Cape May Diaries
32- Getting our teeth into it
A few years ago, Sharon and I were fortunate enough to catch a performance of Frankenstein at the Cape May Stage – a single-performer show that absolutely floored us and made up pledge to catch the next performance of its kind.
Few works in literature better represented the Victorian Era than Frankenstein did – and Eric Hissom – who played every role in that production, so dazzled us we insisted on catching the 2005 production of Dracula, the Journal of Jonathan Harker, a one person performance done by Jim Helsinger.
In the time that lapsed between the two performances, I discovered just what a fad single such one-person shows had become in community theater, allowing a single actor to demonstrate the full range of his or her abilities.
Unfortunately, such performances often rob the production of its most important ingredient: drama.
By this I mean the legitimate emotional reaction of individual actors reacting while in a character that is not their own. From this real emotions emerge – as in the performance of the East Lynne Company a few blocks away.
We get to see only one actor never surprised by another actor’s performance, never truly drawn out by the interchange of personalities.
Jim Helsinger put on as great a performance as I have seen on stage and yet did not draw out the same awe in me as I felt a few years earlier.
Part of this is because Dracula is not Frankenstein.
In some ways, Dr. Frankenstein is the monster, and thus having one character plays both makes perfect sense.
More importantly, Bram Stoker was always something of a hack writer, something akin of Harold Robbins or better, Steven King is today.
Stoker adapted eastern European folk tales the way TV crime drama writers take things from the headlines the newspaper. He did not actually create a myth the way Mary Shelly did, and this lacking shows in the original, as well as on the stage.
Mary Shelly wrote a work of literature, a landmark book that began the modern age of science fiction. With richer language and a deep sense of social commentary, the earlier play left a deeper emotional impression on me.
In Frankenstein of a few years ago, we were carried inside the head of the character struggling against our own inner demons.
In this year's Dracula, we get an adventure on stage full of chance scenes and such, but never the penetrating conflict.
Stoker is all dash and little depth, and this play would have done a lot better with an ensemble cast because of the intense physical nature of its story line.
While Helsinger gives a fine performance for the first half of the production – though I would have liked to have seen this as a two character scene, a battle of wits so to speak. The second half of the play falls into almost near hysteria as the actor is forced to fill in the most dramatic parts of Stoker’s work with dialogue, looking a little out of control as he chased himself in a desperate effort to catch wagons and drive the stake finally into Dracula’s heart.
Had an ensemble cast performed this place, each actor could have invested more depth into the various characters to make largely a weak plot line into a deeper psychological drama. Because Helsinger is forced to jump from one character to another, each character becomes something of a caricature, with plenty of surface features.
But characters begged for more.
Dracula is a pathetic character, who is caught up in something of a bipolar disease. On one hand he gloats about the fact that he is immortal while on the other hand, he is cursed by the need to feed his addiction. In the end, he is relieved at his release, but we get very little of the real build up to that release.
This might have given us a deeper emotional impact when we left the way Frankenstein did a few years ago – despite Stoker’s lesser talent as a writer.
This is not to say anything bad about Helsinger. His shifting from character to character was flawless, using mannerisms that immediately translated into a new character for us, and his presence on the stage gave us a similar sense of presence as the production a few years earlier with Frankenstein.
Both plays sought to draw on the darker side of the Victorian Age, that sense that humanity sometimes delved too far beyond the boundaries of reason, and that progress could have its negative. Shelly, of course, was more successful in making the human connection, but Stoker had the right idea, and for anyone seeing Dracula, it is a worthy effort and a magnificent performance, despite the silly physical antics at it ends.
Outside the theater, Cape May presents a similar duality, because we mostly get the lighter side of the Victorian Age and rarely get a glimpse of the volcanic emotional build up that eventually brought the age to a close with the First World War. Writers like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Shell and even Stoker, struggled to warn the world of what to expect – most didn’t.
Of course, after both plays, I spent a lot of time thinking about them, even as we drove back north, and how each seem to fit the time in which we lived, where Dracula might be reshaped into terrorists, and our own technology into Frankenstein. But then, very few modern plays deal with such issues – leaving me grateful to the Cape May Stage for their effort to keep that tradition alive.