Program - Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

programDraculaAdapted for the stage by Liz LochheadBased on Bram Stoker’s novelTom Mitchell, directorDepartment of TheatreThursday-Saturday, October 11-13, 2012, at 7:30 pmThursday-Saturday, October 18-20, 2012, at 7:30pmSunday, October 21, 2012, at 3pmColwell PlayhouseThis production is supported, in part, by donations to The Producers Group, Friends of Theatre, and the Bunch Family Guest Artist Fund.The Department of Theatre gratefully acknowledges these gifts, which assist theatre students in their professional training.Many changes were in the air as Europe approachedthe end of the nineteenth century and the beginningof the twentieth century. Among those changes wasthe developing understanding of how the inner lifeof the mind worked. In 1893, Edvard Munch paintedhis expression of inner torment, The Scream. In 1897,Constantin Stanislavski established the MoscowArt Theatre, dedicated to the performance ofpsychological realism. Sigmund Freud’s Interpretationof Dreams was published in 1899.During this same time, three authors created worksthat delved deeply into the psyche in different ways.In 1890, Frank Wedekind wrote Spring’s Awakening;in 1901, August Strindberg wrote A Dream Play; andin 1897, Bram Stoker wrote the novel, Dracula.A German playwright, Wedekind created acontroversial work that explored the impulses ofsexuality among adolescents. Restricted by a rigideducational system, struggling with the expectationsof parents, and revolting against the attitudes ofsociety, the young people of the play reveal theirdesires and pay the price for their transgressions.Strindberg used the stage to capture the experienceof the dream state. A Dream Play immerses itsaudience in an intellectual and sensual whirlpoolthat defies the traditional orderly narrative in favorof random associations and abrupt reframing ofaction and idea. The psychologically intense authormanifests the complex and contradictory experienceof dreams and challenges the viewer to consider hisor her own somnambulant experience.Director’s NoteNightmares, Dreams, and DesiresFinally, Bram Stoker, the theatrical manager for thequintessential English actor Sir Henry Irving, uses thetale of an exotic foreign count from the mysteriousCarpathian Mountains to explore the nightmaresand fears of a generation facing change. Draculabrings uninhibited sexuality and irrational violenceto a culture that had reached a peak of control andreason. Just as the rumblings of war in the East arebeginning, and the suffrage leagues begin to growmilitant, Count Dracula seduces the young ladies ofEngland and challenges their male protectors.The theatre offers an excellent means to explore theinner longings and fears that reside in our minds.Three of the plays offered by the Department ofTheatre this season allow us to consider the minds ofour nineteenth century forbearers and also to exploreour own nightmares, dreams, and desires.—Tom Mitchell4 5