The making of 'Dracula, a feminist revenge fantasy, really.’

When the curtains open on “Dracula, a feminist revenge fantasy, really.” on Oct. 23, audiences will see the culmination of nearly two months of hard work: the hundreds of hours spent in rehearsal, the fight and intimacy choreography, the set design and build, the vocal training, the costume design and more.

Now, the public can get a rare peek behind the curtain to see how this WVU School of Theatre and Dance mainstage show was made.

Picking the play

The work starts long before the actors are cast and the crew is recruited. Radhica Ganapathy, an associate professor in the WVU School of Theatre and Dance and the director of “Dracula,” serves on the School’s Season Selection Committee.

The committee decides on the five to six mainstage productions for the academic year, taking into consideration trending issues and topics, the School’s pedagogical needs and the target demographic.

“The committee looks for what helps students grow as performers but also learn the study of theater and about different styles of work that nurture their artistry,” Ganapathy said. “We’re looking for a piece that’s exciting—where they not only get to play with text, but they also get to learn about movement and intimacy and fight choreography.”

Committee members must also consider the number of students available for cast and crew, what can reasonably be achieved in the given time frame, and how each play serves the student population.

For the first couple theatrical performances of the year, they look for something contemporary (Kate Hamill’s feminist reimagining of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” was first staged in 2020) and easily staged. WVU’s production came together in under two months and uses one—albeit very large—set piece.

Once all the criteria boxes are checked, the actors are cast and the crew is assembled, preparation for the show begins in earnest.

Providing the playground

As actors work to bring the characters and story to life, works to bring the world of “Dracula” to life.

Brookover, a senior Theatre Design & Technology major, is the production’s scenic designer, charged with creating the visual, physical world of the play that the actors will inhabit.

“It’s always my first priority to elevate the plot of the show, never distract from it,” Brookover said. “How has the character’s environment shaped them? How much of their environment is a reflection of them? What is the playwright’s message and how can the world around the story help to tell it?”

Brookover starts the process by rendering multiple set models. She then takes pieces from the different versions based on the things she likes, things she doesn’t like and things she can’t afford.

“The final result is a concoction of mine and the director’s favorite scenic elements both creatively and realistically achievable with time and budgetary constraints,” she said. “My job is to provide the playground for everyone else to play in.”

Brookover researched Gothic-era castles, crypts and mental institutions, taking inspiration from the architecture and stonework. The design team knew they wanted a rotating set, since the script transitions quickly through locations, so the castle façade is on a large turntable, where different orientations of the structure serve as different settings.

“I knew I wanted the scenery to reflect this idea of a world built for a patriarchal mindset,” she said. “Something that looked grand, intimidating and cold. Always looming, never feeling safe or comfortable. Pools of blood forever frozen or spattered across the castle walls and floor. Tally marks on the walls referencing our favorite madwomen while also symbolizing the many years vampires can live to see."

“In creating the scenery, I wanted to recognize that this world is catered to the ‘outdated’ ideals that Dracula holds so dear. The world was built with a strong foundation but is old and crumbling. Despite the harsh environment revolving around Dracula’s actions, it only takes a new way of thinking to send it tumbling down.” Daney Brookover

She’s lucky, Brookover said, to work with a supportive and collaborative team of designers, so “the only challenges were that of reality and price of lumber.”

As with most School of Theatre and Dance productions, the set was built in the shop at the Canady Creative Arts Center. For “Dracula,” however, the set had to be moved across town to the Metropolitan Theatre.

“It gets built in the shop, taken down, loaded in a truck, loaded out of a truck and rebuilt in the theatre,” Brookover said. “This show took a few truck loads due to its large pieces.”

Brookover emphasized that many hands contributed to building the world of “Dracula, a feminist revenge fantasy, really.,” and she couldn’t have done it without the full design team, the carpentry team and the lab students.

“Theatre is the most collaborative art form, so working with a team that is all on the same page creatively has truly been a lot of fun.”

A fist and a kiss

Fight choreography is a mainstay in any production that involves physical conflict. Actors are taught the tricks of the trade to make a staged slap look and sound real, how to fall to the ground without injuring themselves and how to battle with fake weapons using carefully orchestrated blows and footwork.

Associate Professor of Stage Movement and Head of Graduate Acting Jessica Morgan is the fight and intimacy director for “Dracula.”

“Fight choreography is looking at any moment of staged violence,” Morgan said. “It is taking this story that's been given to us by the playwright, taking into account how the director imagines it, then looking at how we can safely tell that story within the boundaries of the actors portraying those characters.”

“Dracula” incorporates three types of fighting: contact, non-contact and non-contact made to look like magic.

“You can have moments where we choreograph a punch to the stomach, where you're actually making fist-to-stomach contact, but doing it in a way that is very controlled and very safe, but it looks more realistic,” Morgan said.

“Then we have things that are not so safe to do realistically. We have to acknowledge that this is theater: You've already agreed to suspend your disbelief and walk into this world. You know that it's not real. So for things like a slap to the face, we would never make contact.”

The trick in such non-contact fighting is to “mask” it: angling the actors in such a way that the audience (or most of the audience) can’t see that the actors aren’t really touching.

Then there’s the “looks like magic” non-contact fighting.

“We have some magic moments where Dracula is battling someone without making any contact,” Morgan said. “We can very clearly see he's not doing it. That requires a different kind of coordination between the partners—action/reaction—because it’s at a far distance.”

While “Dracula” is filled with staged violence, the show is also filled with staged intimacy. There are two romantic couples in the play, and sensual seduction is a large part of the classic vampire myth.

Intimacy choreography is a much newer field despite many plays incorporating non-violent physical touch. Morgan is a certified intimacy director who began her training in 2018 with Intimacy Directors International and has her current certification through Intimacy Directors and Coordinators.

Morgan approaches intimacy choreography similarly to how she approaches fighting: What does the text call for, what does the director want, what are the actors’ boundaries and what can be accomplished with all of the above taken into consideration?

When actors audition, they are given a list of actions/touches that are required by the play, and they have the opportunity to communicate any boundaries or concerns they may have before rehearsals begin.

Both Morgan and Ganapathy emphasize that actors must give consent for any staged touch, and that consent can be modified or revoked at any time.

“We go in recognizing and respecting that boundaries can change. A ‘yes’ can become a ‘no,’ but a ‘no’ can also become a ‘yes,’ and sometimes we don't know what our boundaries are until we're in the moment of doing something,” Morgan said.

Morgan and Ganapathy worked together to identify each and every touch in the "Dracula” script. (Morgan even made a chart.)

“Any physical contact, whether that's a pat on the back, whether that's the touch on Mina's pregnant belly or it is a staged kiss, all of that is identified. And then we go moment-by-moment, choreographing each one.” Radhica Ganapathy

“With Jessica Morgan present in the space, we look at every single moment, and she looks at what the blocking is. Then she asks me what I need and how I see it. And then she gives her input. The actors are right there, so it's very, very collaborative,” Ganapathy added.

For this production of “Dracula,” the student actors are very involved in the choreography. Jonnie Carpathios, a second-year student in the MFA Acting program who plays Jonathon Harker, is the fight captain, and he’s assisted by senior Musical Theatre major Faith Hargadon, who plays Dr. Van Helsing. Ethan Pante, also a second-year student in the MFA Acting program, is the intimacy captain. He’s assisted by senior Acting major Luke Belcher, who plays Dracula.

When it comes to staging the actual movements, Morgan has two approaches, depending on the scene.

“One is creating very specific repeatable choreography. If it is a kiss, for example, your head turns this way. Your head turns that way. We come in on a count of three. You hold lip-to-lip contact for three counts. This person moves away first. Your hands go here. Your hands go there. This is where they inhale, and then this is where the exhale is,” Morgan said.

“We can make it very specific. That way actors are in the moment and thinking about what the character is doing, as opposed to ‘Oh my gosh, where's my head supposed to go? Did I hold it too long?’” she said.

The other method is to create a “vocabulary” of movement around characters who have an established relationship. Morgan and the actors consider how the characters would normally interact with one another: How would they greet each other? How would they say goodbye when they leave for work?

“We can establish a working physical vocabulary with these two actors saying, ‘OK, these are my boundaries. These are things that are not OK, but these are things that are OK, and these are things that make sense for us as these actors playing these characters,’” Morgan said.

“If in the scene you have an impulse to brush someone's hair off their forehead as a gesture of tenderness, it isn't necessarily choreographed. But it is within that established vocabulary movement of that it’s OK to do in that moment if you feel the impulse to do so,” she added.

“Dracula” will have a mix of choreographed and non-choreographed movements, ensuring that physical contact between actors has been carefully considered, but also allowing the actors to improvise some contact in the moment.

Finding their scream

Vocal training is a familiar part of theatre, though many outside the theatrical arts may mistakenly believe vocal training is exclusively about singing.

Acacia Daken is a visiting professor in the WVU School of Theatre and Dance, and she’s a vocal and accent coach. She worked extensively with the cast of “Dracula” on finding the right voice and accent for their characters and screaming without damaging their vocal folds.

“The goal of vocal training is that the actors have sustainable, flexible voices that can create characters, that can be heard in the space and that they can do anything required of them, be it a dialect or work with difficult text like Shakespeare,” Daken said. “If a speech pathologist and an actor had a baby, that’s my job.”

Daken recently completed Vocal Combat Training (VCT), which focuses on working in vocal extremes in a way that is healthy, sustainable and repeatable.

These vocal protocols are rooted in the body: the way vocal folds part and come together, the amount of air pressure being used and where the larynx is as the actor makes the necessary sounds.

“There’s a certain level of training movement like you would for dance. We're training how your vocal folds come together. We're training your breath,” Daken said.

“Your fight coordinator comes in and figures out the fight scene, then I'm going, ‘OK, so how much effort is that?’ The effort you vocally need to lift a giant boulder versus the effort to throw a little stone, the impact of being burned as opposed to the impact of being sliced or stabbed, and vocally, how do we tell that? It’s offering specificity, and then body tracing it,” Daken said. “It’s like vocal choreography.”

To teach the actors how to scream without hurting themselves, Daken gave them each a straw.

The straw is one way to do semi-occluded vocal tract work, or SOVT. This method gently trains the vocal folds by intentionally obstructing the airflow out of one’s mouth. Imagine, for example, the way air gushes out of the mouth on an exhale vs. blowing bubbles through a straw.

When the air doesn’t all escape at once, it creates a back pressure under the vocal folds that allows the folds to come together with less muscular effort. It also allows the vocal folds to achieve better contact, which in turn improves volume and resonance.

As the actors blow through the straw, they’re also making sound: pitching their voices from low to high, then high to low, then running through octave scales alongside the piano. As they do this, actors are establishing their vocal extremes for the day—the highest and lowest sounds they can make without causing damage.

“What we want in this work is not going above 80% of your extreme,” Daken said.

Once the extremes are set and the vocal folds are prepped, actors work on their screams.

“I had an incredible time going through the process of learning how to find my scream, learning how to make effort noises, like learning how to do all of the vocal work and do it in a healthy way,” said junior Acting major Katie Manning, who plays Mina Harker. “Getting to that point of being able to scream and make that kind of noise come out of you is really exciting.”

“When you open up parts of your voice you didn't know you could access and you have control over them, it's very liberating. I think that's what some of the female students, in particular, found. It unlocked a little—dare I say rebellion? Maybe a little feminine rage.” Acacia Daken

“I also think it’s about seeing immediate growth,” said Daken. “I couldn't do this thing six weeks ago and now I have this powerful voice that I'm in control of. It's a win for an actor to see progress quickly.”

Where character and actor intersect

Part of acting is finding ways to connect with one’s character. Sometimes that connection is made through a similar personality, or a familiar backstory, or a shared ambition.

For junior Acting major Heather Lacy, reading about Lucy Westenra was a little like looking in the mirror. “I was like, ‘Yep, that's me to a T.’ I just resonated so much with this character and how she feels kind of trapped in the world she's in even if she's not supposed to feel that way.”

Junior Acting major Katie Manning said “Dracula” came at a time in her life when she needed something rooted in empowered female characters. She plays Mina Harker, who’s world is turned upside-down with the arrival of Dracula.

“Mina has to step up and find that fire within her,” Manning said. “I really resonate with that—taking my life back over and taking agency.”

Faith Hargadon, a senior Musical Theatre major who plays a gender-bent Dr. Van Helsing, found in her character the superhero she always wanted to be.

“I grew up watching and being obsessed with superhero movies and Indiana Jones and Star Wars. I just wanted to be Iron Man and Superman,” Hargadon said.

“But for Halloween, I was always a character like Black Widow, who is a very sexualized character. Those were the options that I had as a girl who wanted to look pretty but also be a superhero.

“I like this character because I feel like Van Helsing is more of a vampire slayer. And then the playwright makes her a confident woman who comes in and knows and can do all these things,” Hargadon said. “In this play, she gets questioned a lot, but I feel like that makes her an even stronger superhero.”

Sometimes, actors find connection with their characters through empathy—understanding a character’s motivations even if the actor doesn’t agree with the character’s actions or goals.

Luke Belcher, a senior Acting major, describes the titular villain he plays as the “manifestation of toxic masculinity.”

“One of the biggest challenges is trying to find that in myself for the moments I'm on stage and get into that character through the lens of the historical text, trying to implement both the retelling and the old school, blood-sucking vampire,” Belcher said.

“The process is just layer after layer after layer. You learn how to do vocal things, you learn how to do different violence and intimacy on stage and make it all feel comfortable. And it's a lot easier to cope with being a bad person on stage when you can easily tap out afterwards and laugh with all the rest of the cast,” Belcher said.

Sometimes, the connection comes when a character lets the actor explore movements and emotions that take them outside their comfort zone.

Sophia Kefer, a junior Acting major playing Dracula’s wife Drusilla, doesn’t relate to her character.

“It’s more of an appreciation,” Kefer said. “Being able to crawl on all fours and be snake-like and morph my body into how I see this character walk around, which is so different than how I am, is such a unique, fun experience to me.”

“This role and this play have definitely challenged what I'm used to, especially aspects such as movement and voice and overall confidence in myself,” said Olivia Sigley, the junior Acting major playing Dracula’s wife Marilla. “The idea of rejecting humanity and being something that's definitely out of my comfort zone has been a really enjoyable experience to learn and explore.”

How a cast becomes a community

After the hundreds of hours spent together, and the shared challenges and triumphs, the cast and crew start to feel less like a group of individuals and more like a community of friends.

For Heather Lacy, the actress playing Lucy, that was the best part.

““My favorite experience with this show has been experiencing this whole new world and getting to know all these new people who I haven't worked with before. We’re figuring out exactly how we want to tell this story, and who our characters are and how we see each other.” Heather Lacy

“I know every single person in this cast now," Lacy added. "It’s been amazing to watch them discover themselves in their characters and watching everybody make discoveries and finally find their scream and find the thing they were missing in a scene. We're all working together to make this thing that we want to be incredible. My favorite part about this is experiencing it with everybody else.”

Chai Webb is the production stage manager, and the view is a little different from behind the white folding table covered in scripts and notes—but it’s no less heartwarming.

“One of my favorite things about being a stage manager for this performance is seeing the transformation the actors go through and how words on a page that I read a few weeks ago come to life,” Webb said.

“Every small addition and every small adjustment bring about change, not only in the cast, but also in the people themselves. A big part of theater is fostering a community, and you can very clearly see a community being built right before your eyes.”

“Dracula: a feminist revenge fantasy, really.” premiers Thursday, Oct. 23, at 7:30 p.m. at the Metropolitan Theatre. The show plays Friday, Oct. 24, and Saturday, Oct. 25, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Oct. 26, at 2 p.m. Buy tickets online at go.wvu.edu/dracula or in person at the Metropolitan Theatre before the show.