Dracula At Hartford Stage
Ancestry.com recently informed me that my DNA suggests that I do not like scary movies. Was the cosmos warning me away from seeing the American premiere of Dracula by British playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm at Hartford Stage, which was reputed to be super scary? If so, I failed to heed the warning. I went, I saw, I enjoyed it.
Malcolm’s Dracula is quite unlike any other version of the well-known tale I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a bunch, on stage and screen. For one thing, it hews very close to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel.
More interestingly, this version is presented as a tale told by Mina Harker (Sara Gutierrez), the last surviving member of those involved in the account Stoker pieced together from diaries, correspondence, and news articles. She is now involved in something of a traveling theatrical entertainment with a very serious purpose. Assisted by a volunteer taking on the role of her late husband, Jonathan Harker (Lucas Dixon), she recounts this horrific story to warn people of the evil that exists in our seemingly innocent world.
Fear and love (or at least a twisted version of it) are the watchwords of Malcolm’s piece. Told with the aid of four ensemble members, three women and a non-binary actor, this Dracula is highly theatrical, occasionally meta-theatrical.
As you might expect from a playwright who co-founded a theatre company called Terrifying Women, who is telling a story in which stereotypically beautiful women are depicted as victims, this Dracula fairly drips with righteous feminist anger.
When Malcolm springs her surprise ending unreconstructed male chauvinist pigs in the audience might feel distinctly uncomfortable and nervously reach for their necks or other vulnerable body parts.
Anchored by a commanding performance by Gutierrez as Mina, Dracula packs a lot into its intermission-less 140 minutes. Despite some slow spots, Malcolm does a remarkable job of keeping the proceedings suitably spooky, relying on the audience’s imagination as much as on stage trickery.
For example, Dracula is mostly present as a disembodied voice. When he does appear, briefly, it is as a dimly lit black shape in the shape of a man or wolf. We never see his face.
The narrative device has an unavoidable distancing effect and the tendency of director Jackson Gay to allow ensemble members to go for laughs where a gasp or stunned silence might have been the more appropriate audience response tends to dissipate the suspense and spookiness.
Nonetheless a great deal remains. A lion’s share of the credit for the considerable eeriness that pervades Dracula belongs to the handsome physical production on Hartford’s thrust stage. The sets by Riw Rakkulchon, lights by Paul Whitaker, and sound design by Caroline Eng are all top notch. The costumes by Fabian Fidel Aguilar play a vital role, especially as ensemble member Scout Backus as Lucy transforms from giddy ingenue to a truly scary vampire with an unquenchable blood lust.
And Mina’s final speech is a grabber.
I didn’t die of fright or soil myself in fear, but I found this Dracula an appropriate way to observe the Halloween spirit.
Dracula continues at Hartford Stage through November 1, 2026. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Hartford Stage website.
Footnote: I was pleased to see that in the program notes, Hartford Stage consistently refers to the Yale School of Drama, from whence most of the talent on and behind the stage originates, rather than using its current moniker, the Bloated Plutocrat School of Drama.
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