Seeking seasonal chills? Check out 'Dr. Seward's Dracula' at First Folio
“Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”
T.S. Eliot wrote those lines in 1935, in his poem “Burnt Norton.” Playwright Joseph Zettelmaier made a similar observation in 2007, in his psychological thriller “Dr. Seward's Dracula.”
“People need monsters,” a character opines near the end of Zettelmaier's play, currently running at First Folio Theatre in Oak Brook. We need them, the character suggests, to explain depravity. We need them to convince ourselves that no “good” man or woman could commit such savagery.
For Dr. Seward, however, the monster is real.
The only thing missing from Saturday's opening of “Dr. Seward's Dracula” was a real full moon. But First Folio delivered that essential element of a spooky tale in its aptly unnerving production of Zettelmaier's gothic-style, psychological thriller.
The play marks First Folio's second production of a Zettelmaier drama derived from a literary classic. It comes two years after the company premiered “The Gravedigger,” an examination of guilt and redemption inspired by Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein.” “Dr. Seward's Dracula” is a similar portrait of grief inspired by Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, which was loosely based on the notorious 15th-century Romanian Prince Vlad the Impaler.
Picking up where Stoker's tale left off, “Dr. Seward's Dracula” is rooted in loss and remorse. It centers on Dr. Jack Seward (Christian Gray), a man tormented by personal loss and professional failure. We meet Seward in 1895, six months after he and his fellow hunters disposed of Count Dracula, who terrorized London and murdered Seward's beloved Emily (a playfully petulant yet mindful Elizabeth Stenholt).
Unnerved by the bloody business, Seward has quit his job at an insane asylum and deserted his patients. Among them is the disturbed, insect-munching Renfield (a chilling, despairing Ted Kitterman), who believes himself Dracula's minion.
Holed up in a tatty, sparsely furnished bedsit (England's equivalent of a single-resident occupancy), the grieving Seward dulls his pain with morphine while conversing with Emily's apparition. He meets regularly with the very much alive Bram Stoker (an avuncular Joseph Stearns). The sociable Irish writer is using Seward's journals chronicling Dracula's reign of terror as fodder for his next novel. Noting missing pages, Stoker begins to question the reliability of Seward's accounts.
So does Inspector Louis Carlysle (the ever-authentic Craig Spidle), who investigated Dracula's murders and declared the cases solved based on Seward's account of Dracula's death. After new bodies surface bearing wounds similar to earlier victims, Carlysle confronts Seward.
“Take me over the edge and I'll seize you by the neck and take you with me,” Carlysle threatens.
Faced with a new wave of carnage, Seward questions his own sanity, which a late-night visitor pushes to the brink.
As he did in “The Gravedigger,” Zettelmaier puts a twist on the familiar tale. “Dr. Seward's Dracula” has moments both eerie and profound. But director Alison C. Vesely's nicely attuned production, like the play, is more unsettling than scary. It's a production marked by compassion and profound sorrow, emotions Gray expertly conveys. His Seward is tormented, emotionally frayed, mentally spent. But it is not a caricature of a madman. Gray's is a complex performance of an essentially decent man undone by his own failure and his unbearable reality.
“Dr. Seward's Dracula”
★ ★ ★
Location: First Folio Theatre, Mayslake Peabody Estate, 1717 W. 31st St., Oak Brook, (630) 986-8067 or
Showtimes: 8 p.m. Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 3 p.m. Thursday and Sunday through Nov. 6. Also 4 p.m. Oct. 22 and 29 and Nov. 5
Running time: About 100 minutes, including intermission
Tickets: $29, $39
Parking: Free lot adjacent to the estate
Rating: For teens and older, includes some unsettling moments