He's Baaack -- In Time For Valentine's, `Dracula' Seduces Again

----------------------------------------------------------------- Theater review

"Dracula" by Steven Dietz, opens Wednesday at the Empty Space Theatre, then runs Tuesday-Sunday through March 30. 547-7500. -----------------------------------------------------------------

He's back again.

That seductive Transylvanian nobleman in the cape. That suave guy whose career as a one-man blood bank flourishes. That popular icon who cannot be vanquished by anything - not a stake to the heart, a wreath of garlic around the neck, or scores of cheesy B movies based on his adventures.

The ghoul in question? Count Dracula, of course.

The debonair monster in Bram Stoker's masterpiece of horror literature has been featured in more than 200 films (most recently the Francis Ford Coppola hit, "Bram Stoker's Dracula") and numerous stage plays.

He pops up again soon, this time onstage at the Empty Space Theatre in Steven Dietz's recent dramatization of "Dracula." The play premiered in 1995 at the Arizona Theatre Company and opens here just in time to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1897 novel.

Directing the show at Empty Space is artistic director Eddie Levi Lee, whose fascination with creepy tales catalyzed a spookfest version of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" at Empty Space several years ago.

"Horror is a genre that movies have taken over, so it's a real challenge to make a stage horror play an experience you can't get on film," Lee notes. "We have some special effects, but we can't compete with all the things movies do on that score."

Lee believes, however, that a play can be just as creepy and even more compelling than a cinematic monster mash: "I do think we create the chance for more of an emotional reaction, a greater connection to the characters. Basically, in live theater you're locked in the room with these people."

The dramatis personae in Dietz's "Dracula" are much the same as those in Stoker's novel. There is Jonathan Harker, the innocent young Brit who travels to Transylvania on business and winds up in the thrall of the magnetic count.

There are Harker's proper young fiancee, Mina, and her more independent-minded friend, Lucy, both prime targets for Dracula's rapturous blood lust.

Also on hand are Renfield, the possessed devotee of Dracula (played here by David Pichette, who originated the role in Arizona), and Seward, the scientist who tries to quantify vampirism.

And of course, there's Dracula himself, portrayed in full cape dress for this production by Carlo Scandiuzzi, an actor and film producer who hails from Italy and Switzerland. (Empty Space would send out no full-face photos of Scandiuzzi, because onstage Dracula's mug is not revealed until halfway into the play.)

Urbane, not just menacing

"I thought of Carlo for this because Dracula has to not just be menacing or powerful, but also urbane and worldly, with that European thing," explains Lee. "He has to be a gracious host, as well as a monster."

In most important respects, Dietz's "Dracula" follows Stoker's literary blueprint faithfully - much more than, say, an earlier "Dracula" drama by John Balderston and Hamilton Deane, which has been in steady circulation since 1927. (An ultra-suave Frank Langella starred in a hit Broadway revival of that script in 1979.)

In the author's notes to his script, the Seattle-based Dietz says he avoided the trendy temptation to treat Dracula as a psychosexual symbol - as so many modern critics and academics are doing currently.

"You can hide from a metaphor," Dietz writes. "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. . . I took Mr. Stoker at his word: although there are obviously many metaphorical dimensions to Count Dracula, the actual being is the most haunting."

Credit due to Vlad the Impaler

Of course, there was never any actual vampire named Dracula. The character's moniker derives from one of the nicknames of the medieval Romanian despot Vlad Tepe (a k a Vlad the Impaler), who had a gruesome little habit of skewering his enemies' body parts on sharp stakes.

While Vlad stays buried in history books, Dracula's legend lives on in many forms - including a slew of youth-oriented vampire clubs, and chat-lines that have sprung up on the Internet.

And in Romania, the myth is enjoying something of a resurgence. Recently the country hosted a World Dracula Congress, with scholars presenting such mind-twisting papers as "Consanguinity: Stoker's Dracula and Gothic Literature's Wandering Jew."

Stoker might be spinning in his crypt over such intellectual machinations. A man of the theater and the longtime manager of leading English stage actor Sir Henry Irving, Stoker's main agenda in his potboiler was just to entertain and terrify Victorian readers - who loved nothing better than a good, gory yarn.

"It's an extremely theatrical piece of writing," observes Lee. "And I've never read a play that tells the story as well as Steven's does. It's shocking, erotic, certainly bloody. And it's about people's longing for immortality, which is a very big subject."

And Lee deliberately timed the Empty Space's presentation of the show to coincide with the most romantic day of the year, Valentine's Day.

"Hey, this is a perverse, erotic love story," he maintains. "Dracula's very seductive, with both men and women. And there are times, in our version, where the thing gets dangerously close to bodice ripper."