New play examines the impulse to revenge

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Norma Serna (clockwise from top), Christina Thodos and David Thomases star in “Courting Vampires.

‘Courting Vampires’

At Clockwise Theatre,
221 N. Genesee St., Waukegan

Jan. 20-Feb. 12, 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays,
3 p.m. on Sundays

$16.50

800-838-3006, www.clockwisetheatre.org

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Updated: January 17, 2012 8:38PM

We’ve all wanted to exact revenge on somebody who has harmed us or someone we love. But often, we fail to think about what comes next.

“Courting Vampires,” written by Laura Schellhardt, and playing at Clockwise Theatre in Waukegan, will take audiences inside the mind of someone who has committed an act of vengeance.

Rill (Christina Thodos of Evanston) is charged with caring for her younger, wild- child sister Nina (Norma Serna of Waukegan), who has been infected with a deadly blood illness by a man, who is referred to as a vampire (David Thomases of Chicago), with whom she had a tryst. Rill, who once aspired to be a lawyer, murders the man for slapping Nina with a death sentence.

The action moves between the past, the present and Rill’s imagination, where the murder trial takes place.

“I love my sister very much,” Thodos said about Rill. “We’re inseparable, we’re like the same person. We’re that close. When she’s taken from me, so to speak, she really is ripped away from me, you see what I go through with that and how I end up killing this man, this vampire, and the play revolves around me defending myself.”

Disturbing passion

Thodos, who appeared in “Special Needs” at Clockwise last February and March, wanted to be Rill because she found the script “original and creative and disturbing and passionate and it addresses something in life that’s not pretty, but things that we all go through when loss occurs.”

Schellhardt, of Winnetka, who heads the playwriting program at Northwestern University, began writing “Courting Vampires” when she was earning her MFA at Brown University in 2005.

The oldest of two sisters and a brother was inspired by an article she read about a court case involving an HIV-positive man who knowingly infected his female lovers without disclosing to them he had the disease. The case was considered an act of premeditated murder.

But, it was the sentiment of an older sister of one of the victims that had the most impact on Schellhardt.

“Her vehemence in the quote talking about what was robbed from her — How to start a future when it’s the future that’s stolen from a person? — was pretty impressive,” she said. “It stuck with me.”

And, it made her think about her own siblings.

“The idea of anyone harming them in any way is ... It’s a big thing for me.”

Since Schellhardt is more interested in raising questions than making statements through her work, which includes the Jeff Award-nominated “Auctioning the Ainsleys” and “The K of D,” she’s taken a non-linear approach to “Courting Vampires” by placing some of the action in Rill’s mind. In this case, she raises questions about revenge and personal justice.

Uncontrollable

“Revenge is a natural urge. It’s not something we can control. So if there is an imbalance in our lives, something taken from us in an unjust way, we’ll naturally be inclined to want to right the wrong,” she said. “There are these situations in which that system fails, and more and more often actually. I am haunted by this question: What do you do when all the systems in place fail you and you’re left with this feeling of impotence? How do we cope with that?”

This leaves director Alexandra Main, of Glenview, with some challenges, especially between what’s happening in Rill’s mind and what’s actually happening.

“Hopefully, if I’ve done my job as director, the audience becomes an integral part of the action as judge and jury and will get a ‘sense of one light source’ and a ‘sense of the room getting smaller,’ ” she said. “The audience should sense that we’ve entered the realm of dream and of nightmare. A place of in-between-ness. Anachronisms abound and everything makes its own kind of sense ... in Rill’s mind. She must justify her revenge in whatever way she can in order to find redemption.”