Spring Break
New Dracula graces stage
STEPHEN MILLIGAN
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No matter how many times he seems to be down, Bram Stoker's immortal creation Count Dracula always seems to be able to make a return in yet another incarnation.
This time, the bloodsucker has to face up against Sigmund Freud.
University professor John Vance, who already teaches classes on Stoker's novel and other horror tales in the English Department, is bringing to the stage a new play, "In Mind of Dracula," in which the events of the novel are combined with Victorian psychiatry.
"It really is a cross between the gothic novel 'Dracula' and the Freudian psychiatry of the time period," said Vance, who wrote, directed and stars in the new play which debuts at the Morton Theatre tomorrow night and plays through Saturday.
The majority of the play's cast has been stripped away, including Dracula himself, and Van Helsing never even appears in the narrative at all.
It begins instead after the vampire's attacks on Lucy Westenra started, when she and her friend Mina Murray begin to visit a friend of Freud, a doctor played by Vance himself, in order to understand what Lucy's condition means.
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"I'm a big fan of the story," said Vance, who did a previous adaptation, albeit one more conventional, of the novel for the Morton Theatre. "It's all about human passion, sexuality and suffering."
This new version of "Dracula," however, is less about the horror of the vampire and more about the horror of the mind, delving into dreams and reality.
"The idea actually sprang from a dream of mine," Vance said.
Although Dracula is never on stage, Vance said the Count's presence is felt throughout the play, leading the women and their doctor to ask, as Vance does, "Is it really a dream?"
The play attempts to capture the feel of the novel and of the Victorian era -the play takes place in 1897, the year the novel was published and within Freud's lifetime. But most importantly, Vance said, the play tries to capture the psychology of the "Dracula" narrative.
"If you study the novel, you're trying to get it plot-wise," he said. "This play is what it might be saying."
