The Communist Dracula Pageant

[January 16th, 2008]

Meet Dracula. No, not that Dracula, though he’s invited as well. We’re talking about the communist Dracula: Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania, a man so caught up in utopian fantasy that he bulldozed much of Bucharest and publicly compared himself to Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes. Scary, right?

On Christmas day, 1989, Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by the Romanian National Salvation Front after a two-hour trial in a schoolhouse in a remote village. This trial, and the events that led up to it, form the basis of Anne Washburn’s new play, running in a workshop production at defunkt theatre.

The title is accurately descriptive: Not only are the Ceausescus portrayed as vampires of a sort, but Vlad Tepes himself, plastic fangs, long cloak and all, serves as a narrator. The production contains a couple of communist-chic tableaux, but it is also itself a pageant, spattered with songs and a number of asides, the latter delivered in purposefully bad Romanian accents.

This ambitious project attempts to encompass in 95 minutes a sketchy history of the Romanian revolution, nuanced portraits of the dictator and his wife, a brief survey of communist Romanian culture and some dime-store philosophizing about the nature of freedom. As you might expect, it doesn’t quite succeed.

The defunkt ensemble has impeccable comedic timing, and the show’s humorous scenes manage to hold the audience’s attention through the end. The story itself, though, is less gripping, and there’s no reason that should be so. This is fascinating history, full of bizarre characters and plenty of Eastern allure, but the playwright could have found a more coherent structure. The show loses steam during frequently repeated fragments of the Ceausescus’ trial by a kangaroo court, but more awkward are a few scenes that don’t quite make sense to the viewer who comes without prior knowledge of the December Revolution—that is, almost all of us.

The Communist Dracula Pageant is, nonetheless, an entertaining and educational play, well executed by director James Moore and company. It could, with some tweaking, be an excellent script. For now, see it for Kenichi Hillis’ bizarre, toothy performance as Vlad Tepes. He steals the show.