That Horrible Wooden Stake

A SOFT-CORE pornography fan of my acquaintance completed her perusal of Rosemary's Baby with a look of utter and unwonted revulsion. "If people want to do it, I think they should do it," she observed, "but this business with the crucifixes is disgusting."

I'm not sure what she'd have thought of Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I'm told features three Victorian heroes who wander around waving crosses at a rate unmatched at least since Christ was a corporal. In the adaptation now at the Loeb, Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston wisely cut out two heroes and a surplus Victorian heroine but they left all the crosses in. Their hearts, at least, were in the right place.

The heart of this Dracula, oddly enough, is not the hero of Romania's early struggles for independence who gives it its title, but Catherine Dean, the Victorian heroine. Her willingness to act to the hilt--even in delivering lines on the order of "What were you doing over there with papa and the hammer and that horrible wooden stake?"--is astonishing. It's a willingness understandably not shared by most of the rest of the company--they have lots of lines like "I broke in when I heard the dogs howling" and "How is your daughter and her 'nervous prostration'" and "Yes, Renfield, I offer you your soul in exchange for what you know"--but everyone carries on unflinchingly. Anne Ames and Nicholas Shorter put on fine cockney accents, and John Phillips as Renfield, whose hobby is eating flies, keeps threatening to forsake mere competence for genuine creepiness. John S. Scherlis, as Dracula himself, manages a creditable Bela Lugosi accent, though he lacks the music that saved Lugosi from monotony.

Lindsay Davis, this Dracula's director, provides a background soundtrack, but his inability to think of more than two or three ways for a vampire to sidle up menacingly behind his victim's back means that the sidlings quickly become repetitious. Less excusable is the distressing obviousness with which Renfield eavesdrops on everyone's conversations: the Victorians may have been dumb, but surely they weren't deaf and blind.

Davis and costume designer Jan Stauffer team up, however, for this production's most striking effect, the tableau of Dracula embracing the Victorian heroine, while the folds of his black robes overlap the folds of her white ones, with which the first act ends. It makes the heroine's appearance in a long black robe for the second act as effective as it is inevitable. Stuart Sundlun's set and Bill Scherlis's lighting, by way of contrast, lack the menacing shadows demanded by the play, whose everyday aspects are quite apparent enough as it is.

"With God's help I had made her truly dead," the vampire expert remarks about the time he drove a stake through the heart of one of the heroine's friends. As befits a vampire king, Dracula is less alive than in his heyday, but I guess that no one yet has made him truly dead.