Dracula (The Building Stage)

This adaptation of the classic vampire myth, told primarily through image and music, draws from the plot and characters created by Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel, but plays with what we think we know to reveal a different story at the heart of this classic tale. Originally undertaken with the simple goal of telling a complex story with the least amount of spoken text possible, the creative process began with an exploration of silent films and graphic novels as well as the physical theater styles of Melodrama and Mask Performance. But, surprisingly, what quickly emerged as the heart of the piece was an unexpected thematic element.

According to director Blake Montgomery: “One of the most interesting aspects of the Dracula novel, and surprising to most people who read it, is how little the famous vampire actually appears on the page. Outside of the initial section which follows a young attorney to Transylvania to conduct business with the Count, Dracula appears maybe three times in the remaining three hundred pages. Mostly his presence is felt in oblique, circumstantial ways. Someone gets sick, a bat is seen flapping against the window, a madman in the building rants about his ‘master’ who is coming. What if all of this circumstantial evidence doesn’t mean what we think it means? What if, driven by fear, we embark on a path of misguided righteousness? What if our notions of hero and villain are completely misplaced?” The result is a very different version of the Dracula myth.