Wimberley Playhouse’s DRACULA: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy – A Review

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Wimberley Playhouse’s DRACULA: A FEMINIST REVENGE FANTASY, REALLY sinks its teeth into power, patriarchy, and the struggle to claim one’s own authority.

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Kate Hamill ’s DRACULA: A FEMINIST REVENGE FANTASY, REALLY takes Bram Stoker ’s familiar vampire tale, sharpens its teeth, and turns it toward questions that have been lurking beneath the story all along. There are still mysterious visitors, puncture wounds, blood, bats, and an ancient Transylvanian count with decidedly unhealthy relationship habits. But Hamill is less interested in simply retelling Dracula than in examining who possesses power, who is permitted to exercise it, and what happens when women begin recognizing the systems designed to keep that power from them.

Wimberley Playhouse’s production, directed by Milton Zoth , understands that the play works best when both sides of that equation remain alive. This is still a Dracula story, complete with suspense, violence, seduction, humor, and genuine menace. At the same time, the familiar vampire mythology becomes fertile ground for exploring patriarchy, autonomy, ownership, gaslighting, and the difficult process of learning to trust one’s own experience. Zoth has assembled a strong cast capable of moving between those levels without allowing the ideas to overwhelm the storytelling.

At the center is Marlana Perry as Mina Harker, who gives the production an authentic and deeply human anchor. Beginning as a gentle character who would much rather avoid the responsibility gradually being placed before her, Perry makes that reluctance important. Mina does not suddenly become powerful because the plot requires a heroine; we watch her discover that strength through a decidedly uncomfortable journey. By the end, when she steps into her own authority with willingness and determination, the transformation feels earned. Perry is believable, endearing, and recognizable; less an untouchable hero than one of us discovering that sometimes circumstances require us to become braver than we intended.

Trinity Adams brings playfulness and a welcome bit of sass to Lucy Westenra. Her performance makes Lucy’s transition from fiancée to Dracula’s victim particularly effective because we first see a young woman capable of recognizing the forces controlling her life. Lucy understands more than those around her may realize about the ways her finances, choices, and future are subject to male authority. That makes what follows especially disturbing. Even with those insights, she is ultimately seduced by another, far more powerful male figure. One of the production’s most unsettling ideas emerges here: recognizing a system of control does not necessarily make someone immune to it. Lucy’s fate becomes an especially poignant expression of how easily women, their property, their bodies, and their choices can be absorbed into machinery controlled by men.

Shannon Manning gives an exceptional performance as Renfield, easily the most tragic figure in the production. The audience encounters her before the play even begins, disheveled and unsettling, pushing a sugar cube around a food tray. Soon we discover the flies, the manic behavior, and the strangely rewritten Lord’s Prayer scrawled on the wall. Manning manages to make Renfield funny, awkward, endearing, frightening, and profoundly sad, sometimes within moments of one another. In this feminist retelling, Renfield can also be read as an extreme manifestation of dependence: a woman so consumed by the belief that her powerful male master provides meaning, purpose, and even the reason for her existence that almost nothing of herself remains. Manning makes the tragedy underneath the madness impossible to ignore.

Robert Slack is impressively suited to Dracula. He embodies both the sinister presence of an ancient vampire and the larger oppressive force Hamill has layered onto him. His Dracula can be funny (Slack has excellent comic timing) but that humor can disappear instantaneously. The onstage feeding becomes particularly potent in a play so concerned with systems that consume the lives and agency of others. Whether every moment is intended as direct allegory matters less than the disturbing associations the production allows us to make.

One moment involving a rope is particularly difficult to shake. Dracula throws it onto the stage with the instruction, “save yourself.” In context, the gesture is shocking, repulsive, and frighteningly recognizable as an act of cruelty masquerading as choice. Slack does not soften the moment. His ability to pivot from charm or comedy into something genuinely sinister makes Dracula dangerous precisely because we understand how readily his (or anyone’s) menace can hide behind another face.

Camden Rivers does excellent work as Jonathan Harker, whose journey provides an intriguing counterpoint to Doctor Seward’s. Jonathan begins as the supportive husband, apparently firmly on the side of his wife, her goals, and her autonomy. Gradually, however, he falls under the influence of the much larger male presence represented by Dracula. Rivers handles both the emotional and physical demands of that transformation well. By the end, the production leaves us with the disturbing possibility that Jonathan may become part of the mechanism that allows Dracula’s parasitic influence to continue. If Dracula represents one form of patriarchal power, Jonathan reminds us that systems survive not only through those who create them, but through those persuaded to perpetuate them.

Samuel Ellisor charts almost the opposite journey as Doctor George Seward. He begins as the man accustomed to knowing the answers, confident in education, experience, science, and his own reasoning. Ellisor gradually reveals more dimensions to the character as evidence begins challenging what Seward believes possible. His eventual willingness to accept what lies beyond his previous understanding gives the play an important counterbalance: there are men within this world capable of listening, reconsidering, and changing when confronted with evidence. Ellisor makes that growth believable without turning it into an abrupt conversion.

And then there is Doctor Van Helsing. Roxanne Strobel, a familiar presence on the Wimberley stage, attacks the role with sass, chutzpah, determination, and considerable theatrical confidence. Her Van Helsing is the stubborn, insistent voice willing to name what others refuse to acknowledge. She pushes against misunderstanding, obstinacy, and the comforting refusal to change one’s mind, insisting instead upon looking directly at what threatens us before figuring out how to fight it. Strobel is exceptionally deft with this kind of larger-than-life character, and she gives Van Helsing both comic energy and formidable purpose.

Elizabeth Bull has great fun with Marilla and the Maid, creating two distinctly entertaining characters. Austin Strobel demonstrates similar flexibility as Drusilla, the Merchant, and Miller, differentiating the roles while maintaining a curious enough connection among them that I occasionally wondered whether, somewhere in the strange logic of this world, we were really encountering Drusilla wearing different faces. Whether intentional or simply an enjoyable byproduct of the doubling, it adds another layer to the production. A. Strobel and Bull make an especially well-matched comic pair.

Zoth keeps this collection of characters and ideas moving effectively. His casting is strong, and his direction pays particular attention to the various playing spaces available to him. He allows the comedy to be funny without defanging the horror and gives the more serious ideas enough room to register without turning the evening into a lecture. That balance is essential. Hamill has plenty to say, but Zoth remembers that Dracula should still be allowed to stalk, bite, threaten, and occasionally make us laugh.

Technical Director and Scenic Designer Todd Allen Martin once again provides exceptional work. The set is constructed so that virtually every available space can become part of the action, while scenery, lighting, and sound combine to distinguish the play’s changing locations. Martin’s handiwork is both attractive and highly functional, giving Zoth and the actors a flexible environment in which to tell the story.

Dylan Byrnes’ sound design is particularly interesting. It is not often that one walks into a theatrical preshow and hears Alban Berg string quartets, and the choice immediately suggests that this will not be an entirely conventional trip to Transylvania. Byrnes continues to use classical music in places where more predictable suspense scoring might have been expected, giving the production an unusual sonic character. The placement of sounds around the stage and audience is equally effective, allowing the world beyond the visible playing space to intrude upon us.

MacKenzie Mulligan’s lighting design works beautifully in conjunction with the scenery and sound, establishing location and atmosphere while supporting the production’s more supernatural moments. Kathy Maldonado makes strong costume choices that help define the characters and their world, while Bridget Cook’s hair and makeup work is exceptional, particularly in supporting the transformations demanded by the story. Tobie Minor’s fight choreography is believable, impactful, and appropriately unsettling without losing clarity. Stage Manager Dorianne G. Malbrough deserves credit for keeping a technically and physically busy production moving smoothly.

What makes DRACULA: A FEMINIST REVENGE FANTASY, REALLY particularly satisfying is that it does not have to be experienced on only one level. Audiences can come for Dracula: vampires, blood, suspense, strange behavior, sudden violence, and the pleasure of watching people discover far too late that inviting mysterious aristocrats into their lives is rarely a sound decision. However, Hamill’s feminist reframing is also readily available, mapping questions of autonomy, ownership, gender, belief, and resistance onto Stoker’s familiar landscape. And there are plenty of places between those two experiences for audiences to discover their own connections.

Perhaps that is where this production sinks its teeth deepest. Its vampires are frightening because they are supernatural, but some of the behaviors surrounding them are disturbing because they are not. Control disguised as protection, dependence mistaken for devotion, authority presumed rather than earned, evidence dismissed because it challenges established thinking, and cruelty presented as choice require no supernatural explanation at all.

Wimberley Playhouse’s DRACULA: A FEMINIST REVENGE FANTASY, REALLY is an engaging, frequently funny, genuinely unsettling, and thought-provoking production that I readily recommend. Perry provides a compelling center, Manning and Slack deliver particularly memorable performances, and the entire company embraces both the theatricality and the ideas behind Hamill’s unusual adaptation.

Potential audience members should be aware that this is not necessarily a production for children or for all younger or vulnerable viewers. The play includes depictions and discussions of murder, suicide, blood, violence, psychological manipulation and gaslighting, as well as other disturbing material. The production also uses pulsing or intense lighting effects, theatrical fog, and other suspense and horror effects. For audiences comfortable with those elements, Wimberley Playhouse offers a Dracula with plenty of blood in i

_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/austin/article/Review-DRACULA-A-FEMINIST-REVENGE-FANTASY-REALLY-at-The-Wimberley-Playhouse-20260919)._