Saturday, September 06, 2014

Honourable Mentions: Carmilla: A Play in One Act

My friend David MacDowell Blue is a big fan of vampires, but more so he is a huge fan of Carmilla and, of course, why not – it’s a seminal piece of vampire literature.

David created the annotations for the Annotated Carmilla and I was honoured to be asked to produce the foreword for that volume.

More recently he has translated the story into a play format and it ran, to great success, at Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group in North Hollywood. Unfortunately there was an ocean in the way and I didn’t get to see it, but was impressed with the idea that he lifted it from the original 19th century setting and placed it in a just post-second world war setting, having heard his rationale for doing so.

David recently sent me a copy of the script – and my thanks for that – and so I have written this honourable mention based around the published script. Of course the script only gives me a wee glimpse into the actual performed play but a much wider view of the thought process that led to the re-imagining. Having got that I am even more impressed with the resetting of the story, it works really well.

Of course I’m biased, David is a friend of mine, but perhaps you’d like to get the script – to see how well it works, or maybe even to perform the play. It’s available at amazon:

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