Tribe of Fools' "Dracula' at the Fringe

"Word of mouth is our best form of advertising, so if you like what you saw tonight, tell your friends."

This request usually means that the interminable opening-night curtain speech is almost over. But Director Jay Wojnarowski had a slightly different approach for Tribe of Fools' much-hyped Fringe show, Dracula.

"If you liked what you saw here today, tell other people it was terrifying," he says in a playbill that wasn't distributed until the show was over. "Don't tell anyone anything specific about the show," he continued. "Help us get their anxiety up by keeping them in the dark." And bolster their desire for tickets, presumably.

But the irony is that no marketing strategy could ever rely on offering real anxiety. My little brother's first trip to a movie theater took him to an IMAX film about the red, swishing, pulsing insides of the human body. He was so devastated that he refused to go to the movies for years"“ even Aladdin or The Lion King was out of the question. This is fear. It's an emotion quite different from lining up to see the latest installment of Saw "“ or Wojnarowski's Dracula.

Stuck in a storm

To be sure, attending Dracula did make me wonder how many times I've experienced real fear in my sheltered modern life. There was the night I found out a dear friend had lymphoma. There's the time I spent an evening in rural Oregon listening to stories of local cougars' deadly stealth, and then had to find my way to my cabin in the woods through the darkest night I'd ever seen. Or how about the time I got stuck on the road in a terrible storm, watching the boiling clouds through the sluicing rain and hearing the emergency broadcast on the radio demand that I find a basement immediately?

If someone offered me a ticket to relive moments like that, I'd say thanks, but no thanks. No one wants to be truly afraid; and for all their bragging about bringing the ultimate scare-fest to the stage, Tribe of Fools wasn't marketing a truly fearful experience.

Just as horror movies, roller coasters and haunted hayrides aren't really supposed to traumatize habitual ticket buyers, Tribe of Fools wanted to reel us in, not scare us away. Wojnarowski, for all his neuroscience patter about fraying our nerves ("your amygdala has just been through a workout"), isn't even peddling fear of the unknown. He's just provoking curiosity over a good gimmick.

August Wilson's ghosts

Can genuine fright ever really translate to the stage, as Wojnarowski claims? What sorts of things frighten us when the curtain goes up? Can Banquo or Hamlet's ghostly king bring the chills? What about August Wilson's heirloom piano and Sutter's ghost in The Piano Lesson?

The playwright Conor McPherson has certainly given me some images that keep me awake at night. There was also that childhood trip to Ford's Theatre in Washington for a production of A Christmas Carol. Marley's ghost was downright creepy ("Scrooge! Scrooooge!"), but for me the real terror resided in that dark, empty box above the crowd, as I wondered whether Lincoln ever drifted in for a visit.

Or what about self-consciously challenging productions like Theater Exile's Blackbird or Nice People Theatre Company's Love Jerry? Is it frightening to find yourself sympathizing with a pedophile or a sexual abuser?

"'Come up on stage'

Now that I've thought about it, there's only one thing truly terrifying about going to the theater, and that's when the lights come up on the house and the performers (damn them) ask for a volunteer to come up on stage. Consider the timeless humiliations of the endlessly produced Complete Works of Shakespeare, for a start. At one performance I attended, the actor singled out a child who was too shy to participate with the rest of her seatmates until she performed the action alone while everyone else watched. I wouldn't be surprised if she's gone off live theater for life.

The most frightened I've ever been inside a theater may have been at a Fringe performance of Emmanuelle Delpeche-Ramey's Madame Douce-Amère several years ago. Delpeche-Ramey took audience participation to new and terrible levels by spooning yogurt into audience members' mouths. It was a rare moment of true theatrical terror when I thought I would have to share a Dannon cup with 30 strangers.

Spooky clicking sounds

Tribe of Fools, for all its candlelight and monotonous slithering, couldn't come close to that kind of scare factor. Wojnarowski's cast was sinuously acrobatic, but the script of this "original adaptation" was a nightmare (but not an entertaining one like on Elm Street).

Jonathan (Michael Cosenza) is screaming as three nasty female doctors hold him down and give him a knockout injection. Then Mina (Danielle Adams) and Jonathan wake up. Jonathan is relieved to be home from a horrible journey. Mina informs him that it was all a dream and he has yet to leave. Then she sulks about having to make breakfast.

Later, Lucy (Karina Croskrey) is sleepwalking. Mina brings her to bed. Mina and Lucy wake up. They quarrel about Lucy's sinister somnambulating. Mina wonders if there's a letter from Jonathan today.

But most of the play goes like this: spooky clicking sounds and moans fill the darkness. An actor enters and struggles to light a candle, gasping more than Nicole Kidman in the consumptive death throes of her turn in Moulin Rouge. A black-clad ensemble slithers and contorts and reaches. A bald Count Dracula (Christopher Latzke) minces around. Three nasty women (Johanna Dunphy, Stephanie Lauren and Miranda Libkin) materialize to overwhelm the gasping actor and his or her candlelight.

Alternate and repeat all these sequences for more than an hour while the room gets hotter, and you wonder if the exciting audience "participation" heavily implied in the Fringe catalogue and the show's website will ever happen. (Answer: No.)

Enlisting the audience

Instead of saying anything of substance about his production (like maybe acknowledging the original author of Dracula), Wojnarowski used the playbill to ask the audience to keep the show's details "secret until at least the end of the run." But he encouraged us to tell other people that Dracula "gave you nightmares" and that "you didn't want to be alone afterwards." This director essentially begged the audience to keep Dracula's marketing strategy intact.

I might have been less irked if the show had lived up to a shred of what it promised. Perhaps I'm a Philly Fringe philistine who should've stayed home to watch True Blood, but I haven't been so bored since I saw Beckett's A Piece of Monologue lit by a single bulb in someone's musty basement.

Maybe I'm just steamed because I signed a hyperventilating waiver (promising not to sue over "any risks of loss, property damage or personal injury, including death… as a result of being a participant in the production") for a show that consisted mainly of sitting in the dark listening to thumps and hisses.

I must give Tribe of Fools credit for tapping into at least one timeless, primal fear: shelling out $40 for a pair of tickets to an over-hyped Fringe show, and then realizing that, out of everything else you could've seen tonight, you picked the one that will have you peeking at your watch.