New York Times
April 12, 1984
Stage: 'Vampires' at the Astor Place
By FRANK RICH
One of the oddballs in Harry Kondoleon's ''The Vampires'' is a fledgling playwright who's written a patriotic, ''American naturalist'' drama about colonial times. Given that Mr. Kondoleon's own play is a terribly with-it absurdist farce, this fictional playwright is the butt of many jokes. What Mr. Kondoleon doesn't seem to realize, however, is that ''The Vampires'' is just as tired and formulaic as the old-fashioned claptrap he mocks. As the playwright on stage seems to be rewriting Paul Green, so Mr. Kondoleon seems to be rewriting Joe Orton (with periodic digressions into Christopher Durang).
''The Vampires,'' now at the Astor Place, is yet another excursion into the dark heart of a crazy all-American family. Directed by the author at a strident pace, it is stuffed past the brim with deranged suburbanites. Daddy (John Vickery) is a drama critic who, upon losing his job, briefly convinces himself (and others) that he's a vampire. His brother, the playwright (Graham Beckel), has a 13- year-old daughter (Elizabeth Berridge) who is alternately hooked on heroin and mystical spirtualism. The brothers' respective wives (Jayne Haynes and Anne Twomey) are cat fighters who persist in serving tea and coffee even as all hell breaks loose in the living room.
As he's demonstrated in the past, Mr. Kondoleon is a promising young writer with a tart tongue and off-the- wall sensibility. But this time he delivers even less than he did in last season's disappointing ''Christmas on Mars'' at Playwrights Horizons. For all the references to Catholic guilt, the void, lost illusions and the search for a ''transcendant state of being,'' ''The Vampires'' is really just an arbitrarily structured collection of determinedly outrageous gags.
The strained jokes aren't funny enough to sustain our attention, and the crypto-religious denouement, as in ''Christmas on Mars,'' is a bald attempt to impose unearned significance on a vacuum. Though Mr. Kondoleon is, I guess, attempting to eviscerate bourgeois propriety, ''The Vampires'' never reveals the sharp fangs that allow a play like Orton's ''Loot'' to wound. It's typical of this work's method and concerns that we're supposed to giggle when a character refers to an ashram as an ''ashcan.''
The topsy-turvy set has been smartly designed by Adrianne Lobel - who recently performed the same task for an almost identical play, John O'Keefe's ''All Night Long,'' at the Second Stage. As in that work and others of this genre, the style of the staging is neo-sitcom; the production looks like a hopped-up, surreal version of ''The Donna Reed Show'' (which is invoked in the text). The cast is as kinetic as the circumstances require - with the talented Mr. Vickery and Miss Twomey giving performances that uncannily (and, one assumes, unintentionally) mimic the respective mannerisms of Tony Randall and Elizabeth Ashley.
As the cape-swirling drama critic - a bloodsucker both in print and deed - Mr. Vickery has the only truly amusing role. He takes delight in the fact that one of his reviews drove an actor to suicide, and he pans a workshop production of his brother's play as a ''peabrain's peephole into politics.'' Needless to say, this character in no way resembles any real-life drama critics - none of whom, to my knowledge, own capes. But I must confess that Mr. Vickery speaks for me when, midway through ''The Vampires,'' he declares that ''the time for non sequiturs has come and gone.''
Crazy Suburbanites
THE VAMPIRES, written and directed by Harry Kondoleon; setting by Adrianne Lobel; costumes by Rita Ryack; lighting by William Armstrong; sound by Paul Garrity; fight direction by Randy Kovitz; production stage manager, David K. Rodger.
Presented by Stephen Graham. At the Astor Place Theater, 434 Lafayette Street.
| Ian | John Vickery |
| C C | Jayne Haynes |
| Pat | Anne Twomey |
| Ed | Graham Beckel |
| Zivia | Elizabeth Berridge |
| Porter | Paul Guilfoyle |