Dracula A Comedy of Terrors
Properties Design by Laura Merrill
City Lights Theater Company (San José, CA) September (2025)
by Gordon Greenberg & Steve Rosen
Directed by Caitlin Papp
Take Bram Stoker’s legendary vampire story and mix it up in the style of Mel Brooks and Monty Python. Then enjoy a lightning-fast, gender-bending comedy featuring lots of wordplay and six actors playing over a dozen roles. When her sister Mina is struck by a mysterious disease of the blood, Lucy Westfeldt and her fiancé enlist the help of famed female vampire hunter Doctor Jean Van Helsing. Could the answer lie with the dangerous — and seriously hot — Count Dracula?
This was probably one of the most fun properties designs I’ve done at City Lights to date. There were 6 custom built puppets, several light rigged props that helped this show roll out a caCOFFINy of laughs.
Some notable pieces created for this production include:
Bat and suitor puppets
Both the bat and the suitor puppets were made from polar fleece, 1” to 1/2” foam and glued together with contact cement. I worked together with the costume department to make these characters really stand out.
Mina puppet
After mina is bitten by Dracula, she slowly transforms sick in her bed at home. The director wanted the actors to be thrown around the room by her, so we came up with a plan to make her arms comically long to make this happen. Her arms were made with 2” around flexible plastic tubing with polar fleece hands and pink sleeves to match her dress. the body was a body shape made out of sheets, muslin, and covered with a dress.
Wolves in the forest
We wanted large glowing eyes to represent the wolves that hunt Harker down in the woods, so I grabbed 6 yellow bowls from the dollar tree and painted them to look like eyes. The lighting department gave me LEDs to put in them so they could be controlled from the lightboard. I sealed them up with a thin wooden backing and affixed wooden dowels to the back as handles.
Opening books
In the beginning of the play each actor has a book they are reading from to introduce the story. Each book was hollowed out to facilitate a large square LED light that illuminated each of their faces during this scene.
Germanicus Vita Vamperious
Dracula gives Lucy a rare plant from his homeland in order to impress her. It needed to be easily puppeteered and quickly passed from person to person. I came up with the idea of something that you only had to press one button to puppet. I printed a gothic vase and housed a snapping dino head toy to the inside. I then used epoxy clay to transform the snapping dino head into a snapping flower head. Finally, I dressed the whole thing with various vegetation and moss to really give it a creepy plant vibe.
