502 West 53rd St., Manhattan, NYC
October 24-November 1, 2025
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| Miles Purinton as The Concierge, Patricia Lynn as Millie, and Mark Weatherup Jr. as John. Photo by Al Foote III. |
The characters in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula spend a great deal of their time assembling and documenting proof of their encounters with the supernatural, collecting letters, diaries, and the fin de siècle stand-in for a podcast, a journal recorded on wax cylinders, as evidence of “a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief” (Stoker 1897). Patricia Lynn's The Truth About Transylvania, making its world premiere at A.R.T./New York Theatres in the run-up to Halloween, takes up this thread from the novel and presents a contemporary couple livestreaming their ex post facto testimony–and a paltry amount of physical evidence–in an attempt to set the record straight about exactly what happened to them in the "land beyond the forest." Captivatingly directed by Jacob Titus, with whom Lynn previously paired for her compelling feminist reimaging of Dracula titled Your Invisible Corset (2018; you can read our review here), The Truth About Transylvania uses the figure of the Count as a gateway to explorations of identity, gender (particularly masculinity), doubt (of both the self- and ontological varieties), and distinctions between what feels true and "the truth." The result is equally creepy and compelling, an atmospheric meta-gothic grounded in its characters' necessarily flawed and finely drawn humanity.
The sides of the set contribute to the gothic atmosphere with roots or thick vines and draped fabric; otherwise, the stage holds only a wooden chair, some stacked boxes and a trunk, and the screen behind which a man named Jonathan Harker (
Mark Weatherup Jr.) sits silhouetted to begin the play. John is not
that Jonathan Harker, although Stoker's book and the vampiric culture industry that it inspired do exist in the play's world. His wife of ten years is Millie Bell (Patricia Lynn), a professor with a love of etymology who says early on that meaning can act as a defense, even a weapon–a position that we will see severely tested by the play's end. Their livestream, dominated at least initially by John, frames a retelling of what John presents as their extended encounter with Dracula on a trip to Romania. In this telling, acted out by the cast, to celebrate their anniversary and to put behind them several months of medically-related unrest in their relationship, the couple decide on a getaway to Transylvania. The porous boundaries between truth, fiction, and performativity with which the play is so centrally concerned appear even in the fact that Transylvania is much greener and sunnier than they expected. When they arrive at their lodgings, the cinema-literate concierge (
Miles Purinton) whom we later learn shares a family name with another of Stoker's characters, performs the sort of vampire-related proclamations that tourists would expect, even as he says that management make him do so, which probably helps John and Millie discount his advice to wear crosses, stay indoors at night, and avoid the plum brandy in the mini-bar. Millie is attacked, with a bystander's video of her in the aftermath circulating online; then John goes missing, and his story of what happened to him during that time only adds to the questions of whether Dracula is indeed real, how much of the recollections that we see dramatized are in fact "the truth," and even how far the characters agree on these questions.
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| Miles Purinton as The Concierge and Patricia Lynn as Millie. Photo by Al Foote III. |
The Truth Chair (one can hear the capital letters in how John talks about it), used within the Harker family by John's normatively masculine lawyer father, provides yet another symbol of the instability of what it true, since John notes that what we are seeing in the livestream is not the actual Truth Chair but a stand-in promising the same veracity as the original. And more than once, the concierge characterizes our world as one "where we only believe what we see on our phones" (notoriously reliable portals to reality that they are). He also repeatedly emphasizes that Dracula makes people doubt themselves, doubt that he exists. The idea of finding (the) truth extends as well to who we "really are" and what we want, which can be at least as hard to reveal as to discern; and the characters come to interrogate the pressures that we put on ourselves in intersection with gender and familial paradigms. Millie needs to be seen not to conform to stereotypes of women as weak, helpless victims; but she also tells John that she needed someone to bring her cheese and comfort her more than she needed a male avenger. John, who has a complicated relationship to his father and his declarations about how "Harker men" behave, worries about the attractiveness of traditional hegemonic masculinity and types of license it carries, and how it might overlap with monstrousness. And, in a striking scene, we see the potential for rage-fueled violence inside this generally soft-spoken man. Even Dracula (
David Israeli), who first appears masked and dressed in black, changes his appearance, including the mask, the symbolism of which can be linked to masculinity as well as to other types of performance. At one point, the Count writes that his home is the only thing he loves, and the question of what, or who, "home" is also becomes important for John and Millie as the narrative progresses.
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| Mark Weatherup Jr. as John. Photo by Al Foote III. |
Israeli's Dracula moves with a dancer's fluidity early on, yet still communicates power and menace (helped by the ways that Weatherup reacts to him and his touch). Israeli, involved in one particularly effective jump scare, is also quite expressive even masked, and the Count's few lines being delivered by a deep, echo-laden offstage voice add to his uncanniness. Purinton as the concierge is often very funny, but he also injects pathos into the performance when it counts (pun not intended). Lynn and Weatherup engrossingly and authentically render both the tenderness and the tensions between Millie and John as well as their individual vulnerabilities and internal struggles. Weatherup delivers many of his lines with an outward calm and very close to the audience, heightening the effect of the times when he crawls on the floor like a wolf or imagines he is stabbing someone with a pen or cries in Millie's lap. Austin Boyle's lighting design makes similarly excellent use of contrasts, with darkness playing as important a role as illumination. Contrast and contradiction factor as well into the play's suggestion by the end that uncertainty is not only acceptable but definingly human–a position counter to the coldly rational approach to truth that some feminist thought views as itself part of the Western patriarchal tradition. Still, we are as certain as one can be that
The Truth About Transylvania delivers a superb production of another terrific play from Lynn.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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