Bonzuko

Horror plays are easy that way, because they are explicit: We are going to fuck with you. This is why you are here. The sin is if a company takes that as a sign for laziness, to let the techies work the scares all out. The mistaking of pyrotechnics and screams for the intimacy needed in horror — the thing you don’t want to touch is touching you. Or, more precisely, you volunteered to touch it.

This is not what happens in DRACULA. Dietz has pitched it so the least important name character — Renfield — runs the show. He is on stage for the majority of the performance; it is his cries or prayers that turn the tone; it is his death that converts the story back to the rush of epistolary plot and train tables that mottles the skin of the novel. In this adaptation, Dietz doesn’t ask why a merciful God allows a Dracula to live; rather, he asks why supernatural forces are allowed to break their promises to the faithful. Why did Lucy turn away from the man who risked hell, eventually, to free her? Why did Harker bar his wife from learning his secrets, when his diary was the key to understanding their struggle? And, why did Mina betray the Count, when she was feral and that close to becoming his bride? The dead Dracula fed upon? Ever loyal, in their lack of struggle, as with the flies and moths and spiders and rats, the great black chain of being.

Do these kids know how lucky they are, to play with this dynamite? Will they recognize this frisson of lighting that match, when they play Pinter or Beckett or Churchill? I hope so, and that they keep the Count in their heart all year long.