STAGE REVIEW : Rude Guerrilla performs Clive Barker's script, an uneasy mix of violence, metaphysics and macabre humor that needs more shocks, fewer laughs.

By ERIC MARCHESE

The Orange County Register

On the face of it, Clive Barker's "Frankenstein in Love" would seem the ideal show for the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company: a dark sensibility and a political subtext, partial nudity, and graphic violence calling for beef brains and buckets of stage blood. Deceptive face, that one. For like the Frankenstein creature of this staging, that face--indeed, the entire body - appears stitched together from a variety of disparate elements. Too disparate, in fact, for co-directors Dave Barton and Alexander Rodriguez to reconcile.

Barker takes the concept of a ruthless 20th-century South American military regime and grafts it onto Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's familiar 1818 Gothic horror novel "Frankenstein." The unnamed country is in revolt. Its corrupt despot fears capture by the people. His fiendish right hand, the Austrian Dr. Joseph Frankenstein, has gone into hiding. Like the Nazi Josef Mengele, the doctor seems to have fled one cruel dictatorship and found a comfortable home with another.

As the presidency of Garcia Perez (Vince Campbell) crumbles around his ears, the people have responded to the charisma and sensible "politics" of young Cesar Guerrero, whom they've affectionately dubbed "El Coco." Little do they know that this long-haired superman was created by Frankenstein. Playwright Barker has wrapped his tale in the trappings of Grand Guignol, the Parisian school of shock theater developed in the late 17th century to horrify audiences with bloodletting, murder, torture and other mayhem. And a sense of irony pervades this retelling of the "Frankenstein" legend: The play is narrated by the ghost of Maria Reina Duran (Marnelle Ross), a palm reader and fan dancer who falls victim to one of El Coco's rages. Though it's probable that Maria's constant, ironic commentary is designed to lessen the show's tension, it seems out of place.

But "Frankenstein" suffers from an even more colossal flaw: poor plotting. The story's central father-son conflict would seem to put the doctor and his creation on a collision course of titanic proportions. But Barker muddies up his own story with scenes that obscure potentially solid drama. What Rude G's staging really needs is a healthy dose of melancholy to make the tale more of a nightmare. When atrocities are thankfully committed offstage, a couple of brief shrieks are used where the victims should literally be screaming bloody murder. (The staging underuses the element of sound.) The script's humor, meanwhile, only comes off like a live version of EC Comics. Not that there aren't gross-out moments: One character has his heart ripped out. Another is skinned alive (offstage). The palms of a man's hands are "crucified" with sharp blades, while another's head is punctured by sharp metal spikes. Offstage, a character is cut up with a hacksaw and, onstage, his body parts eaten by ghouls. Still, this staging's assault upon our sensibilities could hardly be called relentless.

Robert M. Tully is commanding at expressing Cesar/El Coco's inner self-conflict, self-loathing sense of immortality and craving for emotional security. Grace Nassar is compelling as his physically and emotionally ravenous would-be mate, Veronique, a victim of Dr. Frankenstein's human experiments. Dark-haired and pale, her face pock-marked, Nassar gives this staging exactly the kind of spooky, desperate presence it needs more of. Our anticipation that the doctor will be a menacing soul of pure evil is dissipated once Jack Thomas appears. Frankenstein's very presence should make our stomachs knot up, but with his small stature and Elmer Fudd-like German-accented voice, Thomas evokes anything but shudders. He can't equal Tully's powerful stage presence, although the pair's final confrontation has emotional power, thanks to their handling of Barker's poetic words. Campbell has some nice moments as the pitifully weak, fear-ridden Perez but should be more hateful as a sadistic cardinal who, at the hands of Veronique (and later, a couple of ghouls), suffers a particularly grisly fate. Russ Marchand is praiseworthy as Lazaro, who comes off like a stage version of Beetlejuice, and his bit as a Texas mogul-type American ambassador is a hoot. Like Lazaro, Ross' character suffers from a too-flippant air as our ghost hostess (shades of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark) but fares better as a spooked, living being. Andrew Nienaber's turn as El Coco's right-hand man Cockatoo is largely colorless, a thankless role that only advances the plot. The ghouls Follezu and Mattos (Michelle Bylenga and Stephen Wagner) are standard issue, and Wagner's surgeon character Dr. Fook requires a heavier, more dour presence. David Cramer has it right, though, as Bozuffi, a tailor who steals clothes from the dead and is assigned to help stitch El Coco back together.

Textual flaws aside, this is an impressive show from a technical standpoint. The set is decorated with at least a dozen photos depicting actual historical atrocities. Peter Balgoyen and Jennifer Rose have crafted makeup that thoroughly realizes its aims - especially their work on Tully - and the rest of the show's many technicians, production design artists, props masters and costumers deserve kudos.

Frankenstein In Love

Reviewed By Laura Weinert

Southern CA July 25, 2001

If you're going to be tossing bloody, severed heads around the stage, it helps to have a sense of humor about the whole thing. It also helps to be very well lit. Clive Barker's play is rich with hidden comic gems--clever lines buried in a text that at times soars to somber, poetic reflection on love, politics, and the act of creation. While the Rude Guerilla Theater Company's production revels in the thick, provocative deas Barker wants to explore, some of the low camp and dark comedy fall by the wayside. Gravity and gore make an odd couple, and when placed under flat, often monochromatic lighting, the result can at times become tedious.

Here, Dr. Frankenstein makes a career out of collecting discarded victims of political torture by a South American regime, dismembering them, and sewing them back together in fascinating combinations. His greatest creation, El Coco (a passionate, pensive Robert M. Tully), decides to lead a revolution and organizes his fellow living dead, with twisted results. Despite the socially probing themes, Barker's play is decorated with great comic lines. When El Coco begins a troublesome love affair with a fellow creation, Veronique (a freakish, intense Grace Nassar), she asks him, "Do you waltz?" "Why yes, my feet are from Vienna," he replies. Rather than allowing the actors to relish these light moments, punch them, and leave a beat for a laugh, directors Dave Barton and Alexander Rodriguez seem to have encouraged the actors to race to the next line. The result is that much of the camp is lost on the audience, and the show takes on an unnecessarily heavy feel.

There are several great exceptions. As Lazaro, Dr. Frankenstein's assistant, Russ Marchand gives a hilariously physicalized, over-the-top performance, prancing about with his electric drill. Jack Thomas' Dr. Frankenstein is brilliantly developed--wicked in a cold, debonair sort of way. As Bozuffi, the town tailor who must sew El Coco a new face, David Cramer is prissy, wry, and manipulative--a delight to watch. Marnelle Ross is suitably sexy and strung-out as Maria Reina Duran, our narrator of sorts, the town palm reader/prostitute back from the dead, though she does throw several of her better lines away.

Intricate props (Bonnie Vise, Jay Fraley)--ranging from decapitated heads to dead babies--and ghoulish makeup design (Jennifer Rose, Peter Balgoyen) successfully set the bloody, horrific scene. Yet Renee Gallo's lighting is mostly dim red lights, a la your everyday haunted house, making it difficult to create much visual flair. While the play need not be a complete campfest, one can't help but wonder what a wonderful production might result if these designers and actors were pushed to think in more creative, more comic, more over-the-top terms.

Clive Barker's Frankenstein In Love

by Joel Beers

OC WEEKLY THEATER | REVIEW Vol. 6 No. 48 Aug. 3 - Aug. 9, 2001

In an era of safe, harmless, thoroughly middle-of-the-road theater escapism, who wants to shock? Clive Barker does, and he does so exquisitely. The Rude Guerrilla Theater Co. has struck up a relationship with Barker, a horror writer and filmmaker whose most notable contributions to the genre are the Hellraiser and Candyman franchises.

But Barker started on the London stage, and to the stage he returned last year when Rude Guerrilla produced his History of the Devil. The same company is now tackling his Frankenstein In Love, a genuinely creepy, unabashedly sick play in production at the Empire Theatre.

How creepy and sick? Two words: infant necrophilia.

There is more to Frankenstein In Love than merely horrific acts, though. Barker is a talented writer with a rich sense of language and no shortage of ambition. With this play, he attempts to marry Mary Shelley's 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein with the genre of Grand Guignol theater, a French creation of the late 19th century that specialized in explicit horror, with hands cut off and eyes gouged out onstage. The pairing works on some level. This Dr. Frankenstein is no misguided man of science or half-crazed creator: heís a man so in love with life that he canít help reveling in death. In his laboratory deep beneath the palace of a South American dictator (more on that in a moment), the good doctor carries out his atrocities, creating grotesque creatures that eat flesh, rape dead bodies, shoot up heroin and read Plato.

And though Barker, a horror writer by trade, might seem perfectly content to shock for shock's sake, there's a method to the onstage madness that illuminates one of Shelleyís themes: the danger of humans losing touch with nature and thus part of their humanity. Barkerís Dr. Frankenstein is so enraptured of human nature that heís willing to destroy and mutilate a few humans in his quest to discover deathless life. In essence, Barker flips Shelley's theme on its head: Dr. Frankenstein hasnít lost touch with natureóheís madly obsessed with it. But he still loses all semblance of humanity.

That's the intellectually probing part of Barker's treatment. Whatís less effective is his decision to update the tale to modern times and layer the proceedings with a lot of intriguing ideas that never feel adequately explained. Most obvious is the fact that Dr. Frankenstein is now a Jew working in league with a third-rate South American dictator, and his monster is now a Che Guevara-like Marxist revolutionary who walks on fire and incites peasants to revolt. It feels like a swept-together collection of random contemporary references. It makes no sense, and Barker doesnít seem interested in answering some obvious questions: What purpose does it serve to make Dr. Frankenstein a Jew? What is this Auschwitz ring coveted by the evil Catholic cardinal who blesses the doctorís scalpels before he uses them to mutilate people? How does his monster, El Coco, inspire loyalty in the peasant masses?

Rather than politically charged, the underdeveloped ideas feel politically perfunctory. But if it sometimes stumbles on the thematic and intellectual level, Frankenstein In Love is otherwise an absolute gas. This Rude Guerrilla production (co-directed by Alexander Rodriguez and Weekly contributor Dave Barton) doesn't always capture the full color and claustrophobic feel of Barkerís script (whores arenít whorey enough and some monsters don't look monstrous enough), but thereís enough theatrical grist in this bloody mill to keep things interesting, and the cast is more than up to the task. What the production sometimes lacks in special-effects wizardry it makes up for in its actorsí approach. Robert M. Tully's is a riveting El Cocoóand he benefits from some stellar makeup. In Barkerís hands, this monster is a patchwork of bodies. One hand belongs to a poker player who killed his family before offing himself. The other belongs to a blind writer; in his voice and his movements, Tully perfectly captures the yin and yang of both. This is a lost soul who eats flesh and has no problem murdering but is tortured by his own lack of humanity. Heís a noble monster in every aspect.

There are also some fine actors in supporting roles, but someone should make a note to immediately axe any and all accents. As Frankensteinís dutiful assistant, Russ Marchand tends to camp things up a bit much but supplies some needed comic relief. Stephen Wagner kicks ass as one of Frankenstein's mutilations (Mattos) and as a necrophiliac doctor (Dr. Fook). It's good, bloody, disgusting stuff, so bloody and disgusting that if there's any validity to the notion that the most offensive art is the most valuable because it forces us to make moral distinctions, then Barker, the horror fantabulist, is also a moral provocateur.

Frankenstein in Love at Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana, (714) 547-4688. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 p.m. Also Thurs., Aug. 2 & 9, 8 p.m. Through Aug. 12. $12-$15.