V18 N30

10/13: Young Dracula At
Exit Zero Filling Station
Undertow
Terry O’Brien’s legendary column... social satire, shameless plugs — and general self-indulgence
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEKSEY MORYAKOV
Jeff Sharkey, Terry O’Brien
You can all exhale (as I’ve been doing
for several days straight), the long
national nightmare is over. Young
Dracula has come and gone. It had a
beginning, a middle and an end and
nobody got hurt so... the metric by which I
measure the baseline success of a show. On
top of that, it was also a hell of a lot of fun. I
had forgotten how much I enjoyed prowling
the stage spouting stupid jokes, one-liners and
ad-libs (of which there were plenty, as, though
I remembered a shockingly high percentage of
my lines, there were a few, uh, gaps to be filled).
The run up to the show was fraught, with
weather delaying it by a day (sorry to the guests
who could not make the switch from Monday
to Tuesday, you missed a good time), no idea
what the stage was going to look like (Ryan
Long and his Riddlesbrood Touring Theater
Co. trucked down this mobile stage rig, which
was awesome, but we didn’t see it until day-of)
and my very deep concern that the show would
not go over very well (a concern that had me
flop-sweating when the first scene in the first
show went laugh-free despite several of my
brilliant jokes).
But those worries swiftly passed as the
day wore on. Despite some morning sprinkles
the weather held off and the grey, overcast
skies actually became part of the scenery, the
stage and set came together beautifully and
once everyone understood it was that kind of
show (think Blazing Saddles meets Airplane), the
laughs were loud and plentiful.
My castmates all settled in and, once we
got going, it was like falling off a bike. Amanda
Brough was Laurel to my Hardy as Mrs Leach,
the grumpy housekeeper in constant gastrointestinal
distress. Jeff Sharkey was suitably stupid
as Ben Fields (Renfield?). I wrote this part
for myself and originated it in 2017, but Jeff’s
inherent, natural stupidity lifted it to a whole
new level. (ZING!) Miranda DeLong brought
her millennial angst and cutie-patootiness to
the part of Carolina Franklin, her lovelorn character
getting some of the biggest laughs of the
night. Lisa Weck brought a vapid innocence to
the part of Isabella, Dracula’s daughter, which is
a real feat of acting as Lisa is neither vapid nor
innocent. And Kevin Ebner did some Capital
A ACTING! as Nevada Smith (totally not a
rip-off of Indiana Jones) and was something
of the company cheerleader; as Kevin goes,
we go. Also helpful was Taran Christen, who
played all of our sound cues at the right times
and, more importantly, fed the title character
the lines he could not remember.
Finally, there was me, the glue that held our
gears together, the sugar in our gas tank, the
iceberg right ahead. To call this show dumb is
an insult to the word dumb. Gloriously, delir-
Jeanie, Ted, Karen
wise men say
only fools rush in
but i can’t help falling in malt with you.
Brady, Amie, Rose, Bob
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October 22, 2020 EXIT ZERO Page 21