Dracula Comes to Greenwich Village

By Lori Perkins

People who know me know that I love horror.  I was one of the founding members of Horror Writers of America in the 80’s, but they don’t know that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the first book I ever took out when I got my adult library card.

I have seen many productions of Dracula over the years.  I was even fortunate enough to see the production with Frank Langella and Edward Gorey’s stage sets on Broadway (I was a teen).

And my favorite Stephen King novel is Salem’s Lot which is basically Dracula comes to America, so I also love new and innovative twists to the story.

I had a visiting friend in town (who named her first son Bram, so you know where she stands on this) and we decided to take a plunge and see this un-reviewed production of Dracula at the Players Theater in the Village, because we know that even bad Dracula can be good.

The play is performed in a small theater which you have to get to by climbing three flights of stairs.  We are not spring chickens, so this kind of gave us pause.

And the set is kind of bare.

We expected the plot to follow the traditional Dracula course, and it did, with surprisingly young and impassioned actors, who held their space amazingly well, as the story was told back and forth between Harker, and Mina and Lucy, and Renfield, and Dr. Seward.  All good solid performances until you meet Dracula

Who

Blows

You

Away

Because Dracula is a woman.

A stunning version of a female nosferatu with blond hair, really long black nails and platform shoes that make her tower over everyone. 

She has a presence that is daunting and scary and powerful. As soon as she enters the stage, the entire production changes and you are sucked in (I couldn’t help that pun) on a whole new level.

From the moment actor Marie Antoinette enters the stage, the play has a life (or death) of its own.  There are subtle changes to the original story that come full circle making this version of Dracula an homage to Stranger Things and Stephen King’s It .

I was so impressed by this powerful, but simple and unique play that I reached out to the playwright, Jacob de Guzman-Lawson who describes himself as “a NYC based writer, director, and failed cellist.”  

I asked Guzman-Lawson if the play was originally written with a female Dracula in mind. “Dracula was originally written to be played by a woman but with he/him pronouns to go for a more androgynous and almost evil Angel characterization which was inspired by Tilda Swinton's performance as the archangel Gabriel in the 2005 picture Constantine. However, upon casting Marie and discussing the character with her, that original idea started to not make any sense and so we switched things back around to she/her. Dracula still feels flung out of space to me, so I sort of got to have my cake and eat it, too.”

Then I asked him how he found the actor. “I saw Marie Antoinette in a production of Almost Maine …her performance stuck with me in a way I can’t describe so when casting Dracula, I asked my co-producer to reach out to her. That show was also where I found Harker and the Narrator, by the way.”

And then, because I imagined that so many of those who go to see this play have their own Dracula personal history, I asked him about his. “Nosferatu was one of the first movies that I really loved as a kid and quickly devoured many interpretations of Dracula, but did feel that a lot of them did sort of homogenize into a uniform blob. I do like the more monstrous and otherwise regal interpretations of the Count, but I have gotten tired of the stuffiness and I wanted something more ethereal. My and Marie's Dracula I guess is the concept of destiny itself shoved into a humanoid form.”

If you love the Dracula story and/or mythos, make sure you catch this Off-Off Broadway production which is at The Players Theater at 155 MacDougal through July 27^th.

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