Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really
Kate Hamill
San Francisco Playhouse
Since the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker’s gothic horror novel Dracula, hundreds upon hundreds of adaptations in cartoons, films, plays, and musicals from amateur to Hollywood and Broadway have spread the tale of the iconic vampire, Count Dracula, who moves from Transylvania to England to spread his terror. Generally in each rendition, helpless women are the primary victims of an often handsome, sexy, yet scary devil with a heroic male, Abraham Van Helsing, emerging to lead the charge to destroy the deadly menace and thus to protect the weaker sex of society.
To this seemingly endless parade of Dracula adaptations comes a new one that drives a stake into the heart of the tale’s main premise: the supremacy of masculinity. Kate Hamill’s 2020-premiering Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really exposes the Count for what he really is — a predator who preys on women and one who in many ways is no different in his attitudes of women than all the other males around him. Hamill also recasts the heroes of the tale as two women who far outweigh the males of the story in the wherewithal, courage, intelligence, and overall agency required to slay both the patriarchal monster and the sexist attitudes of all the men in their lives. Now in a fantastically imagined, directed, and cast production at San Francisco Playhouse, Kate Hamill’s Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really is an entertaining revamp, retaining the required blood and horror while also over-flowing with bitingly sharp wit, humor, and irony.
Hamill’s script mirrors much of the well-known journey of a young barrister, Jonathan Harker (James Aaron Oh), as he departs from Victorian London and from his pregnant wife, Mina, to go to his client’s dark and dreary castle in Romania to complete documents for a property purchase in England. Arriving at the residence of Count Dracula in the middle of the night, Harker is soon under the power and the bite (literally) of the Count and his two, creepy brides and will return with them to London with scars on his neck and poison running in his veins.
Once returned, havoc and horror erupt in the backstreets of London as well as in the lives of Mina and her best friend, Lucy. Lucy is reluctantly looking forward to marriage to Dr. George Seward who runs an asylum where men often place their wives by declaring them crazy.
Midnight bells in London announce appearances by a thirsty Count and his wives, with mounting threats to Mina and Lucy as well as to a young barrister who is not at all the man he once was. Just as the threat of a Count’s bite once again sharpens the tension, a cocky, sure-willed woman appears in western attire of wide-brimmed hat, trench coat, and boots bearing wrapped wooden stakes attached to her legs (rather than guns in her belt). In this version of Dracula, Dr. Van Helsing arrives to upend any hint that women should bow before the stereotypes and demands of the men around them — a hero armed with facts, not superstitions; with practical, proven solutions, not remedies based on sexist bias; and with to-the-point, no b-s retorts, not societal-expected responses of how women should and must be.
With brazen confidence and enough audacity to stare down and outsmart any monster she meets — Transylvanian Count or London-based doctor — Susi Damilano is a hoot and a holler as Doctor Van Helsing. When she enters, one can almost imagine her swinging open the doors of a saloon in the Old West as she saunters in with a stomp and a snort. (That connection is enhanced by James Ard’s sound design whose ongoing musical chords and snippets whenever Van Helsing appears hint rather plainly of the music heard in TV/movies westerns.)
Damilano’s Van Helsing immediately lets a sexist Dr. Seward know his place, demanding he go get her coffee and then just take a seat while she takes over the situation at hand of his fiancé’s mysterious (to him, but not to Van Helsing) condition. Van Helsing also makes a fast connection with us as audience, often turning in a quick, frozen pose and knowing look to us (with accompanying, appropriate sound chord) after she puts in place with a quick riposte to some dumb or sexist suggestion by a male (whatever monster is on the stage at the time).
Van Helsing first must counter the poo-poohing dismissiveness of Dr. George Seward as they stand over the convulsing, writhing body of his fiancé Lucy (a eye-popping performance by Nemma Adeni) who is near death after nightmares that were more real than Seward is willing at first to believe. Seward is initially rigidly steeped in his own deep-set prejudices about women and about his own male superiority. But the Doctor begins to undergo — with much initial reluctance — a healing quite miraculous that Josh Schell convincingly portrays to the point that we skeptics in the audience (as well as Van Helsing herself) actually believe and support his transformation.
But Van Helping’s real nemesis is of course the smooth-talking, devilishly debonair, but wicked-to-the-core Count Dracula played with venomous magnetism and disgustingly convincing sexism by Johnny Moreno. There is never a doubt when this Dracula is on stage that he is a deadly predator who relishes preying on the fears and the bodies of others — especially women.
His two brides in their white lingerie — Drusillo (Elizabeth Cowperthwaite) and Marilla (Charisse Loriaux) are the embodiments of his true opinions about women. The two slither about as sensuous, sexual entities more animal-like than not and who mindlessly attend to his every command and need.
But as clever and fearless as she is, Van Helsing realizes — unlike most men — that she cannot be a lone wolf and needs the cooperation and support of others to conquer the evil around them. She turns to pregnant Mina for help, with Dr. Seward appalled at the suggestion but with Van Helsing countering with a smirk, “Do you think her condition melts her brain, Seward?”
From the very beginning of the story, Mina lets her departing husband, Jonathan, know that his not letting her go with him to Romania is his being “over-protective.” When he says, “It is my right,” she responses with vigor, “That doesn’t mean you are in the right.”
That inherent backbone in Mina must withstand pressures from not only her husband but all she has learned from society about a wife’s duty; but Sharon Shao’s Mina keeps showing bits and glimpses that she is not accepting in total what she has been taught. When she does accept Van Helsing’s request, Mina takes on a role of increasing command of her own destiny and that of the others around her, with Sharon Shao giving a blistering, heroic performance at the story’s climax that is jaw-dropping and stunning.
Throughout the evening and even before the action formally begins as we enter as audience, there is a slithering, crawling presence on stage that all eyes time and again turn their attention — a disheveled, head-bent woman cowered in the corner who is often mouthing what seems to be a prayer of sorts. We come to find out she is Renfield, a woman confined to Dr. Seward’s insane asylum — there because of men in her life who have decided that is where she should be.
As Renfield, Stacy Ross gives the performance of the evening. A reject of society but also even of her worshipped Dracula whom she refers reverently in prayer as “Father” and pleadingly in supplication as “Daddy,” Renfield is the epitome of the results of the sexist attitudes of the world she exists. That she has resorted to madcap ways including coaxing flies and spiders to her dinner plate is no wonder as we watch how she is viewed and treated. The only one who ever truly tries to understand her and listen to the heart-felt story of her background is none other than Mina Harker … of course.
Bill English directs this famous tale with just enough reverence to its heritage of horror to provide the needed edge and occasional shock, but he also adds much tongue-in-cheek as well as a smack-down of the sexist, male-dominant heroism of past tellings. The gothic-suggestive set design of Jacqueline Scott takes full advantage of the Playhouse’s oft-employed roundtable as scenes shift seamlessly amidst large arches and a backdrop of Carl Erez’s dramatic and colorful scene/mood-setting projections. Michael Palumbo’s lighting creates both the creepy build-ups and the suddenly horrific and heroic climaxes of various scenes while Kathleen Qiu’s costumes allow for both humor and horror to make their ways into the story’s unfolding. (One has to imagine much laundry between each performance to rid all the white muslim of red blood.)
The required blood and the overall horror aspects of a Dracula-invested tale are probably not for everyone; and even one so creatively and imaginatively (as well as humorously) relayed as The Playhouse’s revamped and updated Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really does at times become a bit too long and over-drawn.
But with Kate Hamill’s none-too-subtle script and Bill English’s sharply honed direction, the point that monsters don’t walk around with fangs but “the monsters look like us” — the ones who “mess up your memories, confuse your sense of reality” — make the warnings of Dr. Van Helsing still ring quite true for us today. The “parasites” she says have always existed and have always walked among us — it takes little imagination to realize that we are being reminded that they are still among us today. While they may not trying to suck our blood, they might very well be trying to drain us of our will to strike a stake in all the false claims these modern monsters daily make — especially about women as well as immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQ people — in fact, anyone that does not look like the monsters themselves.
Rating: 4 E
Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really continues through June 27, 2026, in a two-hour, forty-minute (one intermission) production at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online at www.sfplayhouse.org or by phone at 415-677-9596.
Photo Credits: Jessica Palopoli
