sarma

If I ever had a program for "Vampyro Freako", I've lost it. That might, in any case, be fitting, because I lost my way several times trying to find 83 Leonard Street where Ellen Klein's Ecole de Mime is located. I also had to shed a few of my preconceptions about mime before I could enjoy myself (which I most certainly did).

Most of Klein's troupe of adults and children do not perform with the cleanness or economy of gesture that we (or I) associate with classical mime. What they do is more like a hugely expanded and stylized version of actors' sense memory exercises. They use their bodies in a loose and zany way -swaying on a base of spraddled legs and bent knees.

"Vampyro Freako" is a happy, fiercely energetic mess of people, slides, props, and taped music going through a series of scenes loosely linked together by their common idea: the delights of bloodsucking. Everyone has a beautiful and horrendous makeup; almost everyone has tap shoes on (high-heeled silver shoes with the ties missing, saddle shoes: you can nail taps to anything). The children are especially gleeful -swigging blood from a bar at a vampire cocktail party, dying horribly from poisoned drinks (poisoned blood?) in a harem scene. Strap-hanging in a subway they are suddenly moved to sink their teeth in the nearest neck. This requires skill and cooperation, since the victim of the moment must be prepared to sink to the floor in direct ratio to the amount of bloodsucking that is being inflicted on him.

Everybody on stage moves all the time. There is no such thing as holding still for the main event. In one gory adult scene, a dental patient is sucked all but bloodless by a sinister dentist and his black-lipped nurse who bounces up and down merrily on the anaesthetized patient. No doubt the enraptured three-year-olds in the audience thought nothing of it: "Ride a cock (sic) horse to Banbury Cross." Every bared neck offers a challenge to every greedy fang. Demons win hands down over angels. Even a dead, well-crucified Christ wiggles his nailed-together feet when some hard-tapping demons with peculiar red wattles strut in to rock music. Good taste you can forget; what is Holy Communion but legal blood-drinking, after all? For some reason, a slice of bread, a carrot, and some other food (I can't remember what) elect to do a bit of mild tapdancing together. One (nine years old maybe) has endearingly wrinkled and grubby tights.

So it's a recital of some far-out neighborhood kids that somebody (Ellen Klein, I guess) had the wit to organize. I suspect that ideas were contributed by everyone. "We did it!" shrieked the baby vampires from backstage after the event. "You were really terrific", said some friendly parents to a little girl with a red face, black lips, sequined eyes, and driblets of fake blood running down her chin, "really, you were."