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Undead end
Stoneham revives Count Dracula
BY SALLY CRAGIN
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Sometime in the ’60s or ’70s, Dracula went from menace to camp. Who’s to blame — Lily Munster? Count Chocula cereal? Sesame Street’s Count? Nowadays the Carpathian ghoul is more likely to prompt giggles than gasps. But not during act one of Stoneham Theatre’s new Dracula (through November 6). The adaptation was penned by artistic director Weylin Symes in just five months, and its style owes much to the most effective recent version of the story, Werner Herzog’s 1979 film Nosferatu, which starred Klaus Kinski. As the play begins, newlyweds Mina and Jonathan Harker are parting company and Jonathan is off to Transylvania to sell the mysterious Count Dracula a vacant abbey. Keeping Mina company is peppy cousin Lucy. As the scene shifts between Jonathan’s increasingly doomed journey and Mina’s anxious vigil, Symes reduces dialogue to a minimum. The spare script works with Susan Zeeman Rogers’s series of textured black flats in front of Seussical-esque bare trees; these tilt toward the stage, sliding back and forth or even opening like the pages of a book to denote various locales. The stylized — even balletic — rendition is reminiscent of Robert Wiene’s 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (and the German Expressionist art that inspired it). Sound designer Ben Emerson’s post-mod echoey chimes, electronic chittering, and howls add to the atmosphere. And there’s enough dry ice to keep a metal band happy. In any other production, boyish Diego Arciniegas might seem an odd choice for Dracula, but the actor evokes the feral Kinski spirit, gracefully springing out of dark corners and hissing and cringing, his speech a guttural, implacable groan. Equally fine are Angie Jepson as the girlish and doomed Lucy and Joy Lamberton as a warm and thoughtful Mina. I wish Nathaniel McIntyre’s Jonathan could match her warmth. The second act, unfortunately, veers into camp. The usually stalwart Richard McElvain makes a blustery and too frequently inaudible Van Helsing, the man with the vampire-vanquishing plan. (His accent vacillates between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mittel Europe.) Owen Doyle’s Dr. Seward (Lucy’s suitor, who runs a sanitarium) gets increasingly monotonous and unsympathetic. And these folks aren’t well served by the second half of the script, which becomes talkier and sacrifices atmosphere to explication. What theatergoer doesn’t know about anti-vampire measures like garlic, crosses, and sunlight? Symes hints at subthemes that don’t get developed, among them the idea that Seward’s work with the mentally unstable intersects with his own need to get wised up about the monster in their midst. This Dracula is on the right stylistic track, but as the piece progresses, the stakes — so to speak — need to be raised.
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