Actor performs 10 characters in play
Duane Boutte says his solo show, Dracula: The Journal of Jonathan Harker, is the most physically challenging role he has tackled. He sought help from a chiropractor and burrows so deep into the script that, during performances on Bannerman Island, he remained impervious to howling winds and plummeting temperatures. "I don't notice it at all," he says.
Boutte's outdoor run, where the house behind the stage doubled as a convincing castle, ended earlier this month, but he will reprise the drama at St. Rita's Music Room from Oct. 24 to 26.
Jim Helsinger's adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel premiered in 1995. It requires Boutte to portray 10 characters, including three women, and develop distinctive vocal timbres for each. It helps that he's a voice and text coach for The Acting Company's national tours of Great Expectations and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Beginning in 2018, the Bannerman Castle Trust produced a version of the story by Crane Johnson designed for a small cast. Then it imported a troupe from Kingston to perform the 1927 script that wowed Broadway and informed the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi.
This year, Kelly Ellenwood and Neil Caplan at the trust decided to produce Helsinger's take and reached out to Sean McNall at Hudson Valley Shakespeare to find a director and actor.
In 2023, Boutte had appeared in HVS's productions of Henry V and Love's Labor's Lost. Hired by the trust to direct, he lobbied to act instead and recruited Christian Conn, an actor living in Fishkill, to replace him offstage.
Based on the template created by the 1927 play and subsequent movie, many tales in the vast canon of vampire stories omit Stoker's first act, when Harker, an English lawyer seeking to finalize the contract on a country estate south of London, travels to Transylvania to meet the mysterious buyer.
Like Stoker's 1897 novel, the exploits unfurl through letters, diary entries and a newspaper clipping. The first act, which features Harker and Dracula (along with a Romanian woman and three vampirettes), discloses a chunk of backstory. Other characters like Dr. Von Helsing, who reveals a font of facts about the count, appear after Harker returns to England.
The stark stage setting on Bannerman Island included a desk, a side table, two trunks, three chairs and a chaise lounge. Dry ice effects simulated smoke wafting from Dracula's coffin.
Through body language, facial expressions, eye movement and vocal inflections, Boutte conveys the terror of hanging from a 1,000-foot precipice and the cat-and-mouse chase pursuing Dracula through the streets of London, evoking visceral and emotional reactions like the old radio dramas.
His portrayal of Renfield, a psychiatric patient who eats insects, included bulging eyes, nervous tics and manic expressions. Boutte also elicited a few laughs with Quincy Morris's Texas accent and the deadpan salutation, "Your Friend, Dracula."
At the island's closing show, Boutte received a standing ovation and the crowd buzzed over how he remembered so many words.
"I played the Archbishop of Canterbury in Henry V, who reeled off long lists of names, which I had a hard time with because it's not tied to anything that is going on," he says. "But [in Dracula], the action is so clear that even though there are a lot of lines, the story stimulates the memory."
St. Rita's Music Room is located at 85 Eliza St. in Beacon. Tickets are $35 at dub.sh/dracula-st-ritas, or $40 at the door.
