Just the Right Amount of Blood

Among the directorial challenges Dave Barton faced in staging “Frankenstein in Love,” a sometimes funny, sometimes philosophical but altogether gory play by horror master Clive Barker, was the careful, trial-and-error calibration of how much blood to spill.

During rehearsals, Barton said, spectators in the front row of the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company’s tiny Empire Theater were getting splashed. He gradually found ways to make the spurting more sparing. After a recent performance, close inspection revealed blood puddles at every corner of the stage--but not a drop beyond its margin. Mission accomplished.

Barker had warned Barton that “Frankenstein in Love” would be no easy undertaking. The best-selling author, known for his novels, short stories and movies (including the “Hellraiser” and “Candyman” series), got to know the storefront director last year when Rude Guerrilla staged Barker’s kaleidoscopic, “The History of the Devil.”

“It was sterling work, really tremendous,” said Barker, who came by limousine from his home in Beverly Hills for that show, in a recent phone interview. But I warned Dave right off the bat that “Frankenstein in Love” was the more difficult piece and the more controversial. Grand Guignol isn’t designed to please people. It’s designed to stir them up.”

In “Frankenstein in Love” such notions as “to lose one’s head,” “to lose one’s heart” and “to shed one’s skin” are not taken as mere figures of speech. Barker, who was a struggling, penniless English playwright and stage director before hitting it big with fiction and films, said its challenges were such that he turned over the initial, early 1980s production in London to a more seasoned director. Until then, he had written and directed everything by the Dog Company, an itinerant troupe named after “Dog,” a werewolf story that was the first of the nine plays he completed before shifting to book-writing.

Plays were the thing for Barker from his teens to his early 30s. He began writing them as a 15-year-old at Liverpool’s Quarry Bank Grammar School--the alma mater of John Lennon. Having “done my duty to my parents’ ambition for me” by completing college studies in English and philosophy, Barker lit out for London and started the Dog Company with an old school chum, Doug Bradley, who went on to play Pinhead, the demon-in-chief of the “Hellraiser” films. Bradley played Dr. Joseph Frankenstein in the first production of “Frankenstein in Love,” opposite monster Oliver Parker, who went on to direct Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh in the 1995 film of “Othello.”

That initial run produced some shrieking and fainting in the audience, Barker said, as well as some unanticipated cleaning expenses for patrons’ blood-spattered clothing. Twenty years later, Barker notes, the profusion of anatomically correct film special effects has made the public much more experienced with strikingly realistic mayhem to the human body, and perhaps therefore less susceptible to attempts to shock.

On the other hand, he sees the theater as providing a uniquely intimate and unrelenting forum for witnessing the unspeakable.

“You’re in the same space with these horrors, locked in with them as it were. On the screen, you know sooner or later you’re going to be snatched away from the scene of terror to something which gives you some relief.”

One of the crucial lines in “Frankenstein in Love” is: “Everybody is just meat. The rest is the will to be more than meat.” There is enough butchery to back up the first premise. Barker says part of his mission in the play and subsequent works has been to confront audiences with the violability of what one of his heroes, the great pre-Romantic poet and painter William Blake, extolled as “the human form divine.”

“Confrontation with the fact of our flesh, which is a nice way of saying ‘meat,’ is [something] people are facing every day in doctors’ offices and hospitals,” Barker said. “You can’t get away from it. To lie about that and put a [pleasant] face on it is to worsen its impact when you are finally confronted with it. My method is to look at the imagination at its brightest and most transcendent, but also at the grim, dark aspects of the world with open eyes.”

There is a transcendent aspect to “Frankenstein in Love,” along with the horrific and the comic. The monster, stitched together from various dead body parts, struggles, not always successfully, against his own worst tendencies, including penchants for heroin, murder, fascism and cannibalism. Under the nickname El Coco, the monster has emerged as the commander of a Latin American revolutionary movement. He overthrows a corrupt dictator whose crimes include giving safe harbor to the lurid experiments of his creator, Dr. Frankenstein. In the end, the monster and the two leading female characters display “the will to be more than meat” by finding love.

Alexander Rodriguez, who co-directed “Frankenstein in Love” with Barton, said he tried to impress upon the cast that “as excited as you are about the special effects, you have to be 10 times as excited” about the need to embody (or, perhaps more accurately, “encorpse”) the characters with strong acting. Rodriguez says he was captured by Barker’s writing as a high school freshman in Rancho Santa Margarita, and not just because of its shock value.

“I had self-esteem issues, and it helped me. It taught me that you can see beautiful things even in the most grotesque” circumstances. Rodriguez says he stays away from the Barker movies because he doesn’t think they do justice to the author’s ideas.

“Most of the time the [film] directors fail to find the beauty in the horror and the grotesque. They just focus on making the blood flow. Theater usually gets an audience that’s open to thinking. It’s why the theater is such a good medium for [Barker’s] work.”

Barker, now 48, saw his career take off in 1984 with the publication of “The Books of Blood,” a series of short-story collections. He says first printings of each new book typically number 200,000 hardcover and 1 million paperback copies. Movies based on his stories play to many millions on screen and video. Theater, by comparison, is decidedly not a mass medium.

Barker remains busy with his books and films, and such other works in progress as a DVD release exploring his supernatural-themed paintings--Jonathan Davis, lead singer of the Orange County rock band, Korn, is composing music to accompany the visuals. But he says he may yet return to his long-neglected first love. He envisions a day when “I’ll get fed up with one other portion of my [creative] life, which will probably be movies, and then I’ll turn my attention back to the boards. I certainly love theater.”

In fact, he says, he still gets story ideas that he sets aside to develop--eventually--as plays. “I bring them out once in a while and stare at them and say, ‘One of these days, boys.”’

Meanwhile, he makes his plays available to small companies like Rude Guerrilla for the nominal royalty of $1 per performance. Barton, an avowed Barker fan, plans to continue mounting one of the plays each year until he has exhausted Barker’s stage oeuvre.

Rude Guerrilla has made a mark with openly sexual and violent material, but in shows such as “History of the Devil” and “Shopping and

“I find that idea extremely distasteful,” the director said. “We didn’t get involved with him in order for him to be our sugar daddy. The fact that we have a creative relationship with him is enough for me.”

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“Frankenstein in Love,” Rude Guerrilla Theater Company’s Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Aug. 12. $12-$15. (714) 547-4688.