By Paige Laws

“Back, demon!”

“Stakes out!”

“Don’t get too close! They may bite!”

These sound like seasonally appropriate, high-stakes lines about the Transylvanian Man in Black. (No, not Johnny Cash. He was from Arkansas.)

We’re talking ’bout everybody’s favorite neck-nuzzler, Count Dracula, in the Virginia Stage Company’s “Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really.” This Dracula is a friendly, fangs-free kind of guy, clad all in white. (He’s Juilliard-trained heartthrob Robert Beitzel.)

And hold up, again. This Dr. Van Helsing (Darlene Hope) is an American Woman in Black, styling an Annie-Get-Your-Crucifix cowboy hat and a big fat chip on her shoulder, especially with condescending, patronizing men. And just such a one is Dr. George Seward (Dan Cimo, from VSC’s “Arsenic and Old Lace”), who runs a “kind asylum” for disturbed Victorians. Our adaptation is set in 1894, three years before Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” was published, and our setting is likewise Transylvania and then Whitby, England. (This version includes a couple of differing names and spellings too.)

Another change is the awareness among some characters and audience members of the ills of rampant paternalism in Victorian culture and our own.

Playwright Kate Hamill (well-aided and abetted by director Melissa Mowry) has taken lucrative liberties with Stoker’s “Dracula,” just as she has with other out-of-copyright classics such as Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “Emma.” Besides gender and nationality-switching key characters such as Van Helsing, Hamill has openly attacked paternalism on all fronts. This VSC production features, for example, an “all-female” creative team (with one nonbinary person, as Mowry specifies). According to executive producer Tom Quaintance and managing director Jeff Ryder, that’s a first in the long history of the Wells Theatre. In her playbill notes, Mowry calls this production “a labor of love and rage,” the rage directed against the degradation of women by men legally empowered to suck their life’s blood from them.

Some women, of course, are also guilty of allowing or even seeking such exploitation -– chief among them in this play being Renfield (tirelessly played by Anna Sosa, a local Equity actor, who is onstage acting virtually all of the play, before the opening curtain and intermission). Sosa is stationed on a stage-left platform where she mimes insanity silently or quietly whenever she’s not reciting diabolical prayers aloud. Driven over the edge by her abusive husband, she’s chosen to worship Dracula from afar, praying to him as her omnipotent Daddy, desired lover and protector. She’s crazy as a bedbug, which she would probably enjoy eating if she could find one. (Much to the disgust of her attendant, she eats flies, spiders and sparrows.)

The (sort of) sane women in the cast include Lucy Westerna (Blonde Venus-type Lizzie Morgan) who chooses feminine wiles to achieve her desires and thereby meets her demise. Westerna’s close friend and contemporary is Mina Harker (Madeline Calais-King, also impressively serving as this production’s fight captain). Mina Harker is pregnant by her husband, Jonathan, Regent University’s Eric Harrell.

Harrell impressively captures Jonathan’s linchpin everyman qualities. It is he who starts the play on an innocent note, traveling to meet a client who’s a count in Transylvania. As Van Helsing hilariously remarks to Mina later in the play, “Your husband fell ill in Transylvania? Nobody thinks to tell me these things?” It is also Harker who ends things on a most ambiguous note. Enough said there.

The cast is rounded out by Dracula’s sexpot sister-wives, Marilla (Brianna-Lynn Baker) and Drusilla (Komal Smruti), plus Victoria Blake, double cast as a merchant and asylum attendant. Yayra McGodfred plays a larcenous maid who fights the power with her sticky fingers.

Designer Jo Winiarski’s impressive uni-set serves for Transylvania and England using five black Gothic arches (rimmed with trefoil daggers), with five chandeliers, plus Renfield’s high platform to represent her room in the asylum. Sound designer Sartje Pickett provides the requisite country birds twittering theater-wide in Transylvania, de rigueur wolf howls, and purposefully asynchronous modern rock music as interludes.

Less successful facets of the play emanate from the playwright’s unwise decision to include multiple blood-curdling references to killing and eating babies (acts not seen, but graphically described). That’s never funny unless, perhaps, you’re as subtle as Jonathan Swift in the 1729 baby-eating classic, “A Modest Proposal.” Hamill, whose works tend toward heavy-handedness and excessive length, is certainly no Swift. There are plenty of perversions of Christianity, of course, with Dracula serving as a kinky Antichrist. Hamill is also overly fond of parasite metaphors, even chastising herself for it. As pregnant Mina says (and mothers everywhere thank her), “Please do not call my baby a parasite.”

What works well in the play is VSC’s usual excellent casting of locals and imported Equity actors (thanks to resident casting director Emel Ertugrul), plus first-rate staging and effects. (Fog usually stays onstage at the Wells, rather than enveloping whole rows of fanning, coughing theatergoers as elsewhere.) Hamill admits the play is “based loosely on the novel by Bram Stoker,” which, after all, has never merited total enshrinement. Hamill’s jokey if flawed versions of classics generally reinvigorate their source material with her feminist ironic stances. In director Mowry’s terms, Hamill is both “irreverent and reverent” — not an easy witch’s brew to concoct.

Page Laws is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu

Read the original Virginian-Pilot Article Linked HERE

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If you go

When: Various times through Nov. 3

Where: The Wells Theatre, 108 E. Tazewell St., Norfolk

Tickets: Start at $15

Details: 757-627-1234, vastage.org/dracula