Renfield, WNEP Theater. This late-night Halloween offering is less a full-fledged production than a classroom exercise. Conceived and directed by Jonathan Pitts, it sets out to expand upon the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from the viewpoint of Renfield, the spider-chomping lunatic who assists the bloodthirsty count’s invasion of England. At its best the show is genuinely eerie, designed in nightmarish black and white by Pitts. Spooky tableaux (some employing puppets) depict the vampire enslaving the madman through a series of gruesome blood rituals before finally, inevitably killing him. (Actor Ron Kuzava’s rodentlike, bald-headed, pointy-eared Dracula seems inspired by Klaus Kinski’s portrayal of the character in Werner Herzog’s 1979 movie Nosferatu the Vampyre–itself an homage to F.W. Murnau’s silent-film treatment.) The mood of morbid eroticism is enhanced by Pitts’s creative use of recorded music, in particular the haunting strains of an Armenian wind instrument called a duduk.
