Fear. An emotional response to feelings of threat. Fight of flight or freeze. It can be essential in the survival of our species. It is learnt as well as innate. It is the creeping dread as you strain to hear the sound that woke you at night. It is what tells you to stick to the light side of the street. It is what fuels your disgust and keeps you from tasting something unknown to you. It is what keeps you from stepping too far out of line. It is what keeps you in your place.
These are the opening lines of the new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” that’s making its U.S. debut at Hartford Stage.
You probably expect a new telling of the Dracula story to be pretty scary. And this one is. It even gets pretty gruesome, and pretty bloody, at times — and we’ll come back to that. But more than just being scary, this version is actually about fear.
Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, the playwright who wrote this new adaptation, thinks that this focus on fear, itself, is where she was most faithful to Stoker’s 1897 novel.
“The different things that he was writing about at the time I found similar to our fears now,” Malcolm said. “They’re talking about fear of illness and infection. They’re talking about fear of foreign entities coming over here and doing terrible things to our women. They’re talking about gender fear and sexuality fear.”
It’s based on a book from 130 years ago, but it’s a play about the fears all around us now, today.
“I think that’s what’s at the heart of this,” Malcolm said. “It’s asking us to really think about how fear is used to control the way that we live, basically.”
Sara Gutierrez, the actor who plays Mina in this production of “Dracula,” says that fear looks different on everybody.
“Sometimes we like to think that fear encompasses just one feeling,” Gutierrez said. “It is technically one emotion, but it has vulnerability attached to it. It has so many more emotions attached to it.”
It’s Mina — and then Gutierrez — who delivers those opening lines exploring the very concept of fear.
We’re used to our Dracula stories, at this point, focusing on, well … Dracula. Whether it’s Bela Lugosi in the 1930s or Gary Oldman in the 1990s or Adam Sandler in “Hotel Transylvania 2.”
If Dracula’s not the main character, then the vampire hunter Van Helsing probably is. We’ve gotten kind of used to a male lead in these stories. But according to Jordan Kistler, a Bram Stoker scholar at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Dracula only speaks on 33 pages of the original novel.
“He’s quiet, he’s elusive,” Kistler said. “So there’s this real silence from the people we now accept as the main characters, Van Helsing and Dracula.”
In this Hartford Stage version, no one in the six-person cast specifically plays Dracula. According to Malcolm’s script, “He is a shadow, a presence, he may even be a figment.” And that six-person cast is almost entirely women.
“One of the sort of superpowers we have when we’re writing something is that we can create characters, which in turn will become jobs for somebody,” Malcolm said. “I’m always trying to write things that give jobs to women and examine the stories that women haven't necessarily had the chance to tell.”
And so it’s Sara Gutierrez’s Mina who tells this story. She’s the main character, the point-of-view character — the narrator.
“It’s really refreshing and empowering to play Mina in this way,” Gutierrez said. “Usually Mina just is a victim to all of this, and now she doesn’t want to be a victim anymore.”
And there’s another way this performance is empowering for Gutierrez, and it’s in all that blood and gore I was talking about earlier.
“No spoilers, but I love being covered in blood,” Gutierrez said. “And my little emo middle school girl is screaming — you know, the little me who listened to My Chemical Romance. I’m like, ‘This is so cool. I love it!’”
I should say that Hartford Stage recommends this scary, bloody play about fear for ages 14 and up — whether you listen to My Chemical Romance or not.
“Dracula” runs through Sunday, Nov. 1, at Hartford Stage.
Editor’s note: Hartford Stage is a financial underwriter of Connecticut Public.
