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.
