The great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker has written a comic version of “Dracula” that is appearing Off Broadway.
Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll meet someone who can laugh at Dracula because he’s like family. We’ll also find out why grade inflation has become an issue at Yale University.
In the past, Dacre Stoker has written or co-written serious fiction about his great-granduncle Bram, the man who gave the world that famous bloodthirsty Transylvanian at the end of the 19th century. Tonight, the younger Stoker will venture into comedy in an Off Broadway theater where “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors” is playing.
He told me last week that he had put together some funny material to deliver when joining the cast onstage after the performance. He said he would take along a prop and tell the actors: “Loved the performance. You might need a transfusion.”
The prop won’t really be a transfusion: It will be red wine from a winery in Romania in which he has an interest. The winery is in Walachia, “the state below Transylvania,” he said. “We have given vampires to the country — why not get involved in commerce?”
Stoker said his mission was to raise the profile of his ancestor “so the creator himself becomes at least half as famous as his creation.”
He added: “This is how I started getting into writing the books and leading tours — asking, ‘Who is Bram Stoker?’ Bringing him into an Off Broadway comedy is another way to increase awareness of this guy.”
He also enjoys making Dracula funny. “It’s nice to see that people can poke fun at a scary, horrifying novel that’s been around for 127 years,” he said. (Our reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli called “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors,” at New World Stages, “a gender-bending play” that “pays no mind to the ‘terrors’ part of its title.”)
Dacre Stoker said his illustrious relative had connections to the world of theater: Bram Stoker’s “claim to fame before Dracula was running the famous Lyceum Theater in London for 27 years,” he said. He was the accommodating business assistant in the long shadow of the notoriously mercurial star Sir Henry Irving, the first actor ever knighted.
“Irving had extravagant tastes,” he said, and Bram, who had a master’s in math, “had to hold him back while he crunched the numbers” at the theater, the great-grandnephew said.
He also talked about the time his great-granduncle spent in New York: Bram Stoker joined the Players, the private club on Gramercy Park South, in 1893, when he and Irving were on one of eight American tours.
“I saw the book where he was nominated by Samuel L. Clemens, his good friend and neighbor from Chelsea,” Dacre Stoker said, “so Mark Twain nominated him. He had more names seconding him than any other page I saw in the book.” Others have written about Bram Stoker’s fascination with the American poet Walt Whitman.
Dacre Stoker, 65, a former member of the Canadian men’s pentathlon team who coached the team at the 1988 Olympics, said he had been “like this Indiana Jones version of a literary guy, trying to find the story behind the story, to bring this writer to life, to find out who Bram Stoker was.” He used material he found for “Dracul,” a prequel written with J.D. Barker and published in 2018 that envisioned what might have prompted Bram Stoker to create Dracula.
That book followed a 2009 novel, “Dracula: The Un-Dead,” which Dacre Stoker wrote with the screenwriter Ian Holt, himself a Dracula historian. It was the first Dracula project authorized by the Stoker estate since the 1931 film that starred Bela Lugosi.
Weather
A system sliding across the Mid-Atlantic states will mean a partly sunny day, with temperatures reaching the low 40s. At night, clouds will give way to a clearer sky, and the temperature will drop to around 30.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Friday (Immaculate Conception).
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Migrants and the mayor: New York City’s comptroller has restricted the mayor’s ability to quickly spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the migrant crisis — a major blow to his emergency powers.
A Changing City
Toward a quieter city: New York City, not exactly known for its peace and quiet, is expanding its use of “noise cameras,” which ticket the drivers of loud cars and motorcycles.
The rich are back: At the height of the pandemic, the richest New Yorkers left in droves. A new report based on census and state tax filing data has found a reversal.
Small theaters: New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three performance spaces, a history of cultivating major playwrights, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton. What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays.
Lots of A’s at Yale
One consequence of the pandemic has proved lasting at Yale University: Nearly everyone is getting A’s.
A new report found that nearly 80 percent of the grades given to Yale undergraduates during the 2022-23 academic year were A’s or A minuses. The mean grade point average — 3.7 out of a possible 4.0 — was also up from before the pandemic.
My colleague Amelia Nierenberg writes that the findings have frustrated some students and professors. What does excellence mean at Yale if 80 percent of the students get the equivalent of “excellent” in almost every class? Shelly Kagan, a Yale philosophy professor with a reputation as a tough grader, said that when “virtually everything that gets turned in” receives an A, “we are simply being dishonest to our students.”
The post-pandemic spike in grades is not unique to Yale. At Harvard, 79 percent of all grades given to undergraduates in the 2020-21 year were A’s or A minuses. A decade earlier, that figure was 60 percent. In 2020-21, the average G.P.A. at Harvard was 3.8, compared with 3.41 in 2002-3.
“Grades are like any currency,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who tracks grade inflation: They tend to increase over time.
This is not just happening at elite schools. G.P.A.s have been increasing at colleges nationwide by about 0.1 per decade since the early 1980s, he said. But private colleges tend to have higher average G.P.A.s than public colleges and universities.
At Yale, where an A is the new normal, the proportion of A’s and A minuses has been climbing for years. In the 2010-11 academic year, just over two-thirds of all grades at Yale — 67 percent — were A’s or A minuses. By 2018-19, the last full academic year before the pandemic, 73 percent were in the A range.
Then, during the pandemic, the figure jumped. Almost 82 percent of Yale grades were in the A range in 2021-22. The figure slipped slightly, to about 79 percent, in 2022-23. The new statistics come from a report by Ray Fair, an economics professor whose work was first reported by The Yale Daily News. He declined to comment on his findings.
Does any of this really matter?
Pericles Lewis, the dean of Yale College, acknowledged that students could be overly concerned with G.P.A.s.
But he added: “I don’t think many people care, 10 years out, what kind of grades you got at Yale. They mostly care that you, you know, you studied at Yale.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Tiffany frame
Dear Diary:
I was cleaning out my closets when I came across a small Tiffany box. Much to my surprise, it did not appear to have ever been opened. Inside, covered in plastic, was a lovely sterling silver picture frame nestled in a Tiffany blue felt bag.
Unfortunately, on close examination I could see that the silver had become tarnished. I tried to clean it, but to no avail.
I called Tiffany and was told to bring it in for repair. So I traveled to Rockefeller Center, brought the box into the store and was directed to the repair department downstairs.
I showed the frame to one of the women at the counter there. She called two other women over to take a look.
The three of them admired it, but then said that they didn’t sell Tiffany items.
“How could Tiffany not sell Tiffany?” I asked.
“You’re in Saks Fifth Avenue!” one of the women said.
— Eileen Rosenberg
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
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Source: Theater - nytimes.com
