A Study Guide to the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Dracula

Transcription

1 Insights A Study Guide to the Dracula

2 The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They are meant, instead, to be an educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (in any production at any theatre) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and the interpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately produced on the Festival s stages. The Study Guide is published by the, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT Bruce C. Lee, communications director and editor; Phil Hermansen, art director. Copyright 2011,. Please feel free to download and print The Study Guide, as long as you do not remove any identifying mark of the. For more information about Festival education programs: 351 West Center Street Cedar City, Utah Cover photo: Jamie Ann Romero (left) as Lucy and Tyler Pierce as Dracula in Dracula, 2015.

3 Dracula Contents Information on the Play Synopsis 4 Characters 5 Playwright 6 Scholarly Articles on the Play The Changing Legend of the Vampire 8 3

4 Synopsis: Dracula By Marlo Ihler The play s prologue is delivered by Renfield, who at first is well-dressed and erudite, but soon reveals himself as a madman. The play begins with lifelong friends Mina and Lucy sharing secrets about the men in their lives. Mina is engaged to be married to Jonathan Harker, a solicitor who is away on a business trip in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania. Lucy reveals that she has had three separate marriage proposals and doesn t know which one to accept. One of Lucy s suitors, Dr. Seward, comes to call and divulges his deep feelings for her, but she sweetly rebuffs him and, to distract him from heartache, he turns to his work of unlocking the mystery of Renfield s lunacy. Meanwhile, Harker s letters to Mina depict, at first, Count Dracula and Transylvania as exciting and mysterious, but later become nightmarish and fearful. Eventually he stops writing. It is then that Mina begins to notice Lucy s behavior has become strange and worrisome and sends for Dr. Seward to make a diagnosis. He is unsure of what might be the problem, but finds an unusual mark on her neck. Lucy has no memory of her strange actions and becomes deathly ill over the course of just a few days. Dr. Seward has an odd encounter with someone who says he is Harker, but Mina discovers Harker is actually in a hospital in Budapest. She goes to him and finds him deeply changed and traumatized. He tells her he cannot remember what happened to him but that the secret lies in his journal, if she feels she must know. Lucy s health becomes worse, so Dr. Seward sends for his friend and mentor, Abraham Van Helsing. He recognizes the mark on her neck as vampire bites, but keeps the information to himself. He gives Lucy a life-saving blood transfusion from Dr. Seward. Mina brings Harker home to recover. She and Van Helsing read his journal and discover that Dracula hypnotized him to do his bidding while in Transylvania. It also reveals how Dracula stole Harker s identity to further his purpose of securing a new location in London. Fortunately Harker makes a full recovery, and Lucy is brought to the asylum for protection. Renfield begs Seward to let him out of the asylum, claiming he is cured from insanity. He also fears his master and his plan and he tries to warn the others. Later, Van Helsing finally delineates his theory of vampires and the Un-Dead, into which, tragically, Lucy has been fully transformed. Van Helsing tells Dr. Seward and Harker what they must do to rid her soul of this darkness: drive a stake through her heart and sever her head. He also cautions them of the strange and terrible days ahead. Now in England, Dracula begins to wreak unrest on the citizens of London, including Mina. But can Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, and Harker locate Dracula and destroy him in time to save other souls? Is Renfield really as sane as he says? Can Mina resist the same horrible fate as Lucy and finally be married to Harker, putting this ghastly experience behind them? 4

5 Characters: Dracula Mina Murray: A young woman in her early twenties, Mina is engaged to Jonathan Harker. Jonathan Harker: Mina s fiancé, Jonathan is a solicitor and away on business when the play begins. Lucy Westenra: Mina s friend, Lucy is also in her early twenties. She has marriage proposals from at least three different men, but soon falls strangely ill. Dr. John Seward: One of Lucy s suitors, Dr. Seward is head of a lunatic asylum. Renfield: A madman at Seward s asylum Abraham Van Helsing: A scientist and friend of Seward s, Van Helsing eventually diagnoses the troubles surrounding Lucy. Dracula: A strange and mysterious count from Transylvania Waiters, Attendants, Maid, Vixens 5

6 Novelist and Playwright: Bram Stoker and Steven Dietz By Don Leavitt Steven Dietz might possibly be the most prolific playwright you ve never heard of. In a career that has spanned more than thirty years, Dietz has published more than forty plays, an impressive body of work comprised of both adaptations and original pieces. Since 1983, his work has been a staple of regional theatres around the world, and in 2010, he ranked eighth in a list of the top ten most produced playwrights in America. Among his most produced and most profitable plays is his adaptation of Bram Stoker s gothic classic Dracula, a work that Dietz was initially reluctant to attempt. I thought the book had been captured quite well in a number of other adaptations, he said. However, reading the novel again inspired him. I became very surprised at the extent to which so many theatre adaptations veered a great distance from the book, he said ( Dietz s version closely follows the plot of the original novel, although he does take the opportunity to play with the novel s timeline and structure. More importantly, Dietz manages to avoid the campiness and self-parody that plagues other versions, choosing instead to remain faithful to the character and situations that Stoker created. My friends kept asking what my take on the story was... what did Dracula represent? Dietz said. I realized that to make Dracula a metaphor was cheating (Playbill.com, no-bloodless-metaphors). Dietz took Mr. Stoker at his word and treated the actual being of Dracula as the most haunting part of the story. You can hide from a metaphor. A metaphor doesn t wait outside your window under a full moon. A metaphor doesn t turn into a bat and land on your bed, he said. The question, then, is not what Dracula represents, but what he is: a brilliant, seductive, fanged beast waiting to suck the blood from your throat (Playbill.com, no-bloodless-metaphors). Dietz counts Dracula as one of just a handful of his works that have been the most financially successful, despite the fact that none of his plays has been produced on Broadway. I m fond of saying that maybe I ve inverted the old adage that you can make a killing [in the theatre] but you can t make a living, Dietz told Playbill Online in I ve done the exact opposite: I ve made a living on my plays for twenty some years. But I don t have a hit play.... Instead I ve had fifteen or more plays that are seen in theatres and colleges and then there are five or six that pay my bills ( com/celebritybuzz/article/playbill-on-lines-brief-encounter-with-steven-dietz ). This is something that Dietz shares in common with Stoker, who in his lifetime wrote a dozen novels, three short story collections, and nearly two dozen uncollected stories but remains most closely associated with Dracula. So deep is the association between Stoker and Dracula, people are often surprised to learn that he wrote any other stories. While many of his stories and novels have been critical successes, it is Dracula that has proven to be Stoker s most enduring legacy, inspiring film and stage adaptations as well as countless imitations. Abraham Bram Stoker was born in 1847 near Dublin, Ireland, and despite suffering chronic, life-threatening illnesses as a young child, grew to be a large man and a successful athlete. He studied mathematics at Dublin s Trinity College and developed a love of theatre that became a lifelong pursuit. Upon graduation, Stoker took a civil servant s position at Dublin Castle and worked part-time as a theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail; this led to a friendship with the actor Henry Irving that would last through the rest of his life. At Irving s request, Stoker moved to London and became manager of Irving s Lyceum Theatre. 6

7 This proved to be advantageous, because it introduced Stoker to Irving s social circle and opened opportunities for Stoker s personal writing to be taken seriously. In addition to Irving, Stoker counted among his friends James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Oscar Wilde, whose girlfriend Stoker famously stole and later married. Stoker s first book, a non-fiction tutorial called The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland was published in 1879, and his first work of fiction, Under the Sunset, followed in By the time Stoker published Dracula in 1897, he had five novels and numerous short stories to his credit; several more books followed, but none garnered the success of Dracula, which was widely considered Stoker s greatest accomplishment at the time of his death in 1912, just ten years before Nosferatu, the first film adaptation of Dracula, would be released. For Dietz, success is measured much the same way based not so much on commercialism, but on longevity. In an article about Dietz for the Austin Chronicle, Susan Zeder, head of the playwriting program at the University of Texas at Austin, where Dietz currently works as a professor of playwriting and directing, said, There s nothing trendy about Steven s work. It s there for the long term ( One secret to his success may be the almost blue-collar sensibility with which he approaches his writing. He talks about going to work as a playwright the way anybody goes to a regular job, and that is a very refreshing ethos, Zeder told the Austin Chronicle. So it s not in all these esoteric terms. And it s not a devaluing of the art. It s getting art in the right category. It s a thing we make with our hands, and we do it together. Dietz s wife, playwright Allison Gregory, agrees. He writes, like, two plays a year. Every year.... That is in addition to the teaching and the workshops and speaking and directing and extensive traveling and the parenting he does, Gregory said. He writes as if it were his job, whether or not he feels like it. He doesn t wait for inspiration.... I believe that s called discipline ( That kind of discipline seems to come naturally to Dietz who was taught to view work as a necessary thing that should be celebrated. His father, a railroad man, encouraged his children to be useful, and today, Dietz considers words like workmanlike to be an honor. In the Austin Chronicle article, Dietz said, I m much more comfortable with the phrase working playwright than professional playwright. Still, a career in theatre seemed unlikely for a young man who claims to have never seen a play before high school; did not attend grad school; and never took a playwriting class, according to the Austin Chronicle. Born in Colorado in 1958, Dietz studied theatre at the University of Northern Colorado before beginning a career as a director in Minneapolis, where he formed the Quicksilver Stage Theatre Company and began writing plays of his own. A commission to write his play, God s Country, took him to Seattle in 1988, where he lived until he received the offer to teach at the University of Texas-Austin. According to his faculty bio on the University of Texas-Austin website, Dietz plays have been seen at over 100 regional theatres in the United States and internationally. He is a two-time winner of the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award, and recipient of the PEN USA West Award in Drama; the Edgar Award for Drama; and the Yomuiri Shimbun Award ( finearts/tad/people/dietz-steven). Ironically, Dietz considers the fact that his work has not been produced on Broadway one of the contributing factors to his longevity. The advantage of not having success as a younger writer in New York, unlike a lot of my peers as envious as I was of them what I ve gotten to do instead is make a body of work, Dietz told Playbill Online. I feel like I ve had this twenty-year apprenticeship. I ve gotten to learn my craft. 7

8 The Changing Legend of the Vampire By Ace G. Pilkington Of all the monsters spawned in the depths of human nightmares or created by the ingenuity of horror writers, perhaps none has been more successful in stories, novels, films, and plays than the vampire. Indeed, the first use of a blood drinking being in a theatre came as early as 424 B.C. in Euripides s Hecuba. The ghost of Achilles has asked that Polyxena, princess of Troy, be sacrificed to him. As Talthybius tells it, Achilles son holds up a golden cup that is completely full. He says to his father s ghost, Come here that you may drink this maiden s pure black blood (Diane Arnson Svarlien, transl. Andromache, Hecuba, Trojan Women [Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 2012], p.80, line 559, Kindle edition). Already this early, we have the vampire-like figure who is both heroic and monstrous, handsome and dead. While Greek belief in the standard vampire the corporeal revenant who preyed upon or plagued the living developed only after the arrival of Slavic immigrants over a thousand years later, the legend was clearly beginning (Inanna Arthen, May the Ground Not Receive Thee An Exploration of the Greek Vrykolakas and His Origins, By Light Unseen, Web. 1998). The very word vampire is Slavic. The Oxford English Dictionary online declares it to be a word of Slavonic origin occurring in the same form in Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Bulgarian. Folklore in the various Slavic languages is, if anything, overpopulated with vampires. One book on Slavic myth is actually titled Forests of the Vampire ([London: Barnes & Noble, 2003]). Russian folktales include a story about a vampire bear and another about a human vampire who drinks blood not from a golden cup but from a pail (Ace G. Pilkington and Olga A. Pilkington eds., Buckets of Blood, in Fairy Tales of the Russians and Other Slavs [Forest Tsar Press, 2010], 306). According to folk belief, there were many ways to become a vampire. In the words of Paul Barber, from his book Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality, People who are different, unpopular, or great sinners are apt to return from the dead ([New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988], 29). The list of people who might come back as vampires is long and, as we might expect, not based on logic. It includes sorcerers, witches, alcoholics, people of another faith, highwaymen, seventh children, and so on (30). Another possibility is that a body may become a revenant when an animal jumps over it (33). So James Branch Cabell s Lovely Vampire says in Jurgen, As my funeral was leaving the house the cat jumped over my coffin ([New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1919], ). In Romania it is reported that by flying over a corpse a bat can create a vampire (Barber 33). Of course, in folktales as in other forms of vampire fiction, the bite of a vampire works especially well. One part of the vampire legend that has been present from the beginning and has proved highly resistant to change is the idea that the vampire is irresistible and, even when that attraction is attributed to some other (usually magical) cause, extremely handsome or beautiful. In the Russian folktale The Vampire, the creature is such a fine fellow. The picture of health, regular blood and milk, and smartly and richly dressed (Pilkington 295). In Gogol s Viy, one of the world s great horror stories, the female vampire is described as having, Such terrible, dazzling beauty! (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, transl., The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol [New York: Pantheon Books, 1998], 182). Since vampires are supernatural sirens who summon humans to destruction, it is only natural that they look the part. 8

9 In 1819, the dangers and discontents that a doctor found in working for a poet changed the vampire legend permanently and paved the way for Bram Stoker s success. It was a time when folktales were being turned into literature and tales of terror were being coined into money in a host of magazines. John Polidori, Lord Byron s former traveling companion and physician, wrote a short story called The Vampyre. New Monthly Magazine, which published it, claimed it was by Byron, and though the claim was not true, Byron s reputation for literary genius and sexual scandal guaranteed a large audience and a favorable reception. David J. Skal says of Polidori, His literary conception of the vampire still lives, rivaling (and in some ways overshadowing) the contributions of Bram Stoker (Vampires: Encounters with the Undead [New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2006], 37). It was Polidori who made the vampire a Byronic hero, a charismatic, self-tormenting libertine with pale skin, dark hair, and hypnotic eyes. Previously, vampires were the stuff of peasant culture. Now, suddenly, they could be glamorous, brooding, sexy aristocrats. Being undead would never be the same (Skal, Vampires 44). Even more importantly, perhaps, Polidori s story with Byron s name attached created a vampire mania that, it would seem, is still alive or perhaps is undead and unkillable. Though Polidori did not benefit from his story s success and committed suicide a few years later, the story was translated into multiple languages and took the stage in England and France by storm. A contemporary critic cries: There is not a theatre in Paris without its Vampire! (Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen [New York: Faber and Faber, 2004], 16). Like Byron and so many vampires yet to come, the face of Polidori s hero was pallid and emotionless, but its form and outline were beautiful (John Polidori, The Vampyre [London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1819], 28). And now at last in 1897, we come to Bram Stoker s Dracula. It was not the longest of the fictions about vampires. That dubious distinction belongs to Varney the Vampire (1847), which is longer than War and Peace and The Castle of the Carpathians (Jules Verne s vampire novel) combined. Nor is it the best written (no one would mistake Dracula for something penned by Byron), but it reinforced or created most of the details of the vampire legend today. It is, in a sense, the default setting for what most people think they know. For example, in Sergei Lukyanenko s Night Watch, Olga, commenting on what a terrified young boy believes, blames Bram Stoker (supposedly a vampire himself) for spreading disinformation about what is effective against the undead (Andrew Bromfield, transl., [New York: Hyperion, 2006], 81). Stoker s most obvious and ultimately least successful deviation from earlier versions of the legend was Dracula s appearance. Though he is an aristocrat, the Count has none of the physical attributes of the siren or sex symbol. Stoker broke sharply with the Byronic tradition in his delineation of Dracula as a cadaverous ancient with bad breath and hairy palms (Skal, Hollywood Gothic 51). There has been much speculation about Stoker s reasons for the change, including the notions that he intended Dracula to be a degenerate criminal or a representative of unrestrained animal nature. It is probably not coincidental that two fairly recent and very influential books had had characters who were not unlike Dracula in appearance, Robert Louis Stevenson s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and George du Maurier s Trilby (1895, book and stage play). However, Stoker s female vampires are beautiful. One of them, Jonathan Harker tells us, was fair, as fair can be, with great wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby 9

10 of their voluptuous lips (Bram Stoker, The New Annotated Dracula [ New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008], 79). Dracula, though, was not destined to be confined in a novel. Starting in 1924 in a version written by Hamilton Deane (and approved by Stoker s widow), the Count burst forth in stage adaptations and films that would transform him and permanently fix the world s image of creatures who live by drinking blood. This new Dracula was really the old legend returned. He was a handsome man dressed in formal evening wear complete with an opera cloak that would further identify him with the bat (J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead [Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 2011], 221). Or as Steven Dietz describes him in the adaptation the Festival will produce this fall, Youthful and vibrant, sensual and charismatic. He smiles a beautiful smile (Dracula [New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1996], 26). There is one other very important element in the legend of the vampire that has remained consistently the same the element of horror. Again, in the words of Steven Dietz, The question, then, is not what Dracula represents but what he is: A brilliant, seductive fanged beast waiting to suck the blood from your throat (Dietz 85). 10