Dracula
Bram Stoker, who was the first to bring us Dracula, probably isn’t spinning in his grave right now, but he may be having a raucous laugh there. His current rib-tickler is the Dracula that Kate Hamill has freely adapted from Stoker’s novel. It serves as one half of Dracula/Frankenstein, the two pieces playing, for better or worse (mostly worse), in repertory at the Classic Stage Company.
How freely has Hamill appropriated Stoker’s work? Are you sitting? She’s turned it into a #MeToo tract in which the beloved vampire Count doesn’t transform into a bat so he can fly to ladies’ bedrooms where he resumes human (?) form to enjoy a blood cocktail quaffed at a delicate throat.
Oh, good gracious no. This Count Dracula (Matthew Amendt) does a whole lotta strutting as Man with a capital “M.” He’s Everyman who’s told by tall and attractive Mina Harker (Kelley Curran) that “We have given you so much power over us.” It’s a centuries’ old and ingrained concession that Hamill is out to overturn once and for all.
Mina, as it happens, is frequently menaced by the Count; but isn’t, in his words, to “my taste.” On the other hand, she’s married to Jonathan Harker (Michael Crane) and expecting their baby. In Hamill’s treatment, it’s Jonathan who is very much to Dracula’s taste. Also tasty to him is Lucy Westenra (Jamie Ann Romero), Mina’s best friend who’s engaged to another man not worth his weight in wooden stakes. He’s thick-headed Doctor Seward (Matthew Saldivar).
Someone does come to aid these stalked figures: Doctor Van Helsing. She ( yes, She) is played by Jessica Frances Dukes, who, as Van Helsing, denies she’s “a lady” every time she’s addressed as such. She’s anything but. She’s Today’s Woman with capitals “T” and “W.” It’s she who gets to put the male Doctor Seward, repeatedly questioning her medical knowledge, in his place as “pompous” and “pig-headed.”
The crusading Van Helsing (perhaps a spoiler follows) does get to vanquish Dracula—and with Mina’s help. Subsequently, she delivers a treatise on women’s equivalence to men on the issue of power. Still, she isn’t certain Mina gets the feminist point. Whether Mina does or doesn’t won’t be tattled on here.
As these focal folks are getting their blood boiled and spilled, a few other characters incessantly skulk. The most prominent is Renfield (played by Hamill herself). Actually, she’s a Mrs. Renfield, who’s hoping to be reunited with her husband, who’s been disappeared by Dracula’s hand or teeth. Renfield wears a mottled grey outfit featuring many grey straps that make her look bandaged and bondaged. She has come to regard Dracula as a father but eventually, and to her dismay, learns better.
Two menacing spectral figures whom Dracula calls his wives, Drusilla (Laura Baranik) and Marilla (Lori Laing), sneak around in filmy grey dresses. Drusilla often doubles as a nurse tending to the bed-ridden Lucy, although the same hospital bed containing others (Jonathan Harker, Renfield) is often rolled in and out.
In the last few years adapter Hamill has rather handily transferred Pride and Prejudice and Vanity Fair from page to stage. Needless to say, both sources position women in the foreground. Perhaps thinking she hasn’t yet been sufficiently specific about women occupying the same intellectual level as men, Hamill has looked to a novel fronted by a man on whom she can turn the tables with a resounding boom.
Unfortunately, in letting the Count loose on women as well as vulnerable men for two hours plus (with intermission), she’s written an increasingly ugly play that, oddly, includes the random cutesy moment. Perhaps she imagines that if patrons decide they’re at a comedy, they’ll ignore the mounting noxious atmosphere. She asks the actors to behave not with the silken menace that Stoker (and Anne Rice in her Stoker-inspired series) is able to achieve but with unpleasantly blatant strokes. To their credit and with director Sarna Lapine hewing to the script’s demands, they acquit themselves as well as can be expected.
Much about this Dracula looks quite smart. The color scheme, which set designer (and company artistic director John Doyle) and lighting designer Adam Honoré keep constantly in mind, is white, black, grey, and red. Though Duke appears in bounty-hunter togs. Hamill in institution-like garb, and Drusilla and Marilla in their sheer grey negligees, the others wear (varying degrees of) white. That’s the better to put the inevitable blood stains in shocking relief.
Which leads to the one outstanding Dracula element; costume designer Robert Perdziola’s solution to the stage-blood challenge. Every time Dracula plants his teeth into a quivering victim, a bib of red beads (sequins?) springs onto their shirts or blouses. Now that’s what qualifies as a true coup de théâtre.
Frankenstein
Tristan Bernays is the adapter of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and he’s been as radical in his way as Hamill has been in hers. He’s distilled the classic to two cast members: Stephanie Berry, who plays both Victor Frankenstein and The Creature, and Rob Morrison, who as The Chorus, mostly strums guitar. (For the most part, it’s his original music.) Occasionally, he assumes either Frankenstein’s speeches or the monster’s when both are in a two-way conversation.
It may be that by having Perry take on the two focal roles Bernays is saying we all have both sorts of characters in us. Maybe not. Maybe Bernays is reiterating the moral many have already drawn from Shelley’s indelible piece: You mustn’t fool with Mother Nature. Or maybe he’s going for something else. If so, whatever he’s getting at isn’t strongly made.
The most poignant moment in the 80-minute one-act is when The Creature—having risen from the table on which he (it?) was created and on which Victor Frankenstein has lain down—asks, “Where is my name?” Almost as effective is the segment where The Creature demands a bride for himself, insisting that if Victor Frankenstein has one, why shouldn’t he?
So Frankenstein can boast a few favorable ingredients. As directed, however by Timothy Douglas (with John Doyle’s set design, Toni-Leslie James’ costume design, and Leon Rothenberg’s sound design), there isn’t enough in Bernays’ adaptation of anything more than mild interest.
A final word on the Stoker/Shelley pairing: In both, women (Dukes, Berry) play characters written as men. What does that add up to at a time in the theater when this decision couldn’t be trendier? A sizable ho-hum.
