Word: played
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sellars chose a thrust, semi-arena stage for this production, bare except for white gauze strips concealing the huge number of props trotted out for each scene. While this staging does evoke the circus-like atmosphere Mayakovsky wrote into the play, Sellars does not overcome the audibility problems inherent in theater in the round. As the actors careen about the stage, whipping out their lines, each section of the audience gets to hear a few words, but no one hears the entire sentence. While this mayhem may be intended to suggest the decline of human sensitivity and individualism, it succeeds...
This Dracula had its roots in the 1977 Broadway production of a 1927 play by John Balderston and Hamilton Deane, a corny, embarrassing old drawing-room comedy-melodrama with one or two amusing confrontations, sort of a "Vampire Who Came To Dinner." Director Dennis Rosa couldn't decide whether he wanted a campy parody of 30's horror movies or a straight chiller (which would have been impossible with that script). So he tried to do it both ways and it came out neither--a mess, complicated by the celebrated Edward Gorey's black-and-white cartoon sets, which reduced...
...figure of Dracula himself, not the book, the play, or the movies, that has endured. If Superman is the fantasy figure of sandy-haired, scrawny, neo-Nazi Kansas farmboys, then Dracula is for the urban or suburban adolescent: chubby, acne-ridden, excrutiatingly lonely, the boy with nothing to do after school but tear the limbs off Barbie dolls and masturbate. Girls laugh at him, or, worse yet, ignore him altogether...
...RICHTER, the screenwriter, sensibly trashed nearly all the Deane-Balderston play, retaining only certain key encounters between Dracula and his nemesis, Van Helsing. The latter is no longer a pompous vampire hunter but an ordinary professor whose daughter. Mina, becomes Dracula's first victim in England. No corny lines remain; at his most indulgent, Richter keeps an episode in which Dracula hurls a candelabra into a magnificent drawing room mirror that does not reflect his image. "Pardon me," he tells Van Helsing, matter-of-factly, "I dislike mirrors...
...SCREEN'S greatest Dracula? Not Bela Lugosi, who gave a lugubrious performance in Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula, which was utterly ruined by its failure to abandon the Deane-Balderston play. F.W. Murnau's German silent Nosferatuwas a good deal better, and even today provides one or two chilling moments, but Max Schreck's strutting rat did not have a whole lot of dramatic stature...