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Blood-sucking women

WATCH YOUR BACK: The eye of Dracula sees all.

That twist is an inversion. The women are definitely in charge in this Passion of Dracula. William Murray (Shawn Reardon, with pleasant pliancy) is a fresh-faced and susceptible young chap, who’s lately been taken with weird dreams, fits, and spells at the hands of the thickly-accented Countess next door (the statuesque Alexandra Christie). She’s getting to him despite the dogged efforts of his uncle Dr. Seward (Garvey Maclean), who’s taken him to his Whitby Sanatorium, out in the British countryside. The Countess’s rival in love is capable and attractive young reporter Johanna Harker (Alannah Lockwood, with an affable, rakish charm), who stops by the asylum, uninvited, to get the inside scoop, and who is immediately taken with trying to help protect Willy. But the only person who has deep enough insight to figure out that Willy is actually being feasted upon, and prepared for marital duties, is the formidable Dr. Rebecca Van Helsing (Eve Cimmet, who has great range).

How does all this female strength play out over brandies in Seward’s deep brown study (designed in elegant manor style by Steve Lupien)? Because women generally have different cultural and biological experiences than their male counterparts, one might expect a pointedly different drift to the sexual undercurrents eddying about poor William. Rafkin’s director’s notes suggest he sees the switch not just as a shake-up of gender stereotypes and a way to look at the play’s themes in a more universal light, but also as considerably sexier than the original gender schematic. It’s certainly an arousing proposition, and what’s therefore odd about this production is how far short it stops in eroticizing the women with the power.

Christie’s Countess has all the dry, elegant hauteur you could ask for, and Christie performs with great intelligence, but it is not the heightened, undeniable mesmerism that one craves of the creature — and nor is its nature particularly different from the stock sexual tropes of your standard male Dracula. The most erotic moment in the play, actually, might be when another sanitarium doctor, Dr. Helga Van Zandt (Paula Price, who does well in lending eros to both her lover and her scientific pursuits), curls up provocatively on the chaise and announces in excited tones that she’d just love to psychoanalyze the Countess.

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