Saturday, March 21, 2020

Theater Review: Kate Hamill’s ‘Dracula,’ Presented by the Classic Stage Company, NYC


Kate Hamill has carved out an interesting niche among today’s playwrights: adapting classic novels (Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility) with a feminist bent. I enjoyed one of these, Vanity Fair, produced for the late, great Pearl Theater Co., while taking issue with her view that Becky Sharp was less the anti-heroic schemer of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Victorian novel than a disadvantaged woman using any means necessary to succeed in a patriarchal society.

Ms. Hamill took even more liberties with source material in her new take on Dracula, which closed two weekends ago at New York City’s Classic Stage Company. Not that that’s unusual: Filmmakers, for instance, have used Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel as a series of suggestions rather than as sacred writ not to be tampered with. I’m not entirely sure that her central conceit—that the Transylvanian count is, above all, a “toxic predator”—works, even in a current environment in which rogue males are being confronted like the famous bloodsucker in his crypt.

Dracula has been presented in repertory with Frankenstein. I did not see the latter, but the pairing is natural enough: the two, which bookended the 19th century as landmarks in horror fiction, also launched the careers of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in their classic 1931 Universal Pictures films.

Over the years, Stoker’s novel has been interpreted in several ways: religious (the count, a kind of anti-Christ, retreats from the crucifix), political (Dracula comes from authoritarian Eastern Europe, while his pursuers represent the transatlantic democracies), and Freudian (he overpowers—i.e., seduces—men and women without regard to marriage vows, in a direct challenge to Victorian morals). (It’s possible, especially within the last week or so, dominated by news of the coronavirus, to see Dracula in another light: as a source of contagion and fear.)

Ms. Hamill’s might be the first interpretation I have encountered that looks at Dracula from a feminist point of view. It requires serious gender-bending to accomplish this. Notably, the playwright herself has turned Renfield, the middle-aged male lunatic asylum patient who eats flies and spiders for their blood, into Mrs. Renfield, a poet whose trust in the protective men in her life (father and husband) has come to naught now that she is under the spell of Dracula.

Mina Harker—traditionally one of the count’s intended victims—is transformed, in Ms. Hamill’s telling, into a pregnant avenger of her (un)dead friend Lucy and of her husband Jonathan, who stumbles home stark-raving mad after a visit to the Count’s Transylvania lair. As if Mina as a counterpart to Sigourney Weaver’s intrepid Alien monster slayer weren’t enough, she makes common cause with vampire hunter Van Helsing, an African-American female who swaggers onstage wearing a cowboy hat. (“You were expecting an old Dutchman?” she asks.)

In other words, literary purists and traditionalists are best advised to look elsewhere.

But this “bit of a feminist revenge fantasy, really,” as it is called on the title page of the script, had its own compensations, and Van Helsing’s wisecrack points to one of them: a refusal to take convention (literary or masculine) too seriously. Hamill gives herself one of the most gruesomely funny lines when Renfield requests a “plump, juicy, crunchy little kitten”—for purposes of consumption rather than companionship. And Mina becomes rightly suspicious when she keeps getting only short notes from her long-absent husband, invariably reassuring her that his Transylvanian host is “charming.”

All of this, however, serves a deadly purpose: satirizing a patriarchy as dangerous to the female soul as to its body. Lucy, for instance, offers little evidence of love in her explanation to Mina on why she is agreeing to marry the stuffy head of the lunatic asylum where Renfield is kept, Dr. George Seward:

“I have no family, and while I am comfortable enough—without a husband, I have no future, no prospects; I cannot even dictate how my money is spent, it’s all held in trust. But our whole destinies are wrapped up in the men we marry; once we are wed we are—little better than their chattel, according to the law, and I just—wish I could be absolutely sure of his character.”

Hamill’s skill with dialogue is demonstrated with that neat segue from large social context to Seward’s “character.” In short order, he will prove Lucy correct in her uneasiness, as his arrogance exposes her to Dracula. His post-mortem lament that she was “an angel” provokes a memorable retort from Mina that her friend was “vulgar—and funny—and clever—and complicated—she was not some porcelain idol for you to worship!”

As an Off-Broadway troupe, Classic Stage doesn’t have the same resources as larger houses, but the group’s artistic director, John Doyle—doubling here as scenic designer—used what it had to simple but telling effect. (All characters are dressed in white except for the outsider, Van Helsing.) Director Sarna Lapine drew out the talents of her cast, especially Matthew Saldivar as priggish Seward, Kelley Curran as indomitable Mina, and Jessica Frances Dukes as the irreverent Van Helsing.

Having seen a couple of past Classic Stage productions (including David Ives' Moliere adaptation The School for Lies, which I reviewed favorably here), and this original take on Dracula had me looking forward to the company’s next production, Stephen Sondheim’s controversial Assassins.  

But the coronavirus crisis has put rehearsals on that on hold for now. One can only hope, as a message on the company’s Web site assures patrons, that it will eventually mount the musical “in the coming months.” 

One hates to think of its season—like that of so many others in New York—laid waste by a disease as horrifying, in a far different manner, than the double bill it may have unexpectedly finished its season with.

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