Your Daily Dracula – Tom Konkle, Dracula (2020)

Dracula (2020) Tom Konkle

The last Zoom production of Dracula I looked at used a script originally prepared for a stage version of the novel and had a reasonably epic feel.  This hour-long vest-pocket Dracula from the Mindstream Players uses the 1938 script from Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast (though with classical selections rather than the Bernard Herrmann score).  The cast are arranged in their own windows performing to visible microphones, with Wellesian director-Dracula Tom Konkle in the centre spot, conducting the performance with gestures and expressions and chipping in his lines (Dracula, of course, is one of the smaller roles in the piece) with Orsonian richness – until a shiftaround (possibly prompted by a microphone glitch with Mina’s set-up that makes the actress sound like a machine-generated voice for her first few lines) displaces him.  It works especially well when replicating the Wellesian multiple voice sound collages – the crewmen of the Demeter or news criers in Hampstead – and there’s a fine array of odd accents.