Tribe of Fools: Dracula

Cards on the table here:  I’ve been wanting to do an expressionist version of Dracula for some time now.  I have all kinds of crazy ideas for it, and to that end I have done some investigations into the aesthetics of horror, and looked at some of the ways that horror works onstage.  I am familiar with the subject, yes, but it’s also reasonable to assume that I’m just jealous that someone got to Dracula here in Philadelphia before I did.

Pertinent to this, I want to make sure we’re clear about this thing, too:  I like horror movies, a lot, and — though people often declare me incapable of human feeling and therefore inexpert when it comes to assessing what are presumably “non-rational” forms — I have been scared silly by horror movies before.  I slept with the lights on for a week after I saw The Ring; I had nightmares after I saw The Exorcist.  I was so scared by the trailers for the original Nightmare on Elm Street that I could never actually bring myself to watch the movie.  This is pursuant to my point, I’ll elaborate a little later on.

Anyway, so.  Tribe of Fools is primarily a physical theater group in this, the Philadelphia area.  They did a production of Dracula that I saw on Thursday (of a week ago), though I held the review out of courtesy; I don’t like to get into the argument about whether or not critics have an obligation to support theater no matter what.  Whatever good or bad I have to say, it won’t affect their ticket sales.

This is what the advertisement for Dracula says:

Brain fever, nightmare, shadows, and madness saturate this dynamic new look at Dracula. By using scientific methods designed to stimulate fear in the human brain, this original adaptation kicks you into the swallowing abyss of terror. Audience members must sign a waiver to participate.

Hmmm.

You can see why I was interested.  Scientific methods for art and aesthetics are always interesting to me.  I asked the guy, Jay Wojnarowski if he could tell me what the research they used for this was, but he told me that if I let my rational mind get involved, then I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.

Hmmmmmm.

I went to opening night, I paid my twenty dollars, signed the waiver, saw the play.  It was not my favorite thing I’ve ever seen.  There were some things that were very good; there were some things that were almost good, but weren’t quite handled properly; there were some things that shouldn’t have been there at all.  All in all, I couldn’t say the show was bad, but I am blinded by my frustration at the knowledge that it wasn’t as good as I know it could have been.

Before I go on, the program advises me to not tell anyone about the specific techniques that were used, so as to heighten the anxiety of future audience members.  I am to advise you, however, if I experience bad dreams because of the play, or if I was afraid to be alone afterwards.  I’ll check back tomorrow to let you know if I get the night terrors.

UPDATE:  Nope.

And, since the show is closed, I don’t have a problem disclosing their secret fear techniques, in part because I believe that their claim to have secret fear techniques is, actually, bullshit.

So, from the beginning, I have a problem because I feel like Tribe of Fools is insulting my intelligence.  I’m all for secrecy, you know, and all for outlandish publicity stunts like Death Waivers, but if you’re going to play with something like that, you have to play it for real.  You can’t ask someone to waive liability if you won’t explain to them what they’re in danger from — a waiver like the one they had me sign would be completely practically meaningless.  That’s even if the very first sentence of the very first clause:  “1. I am fully aware of the dangers posed by the performance” wasn’t contradicted by the second one, “I also understand that there may be additional dangers that I am not aware of.”

Anyone that read the waiver can see that it’s fake.  It is furthermore not helped by the fact that the box office manager asked me if I needed a witness.  Well, no.  I don’t need a witness.  YOU need me to have a witness.  When I see you put the waiver that I just signed in a pile without witnessing it then I KNOW IT IS BULLSHIT.

But again, even if they HAD a real liability waiver, how would they know the show was dangerous?  Did someone die in rehearsals?  Did people have heart attacks during workshop productions?  Is there some SPECIFIC RESEARCH that leads you to believe that people with heart conditions or PTSD should not watch this play?  No, because if there was, you would have said it.  If someone had died watching this play, you’d have put it in the marketing materials.

So, in trying to establish the mood — that this show is so FOR REAL scary that I could die from watching it — you really just expose the fact that you think I’m an idiot.  Moreover, you’re setting the expectations really high.  Unreasonably high, some would say.  It’s going to be very hard to live up to those expectations unless, during the course of the run, you ACTUALLY KILL SOMEONE.  Now that the show has closed, I feel comfortable relating to you that no one was hospitalized during the run.

The waiver, though, is kind of a neat idea; it, along with the way that we were let into the theater (one at a time by the ushers) was an example of ideas that were just implemented kind of badly.  The problem with the usher was that she was a pretty, smiling girl, with a friendly, cheerful voice.  Total mood killer.   All of these are on the right track, though — they’re what I’ve been referring to as “second domain considerations“:  elements of a performance that are not strictly related to the play or the context in which the play is understood, but to the specific context in which it is experienced.

Now, to the play!  The program lists Nick Mazzuca as the playwright, though he doesn’t have a bio; there’s also a credit that says the play was “created by” the whole cast.  So, I don’t know what that means.  Certainly, the script has all the hallmarks of being a collaborative effort — and I say this with, admittedly, a personal bias against collaboratives scripts, formulated on the grounds that I’ve just never seen one that was any good — it’s scattered, unfocused, makes half-hearted attempts at too many different themes, and each moment of the play feels completely isolated from every other moment.

By this I mean:  something is happening onstage, and sure, what’s happening onstage could be cool, but only if the rest of the play is taken into account.  Yes, it’s pretty cool when Jonathon Harker has lit his candle and is stumbling around in the dark while black shapes scuffle around just out of view.  The fifty-seventh time someone lights a candle in the dark, though, it starts to lose some of its punch.  (The guy next to me was chuckling; this is the Horror/Humor Problem at work.  Incidentally, I hope someone was making sure they have a completely full lighter every night, because if it runs out of fuel the show literally just has to stop.)

The whole play seems like a string of neat horror effects or physical bits that actors wanted to work on, without taking into consideration:  plot, character, dialogue, or even theme.  I guess, “being in the dark while things are around you” is a theme.  But there’s not really a discernible plot, and there are no discernible characters, and what this play reveals to me is that not only are those things generally important, but they are vitally important to horror in particular.

Consider:  most horror movies begin with ordinary, benign settings, into which terrifying elements are gradually introduced.  This is because that heightened emotional states are not immediately sympathetic:  they are, in fact, alienating.  We don’t have sympathy for people just because they’re screaming; we have sympathy for people that we LIKE when they start screaming.  Horror especially is about the rational, everyday world crashing up against the unfathomable depths of incomprehensible terror; for that to work, we need a fully-realized, understood, and beloved rational world in the first place.

Now, I’ve said this, and the truth is that I’m lying; it’s not that this production of Dracula WHOLLY dispensed with plot and them.  If it had done that — if Tribe of Fools had jettisoned what remained of the text and just made a thirty-five minute spooky-movement piece (and only charged me ten dollars for it) that would have been all right.  The problem is that it made these half-hearted attempts at plot that were never fully-realized, these rough sketches of characterization that never lead anywhere (Harker and Mina have a brief scuffle in which she reveals that she pays the rent on the house in which they live; why is this?  Where does this come from?  How does it matter?  It doesn’t, it hardly even shows up in the rest of the script).

The structure of the play doesn’t really lend itself to thematic content, really; this Dracula is, as I said, built on these scenes of people being menaced in the dark, intercut with a scrambled tangle of scenes that may or may not be Harker explaining to Mina why he has to go to Transylvania, and may or may not be in his imagination, and may or may not be in her imagination.  The thing is, you can’t develop theme and character while you’re being chased around in the dark by Dracula; that’s a scene about you being chased around in the dark — so the play, which was only seventy-five minutes, only had about THIRTY minutes to develop dozens of these half-formed ideas about what Dracula was about (for some context:  Bram Stoker, when he wanted to consider and address a myriad of ideas about his life and times, wrote a three-hundred page novel).  You also can’t develop theme or character if you can’t make up your mind whose imagination this is in.

The thirty minutes they’ve given over to plot isn’t enough time, and it shows; the play relies pretty heavily on the audience knowing a lot about Dracula; and, fair enough, most everyone knows something about Dracula; but without the actual ordinarity of John and Mina’s life, of her friendship with Lucy, of the gnawing unease that Harker experiences at Castle Dracula, this play is just seventy-five minutes of people being menaced by weird shapes.

Seventy-five minutes is a long time to watch people be menaced by weird shapes — regardless of how weird and menacing they may be.

Because the piece seems to just be people showing off their weirdness, it’s understandable that there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it, at all.  The book Dracula was about a lot of things, and you sure don’t have to make a play about any of them — but you do have to make a play about something.  All we have here are some vague references to Harker “bringing Dracula back” with him (which, I mean, they cut out all the stuff about Harker being a real estate agent and Dracula wanting to buy a house, so who knows what happened there, exactly?) and repeated references to “brain fever.”

Now, this part I think is kind of weird because “brain fever” is a dated term for encephalitis, one of the most common causes of which is syphilis (in fact, odds are the only person you’ve ever heard of who died from “brain fever” was Lord Byron, who TOTALLY had syphilis, because I mean, come on).  So, Harker talking about how Mina has brain fever, and that he gave it to her after bringing it back from Transylvania…well, hahah.  Maybe they did that on purpose?  The idea of Dracula as a communicable sexual disease is kind of awesome, but there was absolutely no sex at all in this play.  No sexual innuendo, no fetishism, no sensuality, no anything.  Even when Mina and Lucy are sleeping together in the same bed, they wear frumpy, full-length nightgowns over top of their dancer blacks.  (That, of course, is presumably a technical issue — cost of nightgowns, the fact that the actresses had to double roles as scary menacing shapes — and so can be forgiven, especially in a Fringe show.)

UPDATE:  I am informed that the syphilis theme was something that was discussed during the creation of the play, and not just an improbable coincidence.

The fact that this play is essentially about syphilis, without REALLY being about syphilis — that is, the idea’s lack of development in the script — is part of what makes me suspicious that any real research was done at all, and I want to take a moment to get back to the marketing that they did for this show, and for the director’s notes, which claimed that this play was going to work out my amygdala.

The amygdala is a part of your brain that governs a lot of things, one of which is fear condition.  It’s plugged into the sympathetic nervous system, which is the part of your nervous system that the adrenal glands are connected to you.  It’s your fight or flight system (and other systems as well, I’ll get to that in a minute).  “Fear conditioning” is when you have, after a certain conditioning period, associated a fear or alarm state with a particular stimulus and so, when exposed to the stimulus again, immediately slip into the alarm state.  Like if, when you were a kid, you suffered a terrifying attack by a giant rabid St. Bernard and then when you watched Beethoven you had a panic attack.  That’s fear conditioning.

So, it’s an interesting idea that they’re going to try to use fear-conditioned responses on an audience that they don’t have any background for, since how can they know whether or not I’ve ever been conditioned to fear an effeminate Transylvanian count?  But there are certain things — there is, in fact, a whole mess of research on the subject — that we are hardwired to experience as alarm states.  What makes me suspect paucity in terms of research is that none of those things were in evidence here.

Subsonics, for example, are known to stimulate the amygdala and the sympathetic nervous system.  So is UV light.  Strobe effects — not because of the light itself, but because of how it confuses continuity of movement — do the same thing.  All the things that they have in haunted houses, actually, which, hey, it’s almost like Eastern State has been spending years actually figuring out what kinds of things scare people.  That’s also why they use them in nightclubs, incidentally:  because of the wealth of research that shows that sexual arousal is ALSO connected to the sympathetic nervous system.

Why do horror movies have sex in them?  Why did Dracula have sex in it?  It was drenched in sexuality!  Why do people take dates to horror movies?  Why is it that if you talk to a pretty sociology research on a high bridge, you’re more likely to ask her out later on?  It’s because the “horror” and “sex” parts of your complex nervous system share certain pieces in common, and so they’re reciprocal.  All of this research is, of course, widely available, so what was the reasoning behind taking all the sex out of Dracula, again?

I don’t want to seem like a huge dick here, so let me point out that they did do a couple of things exactly right.  Using the absolute blackness of the space, having the Brides (who were all dancers) in half-light climb up on each other in order to break up the human silhouette (silhouette is the first method we use to identify what we’re looking at, so in the dark, if we see something shaped really weirdly, it can spook us).  Some of it was SUPER close to right — using the weird sound effects was a good idea, but it overlooks the fact that too much sound saturates the listening organs, instead of forcing them to reach, and so is subject to diminishing returns.  Also, one person kept clicking; I get that they were trying to make an alien, non-human sound, which is a good idea (see del Toro’s Mimic; just the first half, when it’s good), except it’s clearly a person making a clicking sound with their tongue.

You’ll notice, I’m sure, that I’ve got a very narrow view here of “fear.”  One of the things that rubs me the wrong way with all of the promotional materials is that “fear” isn’t just one thing.  There are at least four different kinds of fear or alarm states evoked by AN ENTIRE TRADITION of cinema and literature:  there’s actual surprise, there’s suspense, there’s disgust, and there’s dread (Boris Karloff referred to the last two as “horror” and “terror”).  Tribe of Fools touches on at most two of these, and really only the “surprise” part — things jumping out of the dark, or not being quite what they seem, &c.

Which, fine, if you want to evoke the same kind of fear that dogs or monkeys have, great.  Just jump out at them and yell.  Throw you suspense by the wayside because remember what suspense is:  it’s an anticipation of the adrenaline alarm state that we experience when something startles us.  What does that mean?  It means that the suspense only lasts until the first surprise; then you have to start over again (remember how so many horror movies have really slow openings?) — Death Waivers and Fear Science marketing are great for building suspense, but that first moment when Harker just starts screaming in the dark burns it all up.

If you want me to ditch my rational mind at the door, great, but then don’t expect any dread — any of the real, eerie, existential fear that is the true goal of good horror.  Dread, the increasingly abstract fear, the one that you leave the theater with, the one that, literally, haunts you — that is something that you make out of rationality.  It’s built on plot, on theme, on characters.  It’s tenuous (and it requires a particularly refined audience; H. P. Lovecraft was one of the world’s best horror writers because he was the world’s best horror reader).

Wojnarowski’s continued assertions, both in the program and to me personally, that the rational mind would obviate the fear that they were causing by stimulating the amygdala flies in the face of the things we actually know about the amygdala:  strong fear stimuli BYPASS neocortical structures in the amygdala, and go directly to the sympathetic nervous system.  That is, fear circumvents rationality:  that is what makes it fear.

To attempt to create horror without first realizing that rationality is the starting point is to undertake the task with a gross misunderstanding of the nature of fear.  It is doomed, not because horror is to great a challenge to achieve onstage, but because there’s nothing there to achieve even if you ARE successful.

[Disclaimer:  Tribe of Fools’ production of Dracula was sold out for every performance.  What does that mean in terms of my criticism?  Nothing.  Hammer Films built an entire movie studio on the idea that people would come to see a movie with Dracula in it, no matter what, and “Everyone Shut Up and Let Buying Decide” is a Bullshit Position.]