The story of Dracula on the mainstage at the Cincinnati Playhouse is not the one you might expect, even though the characters’ names are familiar — Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, Lucy, Mina and of course, the fly-eating Renfield. In this atmospheric, world-premiere production by actor and playwright Vanessa Severo in collaboration with Playhouse Associate Artistic Director Joanie Schultz, the legendary vampire’s story is turned on its head and viewed from a very different perspective — the female characters. It provides all the usual thrills, but with a few twists and turns it goes down a series of surprising dark alleys that will surprise — and delight and frighten — even the most veteran horror fans.
Yu Shibagaki’s spare scenic design coupled with Pablo Santiago’s evocative lighting design take full advantage of the technical capacities of the Playhouse’s new mainstage, Moe and Jack’s Place – The Rouse Theatre. The arriving audience enters to see a dark scrim curtain sliced by a single slash of light with swirling fog behind. Walls fly in and out, and shadows and shimmering pools of light set the tone throughout. (This production could not have been produced so effectively on the Playhouse’s former mainstage.) Sound designer and composer Thomas Dixon’s percussive, jangling score sets a nervous tone from start to finish, and minimal furniture — a Victorian bed and, of course, a coffin — slides in and out in a dreamlike way from moment to moment. This Dracula is still a scary tale — the first act’s final image is a masterful illusion — but humor and modern attitudes are frequently used to distract the audience before taking a sharp turn causing a breathtaking thrill.
Severo and Schultz, who created the show, also serve as co-directors. They have partnered in the past, including for Frida … A Self-Portrait for the Playhouse in the fall of 2022 with Severo playing the famous Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. That show offered incisive insights into the life and mind of a female artist. For Dracula, they have reshaped the familiar story and presented it from a female perspective. In a preview published by the Playhouse, Schultz observed, “Women are basically objects in [Bram Stoker’s 1897] novel, or so one-dimensional they might as well be.” Severo added, “We decided to take away gender roles. We looked at the bones and scaffolding of Dracula and turned it into a smart game of chess, where the Queen is the most powerful player.” They have advanced the period of the story to 1919, an era when women began to strive for gender equality.
Their decision has made the central roles of Lucy (Mia Hutchinson-Shaw) and Mina (Mi Kang), typically women who are little more than victims of the vampire, into the story’s drivers. Lucy, usually attired in a nightgown or a strange, green-feathered dress (Kathleen Geldard designed the costumes), revels in the thrill of Dracula’s grasp. Mina, wearing more traditional period dresses and suits, proves to be much more complicated, ultimately in charge of her own fate. Adam Poss is simultaneously attractive and menacing in the title role, but he is less the central character and more a catalyst to evoke the women’s evolutions as the story’s focal characters.
Harmon dot aut (identified in the program as “an Autistic/(dis)abled multidisciplinary artist” who uses they/she pronouns) is the quirkiest Renfield I’ve ever seen, anchored to a chair with a heavy chain and flipping back and forth between madness and sanity, fury and coquettishness. They are most often paired in scenes with actress Rin Allen as Dr. Van Helsing, a typically male role as the vampire expert, but reconceived by Severo and Schultz as a woman masquerading as a man to gain credibility. There is a weird polarity of attraction and opposition between these two that Severo and Schultz have used to further explore gender roles. “Every character in our version of Dracula,” Schultz said in the published preview, “has a dark part of themselves. I love that no one is innocent because that’s real.”
The men in the story are otherwise shallower characters. Julian Remulla gives a dithering interpretation of Dr. Seward, and a pair of suitors to Lucy (Donovan Woods as the squeamish, feckless Arthur and Torsten Johnson as the shell-shocked and possessed Jonathan) often provoke laughter. Jonathan’s domination by Dracula is effectively demonstrated by some fascinating bits of stage illusions with a chair that moves on its own, a floating quill pen and some partial disrobing performed by invisible hands. Andrea Cirie plays Mrs. Westenra, Lucy’s tradition-bound mother.
In his opening night curtain speech for the premiere of this new interpretation of Dracula, Artistic Director Blake Robison predicted that Severo and Schultz’s adaptation will soon be onstage across the United States. It has predictably been a chilling Halloween offering at many theaters, but now it can be a thoughtful, dramatic piece serving as an attractive addition to any company’s full season. In her director’s note, Schultz wrote, “New versions of old stories are what make theatre a living art form, one that is constantly pulling from our past but is also speaking in the present tense.” That’s what this Dracula is all about — and “tense” is a word with many facets, all present in this production.
Dracula, presented by Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park at Moe and Jack’s Place – the Rouse Theatre, continues through March 3. Info: cincyplay.com.
Subscribe to CityBeat newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
This article appears in Feb 7-20, 2024.
