Playwright: adapted by Aly Renee Amidei from the novel by J. Sheridan LeFanu. At: WildClaw Theatre at The Storefront, 66 E. Randolph. Phone: 312-742-8497;$20. Runs through: Feb. 20
Romanticism being rooted in the elevation of emotion over reason, it comes as no surprise that this trait should be most frequently embodied in females—feeling being, traditionally, a woman’s job, as thinking is a man’s. Writers following Poe’s dictum that “the most poetic subject is the death of a beautiful woman” willingly bestowed upon their “weaker vessels” the power to return from the dead. To our sensibilities, then, what is most noteworthy about J. Sheridan LeFanu’s prototypal vampire story is that the characters who propel its action are all female, the male personae being merely the “muscle”, literally. (Twenty-five years later, Bram Stoker would assert masculine dominance with a vampire story so similar in structure to LeFanu’s—with the exception of its more conventional gender-role assignment—as to border on plagiarism.)
More disturbing to modern audiences, however, are the overt lesbian motifs reflected in our evil temptress’s propensity for seducing her victims before introducing them to her parasitic addiction—a theme that would have been less readily apparent in the 19th century, when intense same-sex relationships were permitted both boys and girls. Aly Renee Amidei’s adaptation, while remarkably faithful to its source material, hints at both pre- and post-Freudian interpretations—our narrator, Laura, is a lonely adolescent who welcomes the prospect of a worldly and sophisticated companion, but is nevertheless uneasy at Carmilla’s advances. And when evidence of the vengeful revenant’s past crimes lead to her being hunted down and finally cornered by pursuers both mortal and spectral, it is her innocent disciple who betrays her with a kiss.
But not before much blood has been spilled with the no-giggles conviction that is WildClaw Theatre’s stock-in-trade. Before a word is uttered, Alan Donohue’s Fuseli-inspired scenic design, Mikhail Fiksel and Scott Tallarida’s original score of pulsating Beethovenesque incidental music, Paul Foster and Danielle McKenzie’s shadowy lighting conjure just the right atmosphere of brooding menace in the Storefront’s cavernous stage, with Scott Cummins and David Chrzanowski’s violence design and Charlie Athanas’ evocative special effects never exceeding the boundaries of their dramatic universe. Under Cummins’ direction, assisted by Barbara Zahora’s dialect instruction, the mood thus established enables an intrepid cast, led by the fire-and-ice tag-team of Michaela Petro and Brittany Burch, to weave a web of conflicted desires enticing the most skeptical rationalist.