A mysterious, cloaked, blood-sucking man has arrived at the 5Cs. And he’s trans — Transylvanian, that is.
5C student theater club The Green Room staged “4 Bisexuals and 2 Guys Named John Kill Dracula” by Zoë Rose Jennings on Feb. 10 and 11 at Benson Auditorium. The queer comedic retelling of Dracula was co-directed by Ash Ahrenhoerster PO ’25, Regan Rudman PZ ’24, Amelia Lewis SC ’25 and Carson Hambuchen PO ’24.
The play follows a polycule — a group of queer people in a non-monogamous relationship — who set out to kill Dracula after the count turns their shared, sickly girlfriend Lucy into a vampire.
Absurd and hilarious at every turn, the play recontextualizes the characters of Bram Stoker’s classic novel in a queer and chaotic modern world of strange seduction and glow-in-the-dark dildos.
The directing team fell in love with “4 Bisexuals” when they watched it at the Minnesota Fringe Festival and decided to adapt it for the 5Cs, swapping Midwestern in-jokes to ones that would resonate with Claremont audiences.
“It’s a comedy with a lot of queer people where queerness is not the punch line,” Rudman said.
Ahrenhoerster was motivated by the lack of comedic theater in the 5C thespian world, which is often overrun with dramas. “4 Bisexuals” wastes no time letting the audience know that if they came for the traditional, dramatic Dracula story, they came to the wrong place.
“4 Bisexuals” retains the basic skeleton of the novel: Lawyer Jonathan Harker’s visit to Count Dracula’s castle, Lucy Westenra’s courtship and subsequent vampire attack and Van Helsing’s vampire-hunting chronicles, but it injects the original story with tongue-in-cheek subversions, modern references, queer inside jokes and frantic action scenes.
“There were a lot of things that I think were really interesting conceptually [about the Dracula novel], but the language is very dense,” Hambuchen said. “I think this play was really good at taking the really interesting concepts and character relationships from the book and twisting them … in a really fun way.”
In the retelling, Dracula poses as Jonathan Harker’s Uber driver and offers his passenger control of the aux. Harker, panicked, played an a cappella (Dracapella, if you will) parody of “Kyoto” by Phoebe Bridgers with lyrics like, “Now I’m in this Uber / Driving out to Fuck-all, Transylvania / They told me I’d be a lawyer / But I’m just a boywhore.”
The audience laughed the hardest at the campy physicality of the performers. Dr. Van Helsing, Dracula’s arch-nemesis who was reimagined as a beautiful vampire hunter with sleeves of tattoos, flipped her hair after every line and seductively pulled out a piece of garlic bread; a trio of boyfriends fed each other raspberries in increasingly bizarre ways; Dracula threw himself around the stage with manic intensity.
“The comedic timing was incredible,” audience member Jaden Sides HM ’26, who attended in a group dressed in vampire-inspired outfits, said. “I’m really excited to read Dracula in my literature class later this month and understand a lot of the inside jokes better.”
“It’s a comedy with a lot of queer people where queerness is not the punch line.”
Given the original script’s minimal stage directions, the cast was free to improvise new comedic moments during rehearsals. Andrew Gewecke PO ’24, who played Dracula, attributed the show’s success to the feeling of trust among the cast.
“A huge portion of the bits are totally unwritten,” Gewecke said. “If you just did the script, it would be a very different show. You can’t do the subtext stuff unless you really can rely on the people you’re on stage with.”
That trust was built out of a communal, non-hierarchical approach to producing “4 Bisexuals,” in which cast members were granted a high degree of control over both their characters and the content of the show.
“We had a lot of trust going into the process,” Rudman said. “That just gave us a lot of opportunity to be able to be free and try out silly things. And especially with comedy, that’s something that’s really integral.”
In updating the classic novel for a modern audience, the cast and crew focused on what made vampire mythology an enduring queer phenomenon.
Ahrenhoerster argued that the play, and the LGBTQ+ community’s love for monsters in general, is a reaction to the early 20th century Hollywood censorship which established the trope of the queer-coded villain.
“People who are queer were able to take those characters and instead of seeing them as villains and seeing them as bad and evil forces, are able to celebrate them and resonate with them and lean into the fact that, yes, society is going to treat me like a horrible person. I’m going to embrace who I am and rejoice in that,” Ahrenhoerster said.
Audience member Lyra Cromwell HM ’26, also in vampiric garb, added to that theory.
“There’s so much history of the lesbian vampire genre asking, ‘What does it look like for a woman to own her sexuality’ and, ‘What does it look like to corrupt young girls,’” Cromwell said. “It feels kind of natural that that would go into a reclaiming of that genre and of exploring sexuality less as something to be taken, but more as something to embrace.”
In that vein (get it, vein?), “4 Bisexuals” revels in its gayness and monstrosity with infectious energy. What started as chuckles from the audience gradually grew to raucous, uncontrollable laughter. By the time the cast took their final bows to a standing ovation, the sound of queer joy reverberated through the auditorium.
“I’d really encourage anyone who’s interested in putting something on at the 5Cs: don’t be daunted by it,” Rudman said. “There is space for student theater and for your productions … I promise you, the joy of having put something on is so worth all of the logistics … because you get to bond with a really amazing group of people and put on something that you’re proud of.”
Facebook Comments