The Low-tech Solution: Dracula and Grusha

There happened to be two Dracula plays running at the same time in New York in 1977. There was the Broadway Dracula, starring Frank Langella, for which Edward Gorey famously did the black-and-white sets and costumes. But there was also The Passion of Dracula, written by Bob Hall and David Richmond, which was playing off Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre.

Edward Gorey, sitting in his hand-drawn Broadway Dracula set.

I saw and liked both of these productions. But I’d like to talk about the off-Broadway one, The Passion of Dracula.

There was a scene in The Passion of Dracula in which Dracula escaped. Or rather disappeared. Or more accurately, turned into a bat and flew away. It is at the end of Act 2 and Dracula has been cornered by the good guys – that is Van Helsing, Seward, and Harker. The Prince of Darkness declares, “I shall return to claim my bride. And when I do, no one shall escape my wrath!”

We in the audience watched as Dracula stood on stage raised his arms and exploded into a circle of light. The ball of light then morphed into a bat, which flew out into the audience, terrifying everyone, until it flew out of the theatre. The actors on stage screamed. We screamed. Everyone screamed. It was magnificent.

My weak and imperfect description will not do justice to the delight of this shocking moment on stage.

My friends and I (we were college freshmen) debated and brainstormed about how this effect was done. Was it a hologram? Did Dracula fall through a trap in the stage floor? And if he did, what of the bat? Was it some kind of projection? Was it a meticulously lifelike robotic bat which could be controlled by the stage manager? Where did it come from? Was it a real bat painted white and painstakingly trained to fly around the audience twice and then out the door?

Once, as King Arthur in Camelot, I had to play a scene while a rogue bat upstaged me by flying around the barn theatre in which we performed. So I know a thing or two about bats on stage. Or I thought I did.

My bat theories seem preposterous as I now write them. The Cherry Lane is an intimate theatre with fewer than 200 seats. The production was realistic and visceral and scrappy, as contrasted with Langella’s slick and campy and extremely expensive Dracula uptown.

Like a magic trick, you don’t want to know how it was done. But as an aspiring theatre director, I couldn’t let it go.

This effect remained a mystery to me for years, until I met someone who had worked with playwright Bob Hall in another production. My friend has seen The Passion as well and was interested enough in that effect to ask Hall about it.

I was flabbergasted (and rendered doltish) by the simplicity of the solution.

A light facing the audience was positioned to the right of Dracula’s head, camouflaged as part of the set along the upstage wall. At the disappearing moment, the light illuminated for an instant, like a flashbulb, effectively blinding the audience. (Was this legal? I guess it was.) Simultaneous with this, the rest of stage blacked out. The Dracula actor could then just walk off stage unseen, along with the other actors. The only thing the audience could see in the dark was the bright afterimage - the lingering visual impression that is left on your eye after looking directly into a light. At the same time, a stagehand dressed in black, walked on to the stage with a glow-in-the-dark bat on the end of a ten-foot pole. As the bright afterimage in the audience’s eyes started to fade, they could not help but fixate on the only other bright thing that there was – the rubber glow-in-the-dark bat. The stagehand extended and shook the rubber bat over the screaming heads of the audience, making a couple of passes and then exited the stage with it.

The lights came up for intermission and everybody went to the bathroom. Except for those who had just done so.

That’s right, a big rubber bat.

The cost of that effect was probably $15, plus the light. 

Of course, an effect with a light bulb is not as low-tech as an effect without a light bulb. Consider the bridge scene Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Nicolette Vajtay, Mark Alan Gordon, John Jensen and Kat Stoutenborough in the “chalk circle” scene of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. / White River Theatre Festival.

In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the servant girl Grusha sacrifices everything to save a baby that is not hers. After a palace coup results in the death of the reigning Governor, his wife (and the baby’s biological mother) flees, leaving the royal baby in the care of Grusha. After Grusha escapes with the baby to the mountains, she is pursued by the soldiers who are charged with finding the baby and killing him.

The second act climaxes with an emotional scene where Grusha and baby come to a rotten bridge spanning a chasm 2,000 feet deep. Her only chance of escape is to cross that rotten bridge. A bridge which will probably not hold her.

Theatre directors tackle these kinds of staging issues all the time: characters fly, disappear, change into other things, age, etc. But I’m going to talk about the bridge scene because, well, I like the bridge scene – and I love this play.

There are many ways to stage Grusha’s bridge scene, but there is rarely an attempt to depict the chasm, or to place the actress far above the heads of the audience. If directed creatively, this is always a spectacular, nail-biting scene.

Grotowski’s manifesto of Poor Theatre contains the idea that it is not theatre’s job to be high tech, because it can never compete with the tech of other art forms. Hence the name “Poor Theatre.” I saw a Broadway musical where the characters on the set piece of a train were in front of a giant LED screen depicting a realistic moving background. It overpowered the actors in a distracting way and ultimately detracted from the scene.

In the bridge scene, actors like Nicolette Vajtay, Barbara Ciszewska, Samie Pfeifer, and Elizabeth Stockbridge do what they do best: make us believe in things that we know are not there.

Samie Pfeifer as Grusha in the Shaking the Tree Theatre production.
Photo courtesy of Samantha Van Der Merwe.

Director Samantha Van Der Merwe directed CCC in 2017 at Shaking the Tree Theatre and played the scene on the stage floor with pieces of netted fabric worked by the other members of the company.

Van Der Merwe said of that moment:

“I wasn’t interested in a realistic interpretation of the bridge. I wanted to capture the essence of what it feels like to be teetering above a chasm. How does the audience come with us in feeling that precariousness?”

Elizabeth Stockbridge as Grusha in the Winnipesaukee Playhouse production. / Photo by Lesley Pankhurst.

Director Neil Pankhurst used the actors’ bodies to create the bridge in his 2008 production at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse. The tenuous life of the bridge was conveyed by the real bodies of the actors.

Director Pankhurst said:

“Getting the audience to use their imagination, and allowing the performer to physically inhabit the world of the story whether that be as a character or an inanimate object (as in the case of the bridge) were important to the interpretation of this piece. Walking on people’s knees/thighs while carrying a baby is not easy and therefore the fear of falling was always present in this moment for both audience and actor.”

Barbara Ciszewska as Grusha in The Mill Theatre production in Geelong, with Tom Considine, Ian Scott, Meredith Rogers, and Diana Stewart. Direction: James McCaughey. Design: Neil Greenaway. Music: Richard Vella. Photo: Peter Wilson

James McCaughey directed CCC at The Mill Theatre in Geelong, Australia in 1978. In this staging, Grusha walks a tightrope, something that every audience instinctively knows to be treacherous and agonizing.

The National Theatre School of Canada production. Directed by Micheline Chevrier; Set Design by Lorena Trigos; Costume Design by Alexandra Lord; Photo by Maxime Cote

Micheline Chevrier directed students at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal in 2015. Boxes that were used throughout the production fashioned the bridge, creating a fragmented pathway over which Grusha had to painstakingly navigate.

Nicolette Vajtay in the White River Theatre Festival production.

The production that I directed for the White River Theatre Festival in 1992 included a violent (paper) snowstorm and well as witnesses through whom the audience could share Grusha’s fear.

For those of you who do not know the play, Grusha makes it across safely. But even knowing that, and knowing there’s no drop, doesn’t prevent that scene from being excruciating. While we are crossing that bridge with her, the threat of death is real. If we believe the actress, we believe the chasm.

Brecht said, “If I give the audience a cardboard sun, they must know that it is cardboard, but they must believe that it is hot.” I can’t think of better aphorism for theatre itself.