Interview with a Vampire

By Daniel Mufson

At the end of 1986, Abdoh wrote and directed Rusty Sat on a Hill One Dawn and Watched the Moon Go Down. Abdoh had by this time directed several plays written by others, but Rusty was only the second play he both wrote and directed.  Earlier that year, his adaptation of Medea used Greek myth as a launching pad; in Rusty, Eastern European fairy tale and legend shaped a plot that uses for its premise the theft of the moon, a familial curse, and a vampire’s tale of love and murder.  Reflecting Abdoh’s fascination with violence inflicted by and on patriarchs, Rusty starts and ends with the death of a father and fills the intervening scenes with images of love vanquished by repressive, embittered, and brutal characters. Abdoh’s fascination with the mythic and the prosaic and the juxtaposition of the two manifests itself throughout the two hour, twenty minute performance.
In the beginning of Rusty, a king, unnamed, loves his queen, Leila. Interrupting their royal bliss, a fisherman steals the moon and thereby renders the queen disconsolate. (No motive for the theft is ever discovered.) The king, understandably perplexed at having been deprived of such joy, orders his sons to find the moon and return it to the kingdom; if they don’t succeed, they are told, “no kingdom for you.” After repeatedly unsuccessful efforts, the sons conclude that, instead of tracking down a missing moon, it might be easier to kill their father. This they do without compunction but not without consequence. First, the king, upon dying, is somehow reincarnated as a vampire. Second, Leila, now bereft not only of the moon but her king to boot, puts a curse on the sons and their descendents: Every 100 years, the sons of the family will be destined to kill their father.
From there, the plot of Rusty Sat on a Hill One Dawn and Watched the Moon Go Down becomes increasingly difficult to follow. The reincarnation of the king as a vampire seems to have something to do with Leila’s curse, but it never becomes clear just how the two are tied together. Part of the problem is that the play’s time span covers many generations. Some of the characters die, some don’t, some are reincarnated, some aren’t, but at any rate the pool of actors remains the same and it is not always clear whether a given actor is portraying a character from an old or new generation. After Leila utters her curse against the family, Abdoh stages a few episodes in which children kill their father. Mingled with the portrayals of patricide are the seeds of a love story between the Vampire and a woman named Camilla. According to the actor who played the Vampire, Tom Fitzpatrick, Abdoh may have thought of Camilla as the Vampire’s daughter, but nothing in the text suggests that to be the case, nor is it clear how that could have been possible.
There are four main parts to Rusty. The first, already described at length, establishes the origins of the  familial curse. In the second part, the audience witnesses a rather dysfunctional family’s Christmas dinner, which is also interrupted by the Vampire’s courtship of Camilla. This is in turn followed by a third scene, called Camilla’s dream, filled with evocative images but no action. The play’s fourth section ends with an explosion of violence and death. The patricidal sons, Andros and Salem, turn against each other, against their wives, and finally against themselves; all end up dead. The Vampire dies, too, though apparently of “natural causes”—the sun rises.
In this chapter, I will discuss ways in which Rusty is a sign of things to come and ways in which the work’s flaws reveal the play to be the product of a young director still uncertain of his vision and craft. The most notable differences between Rusty and the later works are Rusty’s slower pacing and nonconfrontational stance vis-à-vis the audience. Abdoh’s aesthetic would later become almost caricatured with the phrase “faster, louder, harder,” the man himself called an enfant terrible and known for shock tactics. Based on Rusty, such descriptions would have been hard to foresee. Sylvie Drake, writing in the Los Angeles Times, calls the play “by turns slow going and mesmerizing,”  while Michael Lassell, writing in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, writes, “Reza is a master of subtlety and fluidity. Nothing is rushed, nothing is jarring, which is appropriate since Reza’s aesthetic is purposefully meditative.”  The play was staged only a year after Abdoh’s participation in Robert Wilson’s King Lear workshop, and Abdoh might still have been digesting Wilson’s relatively languid aesthetic.
Nevertheless, trademark aspects of Abdoh’s authorial and directorial styles, not to mention images that he would use much later in his plays and the film, The Blind Owl, manifest themselves throughout Rusty, albeit usually in raw or immature form. Particularly relevant to what came later are the balance between ambiguity and clarity; the balance between flexible set design and a set design that has stylistic unity; the theme of the oppressive patriarch; and the nature of being inside or outside, confined or set free. Abdoh’s fascination with the oppressive rule and eventual subversion of patriarchal figures also features itself prominently in all the plays he writes later on and also in the works of other playwrights—King Lear, Medea, Kroetz’s Farmyard—staged by Abdoh in the early eighties. Among the overarching themes of the subsequent Bogeyman trilogy, a three-year project Abdoh created between 1990 and 1992 consisting of Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, Bogeyman, and The Law of Remains, is the dialectical relationship between Eros and Thanatos. All of these themes reveal themselves throughout Rusty with varying degrees of sophistication. Finally, on the broadest level, what is striking about Rusty is its fascination with dark, emotional extremes. Abdoh’s rage was manifesting itself well before he received the diagnosis that he was infected with HIV.

How much ambiguity?

In my introduction, I cited Marvin Carlson’s observation that Abdoh’s sensory bombardment of the audience does not, in Tight Right White, result in a feeling of frustration or confusion. Paradoxically, Rusty does result in confusion even though its pace is much slower and the stage action more focused than all the works that came afterwards. Rusty is a hard play to fathom for a variety of reasons. As I mentioned earlier, a story in which some characters seem to be immortal and others not, when combined with the practice of double casting, easily gives rise to confusion. The use of multiple sites for staging the play also contributes to a sense of muddle. The 24 scenes take place in four different areas of the theater, including its outdoor garden, where the opening transpires. It is not always clear how the different stages fit together in the overall context of the play.

The thread of the plot is elusive, but Abdoh manages to keep an audience’s attention by virtue of his images as well as by holding out the eternal promise that everything will make sense by the time the play ends. Alas, the promise goes unfulfilled. The first line of Jacki Horwitz’s review in The Santa Monica Outlook is, “Frankly, I was lost.”  Polly Warfield’s Drama-Logue review was reduced to describing isolated acts of different characters without making any attempt at describing the overall thrust of the narrative. Tom Fitzpatrick now has difficulty remembering the plot and has conceded that the details as to which character connects to which were not articulated clearly at all, even at the time of production.  Meg Kruszewska, who played Camilla, laughed at the idea of outlining a plot structure for Rusty. The important thing about Rusty, she argued, is not its plot but rather its mise-en-scène. Indeed, she maintained that the original premise for Rusty was that Abdoh wanted to do a play about a girl growing up in Appalachia, but Abdoh, once rehearsals began, at some point became carried away with the idea of doing a Vampire play and gradually dropped whatever ideas had been brewing about life in the mountains.
Nevertheless, Abdoh was clearly concerned that the audience might feel so confused as to become unable to connect to the story at all. His attempt at bringing clarity to Rusty is embodied in the use of a narrator—the “Rusty” referred to in the title. When the play begins, Rusty stands on a roof behind the audience and recites the following monologue, soon joined by the melancholy playing of a clarinet:

A thousand years ago, a king lived. A thousand years ago, a king lived in this land, and he loved. The king loved a fairy queen. The two of them were on a boat one night, and she sang to the moon. The two of them on the boat: the waves were calm… That night a fisherman went a-fishing; that night, a fisherman fished. That night, the fisherman caught the moon. The sky went black. The sky went black and the fairy queen wept as no one had wept before. The fairy queen wept, and the king’s heart fell to the ground. The king called his two sons. The king called his two sons and said: ‘Catch the moon. Rekindle Leila’s eyes. Brighten the stars… or no kingdom for you.’ So the sons seeked [sic] and not found [sic]. The sons seeked and not found. The sons seeked and not found. ‘No moon to be found,’ they told the king. ‘Catch the moon. Rekindle Leila’s eyes. Brighten the stars… or no kingdom for you.’ So the sons took the axe, and chopped of their old king’s head.

Rusty continues to describe how, after Leila witnessed the tragedy, her heart grew and burst, “opened like the Red Sea,” and she put a curse on the sons, on the sons’ sons, and on their sons, and so forth.
That Rusty serves as a narrator for the piece shows the extent to which the plot’s ambiguities were at least to some degree intentional. The first fifteen minutes of Rusty are almost teasing in their clarity. The above monologue is delivered slowly, and the repetition of phrases not only suggests the style of a fairy tale but also renders it virtually impossible to miss any important details. Abdoh seems to have recognized the importance of allowing the audience a point of entry into understanding the story, but he also seems to have been ambivalent about the necessity of holding the audience’s hand through the entire production. The more the play progresses, the less the narrator speaks; the dialogue between the characters, however, is not nearly as limpid as when Rusty addresses the audience directly.
A narrator is in many ways a resort for tentative or unsure playwriting, an often facile tool which can clarify that which could not be skillfully integrated into dialogue or mise-en-scène. Not that all plays with a narrator are necessarily inferior, but the device does not tend towards subtlety. A playwright’s proxy, a narrator can essentially do or say anything he or she wants. Although Rusty is largely responsible for bringing whatever clarity exists, at various points his reticence becomes obtrusive. His silence bears significance because he is implicated in the events unfolding before him. In his role as narrator, Rusty becomes subject and object of the plot, an onlooker recounting the tale, but one who is emotionally involved in its unwinding, which ends when Rusty carries the remains of the Vampire out onto the stage and recites, weeping, the title of the play. The words, “Rusty sat on a hill one dawn and watched the moon go down,” sound passive and peaceful, but in the telling of the story they are anything but. Applied to a vampire story, watching the moon go down (and the sun rise) means bearing witness to a death. This ending for the play, though, only gives rise to more questions: Why is Rusty distraught when the Vampire dies? If he were distraught, why would he sit inactively and simply watch the tragic events unfold before him? Abdoh leaves the audience wondering, essentially, “what’s he to Hecuba” from the moment Rusty finishes his opening monologue, and ambiguity is all the more perplexing because Rusty, the audience’s liaison to the characters, first demonstrates how useful he can be and subsequently opts to be mostly useless.
The most confusing aspect of the play stems from the cyclical nature of the violence that provokes and is provoked by Leila’s curse. “Every 100 years,” Rusty explains, “when the clock strikes twelve, two brothers kill a father.” Although numerous references to a dead father run throughout the play, the father is alive in the figure of the Vampire, who in turn kills various other figures he perceives to be a threat to his love for the young Camilla—who may or may not be the Vampire’s daughter. As certain characters reappear as ghosts and the generations seem to pass, it’s a little difficult to keep track of who died, who is alive, what generation we’re watching. Is Fitzpatrick’s Vampire the embodiment of all of the family’s fathers who have been murdered over the ages? Do the souls of the murdered fathers merge with the Vampire’s after shaking off their mortal coil? These questions have no answer. Rusty is therefore best discussed in terms of its individual scenes, themes, stylistic devices, and perhaps most important, the variety of ways in which set design is manipulated around the text and the actors. The text of Rusty is vague and difficult to follow, but a discussion of the set design facilitates any discussion of the play’s themes and point of view.

Rusty’s Set Design and the Exploration of Styles

The most interesting aspect of Rusty is the way Abdoh plays with set design. While other stylistic variables—the dialogue, the narrative structure, the actors’ conventions—stay more or less constant, the sets change drastically. Generally, a production’s set changes to reflect the fact that the action is changing location; in Rusty, the set variations not only reflect new locations but also stylistic shifts in the way Abdoh depicts the characters and their conflicts. If one were to see photographs of the four different sets of Rusty, one might reasonably assume them to show four different plays by four different designers. At the time he was working on Rusty and A Medea, Abdoh was designing his sets himself; his propitious collaboration with Timian Alsaker would not begin until the production of Minamata in 1989. There is an exploratory feel to the different set designs of Rusty, a testing of the ground, an inquiry into how the different visual vocabularies highlight different aspects of Abdoh’s writing.
The four breaks in the set design occur when the audience actually has to change locations outside and inside the Stages Theater, where the play was produced. The first set, outdoors in the so-called garden, exploits the openness of the yard for all its expansiveness; it is not clear where the playing area of the stage stops and the property surrounding the theater begins. Abdoh uses the openness to communicate the simplicity of the ancient, rural, fairy tale landscape  of the king and Queen Leila at the beginning of the act. The set provides almost child-like representations—a two-dimensional cut-out of the moon, a waving blue cloth for the ocean—which simultaneously foster an aura of ancient legends and an atmosphere of playful theatrical imagination. In this way, the stage design mirrors the playful repetitions—”That night, a fisherman went a-fishing; that night, a fisherman fished”—that sound reminiscent of campfire story telling. Later in the same act, millennia have passed, and the openness of the stage becomes a playground that helps foster the sense of Camilla’s carefree youth. This is particularly evident when two characters drive onto the scene in a Samurai Jeep which Camilla, dressed in a radiant white dress, bounces out of in order to dance in the headlights. The outdoor setting affords Abdoh opportunities to create spectacle, images with a magnitude appropriate to the expanse of time and legend the story was trying to communicate.
The story and the audience of Rusty then move indoors and become more confined, even claustrophobic—and more directly representational. The second part of Rusty is comprised of a Christmas dinner. A long table juts out at an angle perpendicular to the audience. The family and a priest are seated at the table, but Camilla sits on a stool, alone, upstage, against the wall opposite the dining table. The scene would look like a more conventional, realistic domestic drama were it not for small, jagged triangles of flashing white lights imbedded in the dining table. The lights blink in a rapid, alternating rhythm that serves as a counterpoint to the family’s halting dialogue.
Just as the set would look almost realistic save for the flashing lights the family so stubbornly ignores, the dialogue sounds—almost—as if it were written in the style of psychological realism. Any given line sounds more or less normal: “You need a brighter lipstick,” or “All I know is the bread you baked is stale.” Cumulatively, however, one notices that almost all of the dialogue has an edge of hostility to it. Sometimes the line itself seems harmless, but then the actors play with how a new rhythm for sentences such as “Let’s eat, mother,” can suddenly make a friendly familial rejoinder sound cannibalistic. The set and the dialogue are constantly hinting at the threat of violent eruption. The blocking is eerily static; all of the movements are small. Eventually, an eruption of sorts does occur: The Vampire’s head pops up from the center of the table and conducts a brief dialogue before ending the scene. The startling emergence of the Vampire’s head jolts us out of the more recognizable realm of the Christmas dinner and leads us into the more alien world of the third set, the set of “Camilla’s Dream.”
The third set has neither the spare playfulness of the first scene nor the stifling orderliness of the second. The vague familiarity of a domestic dining room is gone. The walls are white; the floors, black. A dimly transparent black pyramid sits upstage right; at stage left, a large pink sculpture with grooves resembling either a brain or piece of corral hangs in the air near a miniature witch, hanging in effigy. A priest sits motionless inside the black pyramid. Downstage center lies what looks like a corpse, which, as apparently dead figures will later do in almost all of Abdoh’s works, suddenly rises from her catatonia. To the left of the pseudo-corpse sits Tom Fitzpatrick’s Vampire, while Rusty stands against the stage right wall.
The scene owes more than a little to Jean Cocteau and Robert Wilson. The juxtapositions here are suggestive and elusive. The pyramid, a non-Christian burial structure, contains an apparently living Catholic priest. What the two have in common is the promise of an afterlife, which Abdoh once called a “prescription for immortality” that “I don’t buy into.”  Nearby, the giant, pink hanging brain/corral and the Vampire who sits near it seem to be a study in faded flamboyance–more colorful and eye-grabbing than the black pyramid and its immured priest, yet somehow the energy seems drained from both. The synthesis of an architectural object and a person evokes Cocteau’s Parade, in which the American Manager was dressed as a skyscraper, or The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party, where characters appeared as phonographs. The design of the objects is completely different—Picasso designed the costume for the American Manager according to Cubist principles—but the germ of the idea is similar. Abdoh’s execution of the idea bears greater resemblance to Robert Wilson’s stage pictures, geometric, static, and clean. The line that Cocteau, in his preface to The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party cites as a possible epitaph for himself, “Since these mysteries are beyond me, let’s pretend that I arranged them all the time,” provides an essential characterization of Rusty’s third set and helps lend the scene its nightmarish aura. The symbols, disparate as they are, have a unity. The Vampire, the hanging witch, the priest within the pyramid all suggest a supernatural world, a hereafter, a hidden order or existence invisible beneath the surfaces of daily living. In this context, the corral evokes lines from The Tempest, “of his bones are corral made”; of course, both the lines from The Tempest and so much of Rusty refer to the death of a father.
Finally, when the nightmare of the third set ends, the fourth set reverts to nothingness—a bare stage, its back wall a scrim that changes from black to white. Rusty moves from fairy tale playfulness and mythic expansiveness to end with a sterile landscape virtually without scenery—just the odd stage piece intermittently brought on and off—populated by characters who finally implode upon themselves in a rush of murders and suicide. The progression, if one could use such a word for it, is gradual: from fairy tale and legend to the domestic and humdrum, from the domestic to a dark dream world, from dream to nothingness. The fourth set, which abides for the remainder of the play, might at first suggest an open landscape but more likely is meant to evoke the negation of the natural outdoors from the first set, of the domestic life from the second, and of the dream life from the third. The violence reaches its apogee of multiple murders and suicide, and the closing “heath scene,” noted by Elinor Fuchs in so many of Abdoh’s later works, is absent because the magnitude of Lear’s heath scene—indeed, the magnitude of Lear’s fall, as well—itself is absent.  The ending image of a stage cluttered with corpses again evokes certain Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies, but the impact is muted because Abdoh’s exploration of character has not been as resourceful as his manipulation of the scenery.

Christianity and the Father

Almost all of Abdoh’s plays contain a repressive father figure or somehow broach the oppressiveness of patriarchy. In Rusty, this preoccupation merges with an interest in Christianity, its patriarchal roots, and the patriarchal structure of the Catholic Church. At around the time he created Rusty, Abdoh was especially interested in Christmas and its place in American culture. In 1987, he told Polly Warfield, the drama critic for Drama-Logue, that he was working on a script for a movie, Christmas at Mrs. McCoy’s, about a woman who has Christmas dinner at her house after she loses her job at the automobile plant.  Warfield recognized and mentioned the echo of the Christmas dinner scene in Rusty, and Abdoh replied, “I’m obsessed with the myths of Christianity, all the myths surrounding Jesus Christ and the apostles, the disciples. And the myths of creation. The Bible is my favorite reading. I’m always reading the Bible. I just love it.”  Christianity and the broad themes it encompasses fit well with many of Abdoh’s concerns. In literary terms, Christ’s ambiguous rolehe is for Christians both the Heavenly Father and the Son of Manparallels the ambiguity of who is son and who is father in Rusty.
Seven years after the death of his father, Abdoh, who himself plays the role of one of the sons in Rusty, runs into the garden at Stages Theater asking, “Wife of mine, wife of mine, apple of my eye, apple of my eye, what’s the matter?” She answers, “Husband of mine, husband of mine, cherry of my ear, cherry of my ear, your father’s dead.” “My father?” he asks, running over to the corpse, “Dead?” To which Rusty enjoins from the roof: “Funerals are where daffodils grow.” The curse has been put on the head of the sons, it is true, but why then does the curse exhibit itself every century as violence against a father? Indeed, what provoked the patricide in the first place? An impossible task set for two sons by their father: To catch the moon, rekindle their mother’s eyes, brighten the stars… or else? “Or no kingdom for you.”
The father who forsakes his son is the root of all Rusty’s drama; the forsaken son later becomes the focus of Bogeyman. Abdoh, however, refused to be forsakenor, at least, he refused to let the forsaken son remain a passive victim, and the father figures in Rusty and Abdoh’s other plays pay a steep price for their misdeeds. Preceding and succeeding generations become fixed in a cycle of recrimination and violence; the family becomes like the uroborus, the emblem of the snake devouring its own tail, a symbol of the endless cycle of death and rebirth.  At the same time, it is difficult not to imagine that Abdoh did not have deep feelings of regret at his father’s death, perhaps even tinged with guilt at not having been the kind of first son that his father had wanted him to bei.e., athletic, not involved with the arts, not gay. In Rusty and in the works discussed in following chapters, this ambivalence manifests itself as a depiction of repressive figures that gradually becomes morally ambiguous instead of Manichean.
Christian institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, are a natural source of fascination, a natural target, for someone who would describe himself and later the Bogeyman trilogy as preoccupied with “killing the patriarch.” The sinister priest who lurks about Rusty is a svelte precursor to the gluttonous authoritarians in Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice and Bogeyman. The priest in Rusty is primarily concerned with punishment, the restriction of pleasure, the bombastic delivery of self-righteous rhetoric. The Christmas dinner scene, which opens with the singing of
“Tidings of Comfort and Joy,” is followed by a moment of silence which ends when the priest, seated at the head of the table, blurts, “Save us O Lord from the hooves of the Beast!” Such explosive invocations, however, seem to be said by the priest more out of a desire to instill fear and to flaunt his privileged status with God rather than out of any sincere interest in securing divine mercy for the people around him. As the priest presides over the family’s Christmas dinner, the family itself is implicated as an instrument of coercion. Here, domestic family life seethes with hostility, the Christmas dinner itself (like all holiday family gatherings) an occasion of forced congeniality.
Abdoh compromises his indictment of fathers with the figure of the Vampire. In the Vampire, we find a father figure whose travails are rooted in his own authoritarianism. Through the suffering and isolation he has endured as a Vampire, however, and by virtue of his dedication to Camilla, he becomes a reflective, sympathetic character. At the end of the Christmas dinner scene, when Tom Fitzpatrick’s Vampire sticks his head out of the table, he does so as a sort of alter ego to the Priest, one with a refreshing lack of pretense and a sense of humor. When the Vampire makes his “entrance,” the Priest cries, “Become still as stones! The wicked shall be turned into hell and all the nations that forget God.” Fitzpatrick, in an inimitable wry tone, answers: “Please stuff his mouth with a sweet potato.” Camilla, overjoyed at his arrival and eager to escape her oppressive family, asks, with a beautiful absence of irony, “Do you want to see my slides?” The Vampire: “Oh, yeeeees.” The jovial harmony of their freely chosen companionship contrasts starkly with the simmering tension of the bonds imposed by familial and religious ties.

Signs of the Future

To conclude, the scenic variation in Rusty Sat on a Hill One Dawn also touches on a distinction that would surface in the later works: an exploration of expanses and limits, outside and inside, enclosures and openness. There is an alignment of Christianity, domesticity, enclosure on the one hand and the pagan, the wild, the boundless on the other. With the benefit of hindsight and what is known about all the works that came after, it should come as no surprise that, if part of Rusty would be staged indoors and part outdoors, the outdoor section would necessarily represent the pre-Christian ethos and the Christian imagery would be mostly confined indoors. “When the soul of a man is born in this country,” Stephen Dedalus says in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”  Abdoh was neither wholly Iranian nor British nor American, a gay man born into a Shi’ite family living much of his life in communities and societies prejudiced against Moslems and Iranians, not to mention queers. Abdoh had good cause to view nationality and religion and group identification in general as just so many nets. The sense of confinement Joyce articulated in Portrait pervades much of Rusty and, even more so, subsequent works, which go on to explore the nets of sexuality and race.
Abdoh returned to the use of outdoor space four years after Rusty when he directed Father Was a Peculiar Man as a co-production with New York’s En Garde Arts. In a way, Rusty hints at Abdoh’s distaste for directing in conventional theater spaces, which is where he would end up for the next several years—at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. When the LATC closed, Abdoh returned to his practice of finding idiosyncratic spaces for his works. Even watching Bogeyman, the last show produced by LATC before it closed, one has the sense that Abdoh was pressing against the confines of a conventional theater and its proscenium stage. As soon as he could no longer direct at LATC, he returned to the use of multiple stages which he first began to explore in Rusty.
In the years following Rusty, Abdoh learned the limits of inventive set design and began to realize the importance of building characters—or as he called them, personae—and providing the audience with more of an arc to follow. And as he did this, he grappled with the device of a narrator. Minamata is Abdoh’s last show with a traditional narrator—one who doesn’t interact with the other characters, who addresses the audience in a way that distinguishes him from the rest of the cast. But as the single narrator recedes in Abdoh’s oeuvre, the amount of direct address to the audience seems to grow. More and more, the “normal” characters become their own narrators, presenting their individual stories and arguments to the audience. The increase in direct address draws the audience into the characters’ struggles more effectively and gives rise to the distinctive acting style that came to be identified with Dar A Luz, the company Abdoh would form after abandoning almost all of the actors used in Rusty and all the works that came before it.