While Bram Stoker’s Dracula is not typically associated with Jewish culture or tradition, Theatre Dybbuk’s current project Dracula (Annotated) makes a strong case for untangling the subtle antisemitism present in the canonical Victorian novel. With ten months remaining until production, the Los Angeles-based cast staged a reading of the piece at the Museum of Jewish Montreal, inviting Jews and non-Jews to analyze and engage with the text.
Dybbuk’s cast is made up of diverse actors, helping to represent the struggles of other marginalized groups in history alongside Jews. During the performance, director Aaron Henne took an active role, cluing the audience in on some intended stage directions and informing them of historical events that tied into the work’s central themes and the exaggerated Jewish tropes of Dracula’s era.
The performance ended with a workshop-style question and answer session, inviting feedback from an enthralled audience. This framework allowed audience members to express their curiosity about the piece’s artistic ambiguity with the purpose of strengthening the play before its debut in Los Angeles. Although many theatrical works are created with the intention of inspiring enthusiasm and enjoyment, according to Henne, Theatre Dybbuk aims to foster the “enjoyment of discovering something new and feeling challenged as opposed to the enjoyment of ease.” With descriptions of plans to spill blood on cast members and references to mass murderers in London, Dracula (Annotated) would be difficult to simply “enjoy” without a bit of consternation and questioning, in line with Stoker’s original Dracula.
Henne founded Theatre Dybbuk in 2011 with the goal of tackling racism and antisemitism with adaptations of classic theatre works like the Merchant of Venice. When asked why he chose Dracula to explore antisemitic tropes in literature, despite the more blatant depictions of Jews in other novels, Henne explained that Dracula’s subtlety made it a compelling subject. Dracula served as a figure onto which people projected negative depictions of foreigners, specifically Eastern Europeans.
“We’re not making the case that Dracula is purposefully or intentionally antisemitic,” Henne said. Instead, Theatre Dybbuk’s work is intended to inspire curiosity into what these classical “works are merely a vessel for.” By placing a Romanian or Hungarian character at the helm of a work addressing misconceptions about Jews in the English diaspora, Henne illuminates how negative portrayals of foreigners are often masked by fictional elements in literature and popular culture.
Maggie Kilgour, an English professor at McGill, introduced Theatre Dybbuk’s Dracula (Annotated) at the live reading, and her expertise in the Gothic novel helped clarify some of the play’s intentions. On the topic of antisemitism in Dracula, Kilgour stated, “Obviously it’s not antisemitism on the surface. I think if anything, especially through Stoker’s milieu, there might be a sense of anti-Catholicism because the Romanians are represented as Catholics, and Dracula as a vampire seems to be a sort of perversion of the Catholic eucharist.”
Kilgour’s interpretation emphasizes that, historically, any group that did not fit into the WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite was a target for discrimination. Kilgour also calls attention to how Victorian novels played into nativist fears about the “other.” Comparably, the muddled aspects of religion in Dracula bring attention to the fragility of faith in shielding people from their own prejudices and justifying discriminatory biases to broader society. Unfortunately, not all foreigners can be extinguished by a clove of garlic or a crucifix held at arm’s length.
As Henne and his team wrap up their North American tour, I am confident that Dracula (Annotated) will be a wholly inspirational and thought-provoking piece post-workshopping. Check out some of Theatre Dybbuk’s other productions at https://www.theatredybbuk.org/projects.
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