried women that he can ruin. Dracula’s sexuality is a weapon, just like Jason’s machete or Leatherface’s chainsaw, and it is used for the same purpose; to destroy his victims. Make no mistake, the vampire is just as monstrous as the ghost or the serial killer.

Perhaps even more so, for they make their victims complicit in their own destruction. Observe the victim’s reactions to the attacks in the book. Men, women, children, all are drawn in despite themselves. Both Mina and Jonathan describe being disgusted by the Count and the Blonde Bride, respectively, but unwilling to resist. They both mention part of themselves actually being eager for the vampire to bite, kiss, and corrupt them. Vampires are so appealing that upstanding ladies and gentlemen have no choice but to surrender their self-control to them, knowing full well the consequences will be the victim’s ruination, death, and transformation into another agent of evil and corruption. The reason we fear the vampire, despite their beauty, is that they represent the wilful sacrifice of innocence and agency in favor of our baser desires.

Lucy and the Count. From Fernando Fernandez’ Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1984

If you want to surrender YOUR self-control to the sexiness of We Happy Few’s Dracula, performed by Kerry McGee, Meg Lowey, Jon Reynolds and Grant Cloyd and directed by the sexiest one of them all, Bob Pike, come to the Shed tonight and/or tomorrow! I’d recommend you bring cash and a drink, though you will find a complementary drink there with your ticket. See OUR WEBSITE for details. If you can’t make it this weekend, we’ll sure miss you, but never fear! We will have more showings spread out in the city through September and October. I hope to see you at one of them soon!

The Winter’s Tale: Putting the “Few” in We Happy Few

Well, hello again, adoring fans.  Fancy seeing you here, on our blog, of all places.  It’s still me, your handsome, clever and oh-so-humble production manager Keith Hock, with another blog entry, just in time for our second weekend of shows.  After our opening night last Friday I was sat in front of a computer and told if I didn’t write another post by the next weekend I would be fired realized that this show’s aggressive double-casting gave me a wonderful opening to put together another blog post to share with you all.

Surely some of you, as you left our shows last weekend, had wondered why we would take a play with a cast of 18 named characters and innumerable Guards, Lords, Ladies, Mariners, Gaolers, Shepherdesses, Satyrs, etc., and attempt to put it on with only six people.  And doubtless you would cast your mind back to our previous shows (as I have no doubt you are all long-time fans and have seen all of our performances) and you would be struck! astounded! to realize that, why, we’ve never had more than eight actors in a show!  How can such a thing be?  Well, don’t you all worry your pretty little heads, I’d be more than happy to assuage your fears and give you all a peek behind the dramaturgical veil as to how, and, more importantly, why We Happy Few puts on plays with so few actors. (There’s some arts-management reasons that I’ll go into as well, but that’s not NEARLY as sexy as the phrase ‘dramaturgical veil’).

As you have all noticed, in the narrative I have constructed to frame this blog posting, all of our shows have been notoriously light on actors.  Our last three shows, Duchess of Malfi, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest, all had only eight actors, while our debut, Hamlet, tied Winter’s Tale with six!  For reference, going on their Dramatis Personae pages, those shows called for 15 (Duchess), 20 (R&J), 12 (Tempest), and an astounding 22 (Hamlet) named characters*, not to mention anywhere from a magical island to an entire vendetta-fueled city full of supernumeraries.  The Tempest made up for its relatively light 12 characters with a veritable brugh’s worth of fairies, spirits, nymphs and reapers to fill the stage.  We very cleverly sidestepped that issue by turning all of those fairies into Ariel, and then also casting everyone in the show who wasn’t Prospero as Ariel, but how do we deal with the apparent 45-person cast list that Shakespeare [or Webster] has presented us with?
*I say ‘named’ characters but I’m also counting significant characters.  In Hamlet, the gravediggers, the head player, and the priest are all nameless, but since they play substantial roles in their respective scenes (more important than some with actual names, as you’ll see below) they all got counted in my census.

From We Happy Few’s 2013 production of The Tempest. Background L-R: Josh Adams, Britt Duff, Scott Gaines. Foreground: Andrew Keller

The answer is we don’t, neither us nor pretty much any other theatre company in the world.  As cultured citizens of the world I am sure you all go to see plenty of plays that AREN’T We Happy Few-produced, and I’m equally sure that you’ve noticed that the actor bio sections of the programs aren’t 20 pages long and filled with Servants, Soldiers and Guards.  There’s a reason for that.  Did you remember that there was a character named Fortinbras in Hamlet?  What about Voltimand, or Cornelius?  Sometimes we realize that a character doesn’t need to be there, or a scene goes on a little too long, so we do some cutting and combining.  Instead of Reynaldo (Polonius’ servant, apparently) and a whole crowd of other, nameless servants jostling around in Elsinore, we just use Reynaldo, whenever a servant appears.  Or we decide that the play can survive without servants, and we ditch them altogether.  I’ve seen full-stage, big budget productions of Romeo and Juliet that just completely did away with Paris.  Our own Hamlet excised Horatio, and nobody missed him.  It’s not that these characters and scenes don’t serve a purpose in the text, Shakespeare did little needlessly (I’m ignoring Timon of Athens when I say that).  They just don’t serve a purpose in the story we’re telling, so off they go.

All theatre companies do it, but we have to do it more than most.  As a predominantly Fringe company, with a stated focus on creating “stripped down, small cast, ensemble productions”, our timing and manpower is intentionally limited.  We bring all of our shows down to 90 minutes by the time we open, and we do it by scrapping every beat, every moment, every character, that isn’t completely necessary to telling the story we want to tell.  Sometimes that can hurt.  Did you know there was a surprisingly prominent Duke Ferdinand/werewolf subplot in Duchess of Malfi?  I did, because I watched us gradually pare it away in rehearsal as we fought to get to 90 minutes.  In addition to being crazy badass, it was powerful character development for Ferdinand, who loses his already-tenuous connection with his humanity after the barbarism of his parricide and talks himself into the belief that he is a wolf.  We were all sad to see it go, but we knew that it was a few minutes worth of dialogue we couldn’t afford to tell the story we needed to tell.

Greater Werewolf, 5th Edition, Magic: The Gathering. Art by Dennis Detwiller

Cutting characters and scenes is all well, and it certainly helps us lower the cast requirements (which you’ll recall is the point I’m supposed to be making in this post), but it only gets us so far.  What we really do to cut that down is double-cast, have one actor play two (or more) roles.  This buys you a lot of space, as many of your actors in smaller roles can serve double duty.  Sampson done being in the play after Act I?  Stuff him in a monk’s robe and he’s Friar John!  All your sailors drowned at the beginning when Prospero brought forth the storm?  (they didn’t, re-read Act I Scene 2, but they’re never seen again so its the same thing)  Roll them in glitter and now they’re spirits!

Combining these two things, cutting and double-casting, can usually get you to somewhere around 12-15 actors.  That’s pretty good, and it works for other companies, but it’s not enough for us.  We take our double-casting a step or two further than a lot of other companies.  Earlier I mentioned that the actors that are double cast are usually the non-leading parts, because they have fewer lines and are in fewer scenes; their casting is a matter of convenience.  OUR double-casting is deliberate and ubiquitous, especially under the guidance of director/producer/founder/superhero, Hannah Todd.  In her productions the only characters we have NOT double-cast were Prospero in The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet in… Romeo and Juliet; Prospero to emphasize his control over everything that happens on the island, and the star-crossed teens to point out their solitude as the only lovers in a city full of hate (My astute readers will argue that Hamlet was single-cast as well, but our Hamlet also spoke the lines for his dead father.  Whether or not the ghost should count as a character in OUR interpretation is up for debate, but since he had two character’s worth of lines he counts as double-cast for my purposes).  Everyone else has been at least double cast, and most of those casting choices have been meaningful, not just a consequence of what scenes happened when.  It was no coincidence that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were also Ophelia and Laertes, or that Tybalt was also the Nurse, or that, as I mentioned earlier, everyone but Prospero, even Caliban, was Ariel.  These choices serve a greater thematic purpose and say more about the show than simply what actors are available for those scenes.

From We Happy Few’s 2012 Hamlet. Left-Right: Raven Bonniwell (Ophelia), Billy Finn (Laertes).

From We Happy Few’s 2012 Hamlet. Left-Right: Billy Finn (Rosencrantz or Guildenstern), Chris Genebach (Hamlet), Raven Bonniwell (the other one).

But we have attained more saturation with our multi-casting for The Winter’s Tale than with any show before.  If you saw it already, surely you realized how significant it was that Kerry McGee embody both Mamillius and his sister Perdita, or that Kiernan McGowan play both the doomed Antigonus and the servant who relayed his demise, or that Raven Bonniwell portray both Hermione and Camillo’s mirrored punishments.  How fitting that Nathan Bennett give us both the prideful, paranoid, appearance-obsessed Leontes and the ludicrous cross-dressing confluence of Dorcas and Mopsa.  How touching that Katy Carkuff deliver the baby Perdita as Paulina, and raise it across the sea as the Shepherd.  And how truly remarkable that William Vaughan’s nameless lord (guard?) who comforts Mamillius in the beginning, turn out to be none other than Perdita’s love Florizel at the end.*  I told you last time there was magic to be had by the double handful in the Romances, you just have to know where to look.

*If you didn’t realize how all this was to be significant, or haven’t seen it yet and have no idea what I’m talking about, tickets are still available for all our upcoming shows here!