We hopped on a Zoom with cast members Anna Sosa and Dan Cimo to dish about how the women take center stage in this production and really stick it to the man–and just how funny that can be.

Playwright Kate Hamill (well-aided and abetted by director Melissa Mowry) has taken lucrative liberties with Stoker’s “Dracula,” just as she has with other out-of-copyright classics such as Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “Emma.” Besides gender and nationality-switching key characters such as Van Helsing, Hamill has openly attacked paternalism on all fronts. This VSC production features, for example, an “all-female” creative team (with one nonbinary person, as Mowry specifies). In her playbill notes, Mowry calls this production “a labor of love and rage,” the rage directed against the degradation of women by men legally empowered to suck their life’s blood from them.

Actress Anna Sosa is joined by Connor Norton from the Virginia Stage Company to share a preview of "Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really," a revisionist take on Bram Stoker's legendary tale.

The newest production from Virginia Stage Company to hit the stage at the Wells Theater is coming just in time for Halloween … with a twist! It’s: ‘Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really’. Cast members Darlene Hope and Madeline Calais-King joined HRS with details about the show.

"What does it mean to have Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, really told from the perspective of a woman of color," says Melissa. ...That eventually opened up the world of the play to her. "This play was written during the #MeToo movement, and the Harvey Weinstein trial," she later adds. "Unfortunately, I think the world is meeting the play, where it sort of starts."