Production of vampire comedy `Tainted Blood’ lacks bite

A stable boy evaporates when sunlight shines on his face. A young woman eats a squiggling worm. A promiscuous housemaid’s flirtations are quieted through decapitation. The hair of a middle-aged woman turns from gray to gold. Could it be she has been bathing in virgin blood again?

It’s not exactly the sort of question you’d like to be considering during an overnight stay in the country, but it’s the kind that keeps you paying attention to Tom Jacobson’s vampire comedy “Tainted Blood,” playing through March 7 at the Penobscot Theatre. Despite a weak, long-winded script and some hokey acting, the show is an oddly fun night of theater, but be sure to bring a scarf to protect your unbitten neck — or to cover your eyes when the blood starts splurting.

A mixture of melodrama, drawing-room comedy, contemporary social commentary, and slasher sensationalism, “Tainted Blood” brings together literary greats Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Bram Stoker to battle Dvapara, an Indian mesmerist who can’t seem to keep his canines to himself. The group, including Wilde’s fiancee Florence and her eccentric Aunt Octavia, gathers at the Wilde country home on the shore of Lough Corrib in Ireland for a late-night spook session with Dvapara, who is, unbeknownst to them, an ancient vampire.

The meeting with Dvapara is one of several odd morbidities with which Wilde is engaged due to discouragement with his career. He knows Dvapara will thrill the guests with intrigue, but he doesn’t know that the “professor of antiquity” will also be bloody draining. The night takes on unexpected dangers when Dvapara is inexcusably late, and a stable hand arrives, hysterically screaming of a graveyard meeting with a blood-sucking “blighter.” The boy unwraps the scarf from his neck and exposes teeth marks in his skin.

No one believes the boy’s story until Dvapara appears and proves himself to be more than your average, run-of-mill seance host. Wearing a long cape and speaking in a cultured tongue, Dvapara entrances everyone, except the literary men who are both skeptical of Dvapara’s line of work and perplexed by Florence’s bizarre recounting of her life as a 17th century countess, whose beauty secret involves large quantities of fresh blood. Nor are the men too pleased with the reappearance of a housemaid, who happened to be dead when last they saw her.

In addition to being a fiction about what might have happened if these famous Brit writers had been partners in the paranormal — they all were alive in 1878 when the play takes place — the play is obviously about the contemporary AIDS pandemic. The metaphor of tainted blood, that which places one in the realm of the living dead, is a powerful one, and Jacobson poses some pertinent questions about trust between partners and the power of love.

Although everyone is a potential victim of Dvapara’s tyranny, and the women, in fact, suffer more overtly than the men, the play is deeply emotional about the relationships between men. It is Wilde whom Dvapara really wants, and about whom the story is most concerned.

Yet, at no time are we really gripped by the emotion — or the humor — of the play. Some of the scenes are slapstick, some serious, some corny, and the unevenness keeps this play from being anything other than light entertainment.

Special effects, by scenic artist Jerald Enos and lighting designer Ted Thomas, are the most interesting aspects of the production. Christopher J. Guilmet as Wilde and Lisa Goodness as Florence offer the most solid and respectable performances. Craig Peritz’s deep-voiced Dvapara is alluring and handsome, though laboriously slow with words. In general, however, this is not a particularly competent cast. If nothing else, the attempt at a variety of British accents onstage takes the audience on a linguistic trip around the world.

“Tainted Blood” will be performed 8 p.m. Feb. 14, 20, 22, 28, March 5 (signed) and 7; 2 p.m. Feb. 16 and March 4; and 10 a.m. March 4 at the Penobscot Theatre. For tickets, call 942-3333.