Dracula: No Fangs but Plenty of Bite

A tall shadow looms before you. It is the vague shape of a man, its head and shoulders enlarged, malformed, by the direction of the light. What you see lacks form and substance. Yet its dark insubstantiality is frightening nonetheless: The mind imagines what the eye cannot see.

This is your first glimpse of Dracula in the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's Dracula: The Journal of Jonathan Harker, and it's a telling one. The blood and the beheadings, the pointed teeth and the stakes through the heart of Stoker's Victorian horror classic never show themselves in Jim Helsinger's wizardly one-man show. The terror in this Dracula springs, instead, from the movement of a shadow, the modulation of a voice, a sudden flash of light.

Helsinger, who is the festival's artistic director and who performed a slightly different version of this Dracula last Halloween season,has managed nicely to boil a 400-page novel down to less than two hours on the stage. More striking, though, are the ways he and director Michael Carleton have found to tell this famous story through the power of suggestion - to make the audience imagine the horror in the tale.

In doing so, they have stripped the silliness from the story of the Transylvanian count, who has become a caricature in his nearly 100 years of transformations to stage and screen. There are no fangs, no fountains of blood, no bats flying by on wires across the stage.

What Helsinger and Carleton have done, along with their designers, is to use the power of theater - the sights and the sounds - to get their story across.

At the Civic Theatre Complex's little Tupperware Theatre, designer Bob Phillips has arranged the audience on three sides of a stage that he has 

transformed into Jonathan's attic, its dusty furnishings laden with the requisite skull and candelabra, its recesses filled with hidden doors and secret passages.

 It's a space that Helsinger uses to the fullest, clambering around it, appearing as a shadow behind a screen, charging into the audience, as he embodies not only Jonathan and the count but also numerous other characters in this bloody tale.

Helsinger changes characters not by changing costume but by altering his voice and his posture, always in the blink of an eye. Stoker told this story through journal entries and letters, telegrams and newspaper stories, and Helsinger does the same, vaulting from one character to the next, addressing a dressmaker's mannequin, if need be, or the shadow of a man behind a screen.

His Jonathan is a hearty young man, at first the quintessential tourist - ready to embrace whatever this exotic adventure brings to him, but then stripped of every bit of familiar ground he knows.

When Helsinger becomes Dracula, it's as if his soul dries up: His hands bend as if palsied, and his voice has the hollow ring of death.

This adaptation is at its best when the battle is between those two; the other characters are less interesting (although the Cockney-accented lunatic Renfield is a delight), and the second act, when more of them are involved, becomes a little diffuse. The text, too, could use a bit of polishing: It's hard to imagine that the celebrated vampire-hunter Dr. Van Helsing would use the word "snuck" instead of "sneaked" or that the articulate Jonathan would fall back on "hopefully."

The pleasure in this Dracula comes, instead, from listening to the sound of it, to the creaking of doors and the clambering of rats, the howling of wolves and the scratching of long fingernails as a vampire crawls down a castle wall. And the pleasure comes from watching the ways that light, mist and shadow can create an atmosphere, can turn a face ghoulish or make you jump in surprise.

Helsinger's Dracula returns the audience to Stoker's novel by returning you to the world of the imagination, to the experience of using all your senses to perceive this tale. There's no better way to tell a story than that.