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Drama’s Fresh Blood

BEWARE OF THE COUNT: Senior Rohan Dharan reads through the script with his co-stars at the rehearsal of the fall production, Ceremony of Blood. Dharan will play the lead role of Dracula in a play that is full of blood and gore, which has never been done before. OWEN WILLIAMSON / PHOTO

By Lexi Muir
<lmuir@hilite.org>

Senior Rohan Dharan stays after school almost every day. He rehearses over eight hours a week and spends countless hours at home memorizing line after line of script. Dharan is preparing for this year’s fall production, Ceremony of Blood, in which he will play the role of Dracula.
“When I read the script, I knew this would be the best role,” he said.

Drama director Jim Peterson said that Ceremony of Blood was chosen as the fall production this year because the calendar pushed the performance date up to Oct. 30 as opposed to its usual performance dates in early November.
“I’ve had this script for eight years but I’ve never had a chance to do it,” Peterson said. “People don’t want to go see a play like this in November, so the calendar really called for a Halloween theme.”

The play is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It is a semi-mystery about ordinary people turning into vampires and why. The setting of the play, rather than the novel’s Victorian era, has been changed to the year 1923 to incorporate some psychological developments, Freud’s theories and how they affect Dracula and WWI, which will include anti-war viewpoints and issues.

According to Peterson, the basic plotline of the play begins with Count Dracula’s invasion of England in search of new victims to feed his undying hunger. In doing this, Dracula finds himself only to be outsmarted by a brilliant woman played by senior Katherine “Katie” Teal, and he is eventually thwarted at the end.
There are many differences between previous years’ productions and Ceremony of Blood. The most significant difference is that unlike previous years, the play will be preformed in the studio theater rather than in the auditorium. This way, according to Peterson, the audience is as close as possible to the actors, and they can be scared easily.

“There will be two stages with an aisle in the middle,” he said. “The actors will walk through the audience to get to the stage and all the audience members will be within 25-30 feet of the stage.”
Dharan said, “This is different from any play I’ve ever done. I’ve never worked with the audience on all sides before.”

Along with being held in a different theater, many new special effects will be added to the production. These effects include blood, lighting, dry ice, sound effects and fog. The amount of “blood” in this production, according to Peterson, is much more than ever before.

“This is my first time working with this amount of blood,” said Peterson. “I don’t usually get into the scary, bloody, gory stories. There are a lot of death scenes so we want it to be bloody. The hardest thing about it is going to be getting the costumes clean for the next night’s production.”

The production will be performed on Oct. 30 and 31 at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 1 at 2 and 7:30 p.m. and Nov. 7 and 8 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are on sale at the bookstore for $7 as well as at ccs.tix.com. The Web site is new this year and anyone can log on to buy tickets for Ceremony of Blood. Peterson said that he hopes the Web site will be used to sell tickets for all future performing arts department productions.

Dharan said he encourages all students to come see the production. He said that the turn out last year was great, and he hopes to make it even better this year.

“(The play) is cheap entertainment and it’s very fitting for the time,” he said. “We’re making it so it’s not as family friendly. Plus, the script is amazing.”

Peterson said that his one hope for the production, other than it being a success, is that the audience members will truly be scared.

“(The play) is scary because you’re right there in the action,” he said. “With television, you can just turn it off. Here it’s in your face.”

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