Houston performer Anastasia Zavitsanos explains how Drunk Dracula balances drinking, improv, audience interaction and trained acting.
Ahmed Humble (Chron)
The whole point of “Drunk Dracula” sounds like chaos: one actor drinks, the audience gets pulled in and Bram Stoker’s vampire story gets dragged through a boozy Houston theater night. But Anastasia Zavitsanos, one of the performers, says the show only works because the actors know exactly when to let things get messy and when to snap back into control.
Zavitsanos has been with the Houston company almost from the beginning. She said she was one of the original six members of the Houston cast and is still with the troupe nearly four years later.
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“I’ve been a performer for as long as I can remember,” Zavitsanos said.
She grew up around Houston stages before training at the University of Michigan, where she earned a BFA in acting. Her father used to MC the Original Greek Festival at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral and would bring her on stage when she was 3 years old.
“He’d bring me on,” Zavitsanos said. “I’d grab the mic and I’d get the whole audience to say, ‘Opa’ with me. And I fell in love with that kind of crowd interaction.”
How drunk theater actually works
That part matters because Drunk Shakespeare is not a sit-quietly-and-clap-at-the-end kind of show. The cast is acting, improvising, reading the room, handling audience reactions and keeping the story moving while one performer drinks during the show.
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Zavitsanos said the production works more like sketch comedy than a traditional stage play. The actors use text from the source material, but the drunk actor has room to mess with the rest of the cast in real time.
“The drunk actor does have a lot of agency,” Zavitsanos said. “So I really can mess with my fellow actors in ways that surprise them and that they’ve never seen before.”
In “Drunk Dracula,” Zavitsanos plays into the looseness of Lucy, the doomed character from Bram Stoker’s novel who becomes one of Dracula’s victims. She said some of her bits only happen when she is the drunk actor.
But the chaos has limits.
Because the show depends so heavily on audience interaction, Zavitsanos said the cast studies the room before the performance even starts. They look for who has been drinking, who wants to be part of the show, who does not, who is celebrating and who may need to be left alone.
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“We are studying every single person in the audience,” Zavitsanos said.
That read-the-room work is part of what lets the cast move between scripted scenes, character work and direct audience interaction. Zavitsanos called it “character light” thinking: sometimes she is Anastasia playing Lucy and Mina, and sometimes she has to fully lock in.
“It’s a fine line that we balance,” she said. “You’ve got to stay sharp. If you’re drinking or not. It’s not easy, what we do. We really are acting.”
The show also has safety systems in place. Zavitsanos said the cast has coded phrases for when something goes wrong, including one that signals a manager to step in if an audience member crosses a physical boundary. Incidents are discussed after the show, documented in a report and sent to New York, she said.
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“There’s a lot of safety precautions in place,” Zavitsanos said. “The actors are very well taken care of.”
More than a drinking gimmick
For Zavitsanos, the drunk part may be the hook, but the live theater part is the point. She said stage acting feels “ancestral” to her because of the one-night-only exchange between performer and audience.
“There is something mystic about it,” Zavitsanos said. “There’s just no way to predict for the unpredictable. And there’s something exciting to me about that.”
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She came into the company more locked into drama, but said Drunk Shakespeare taught her the value of comedy and the medicine of giving people a reason to laugh.
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“I loved drama, I love making somebody feel seen and heard through the tragedy that can be life,” Zavitsanos said. “At the same time, I have learned in the last four years that life is also a comedy.”
The result is a show that looks like a party, but still depends on trained actors staying sharp enough to keep the whole thing from flying off the rails.
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“The goal of the drunk actor, at least for me, is that I want as many people as possible to want to go out and get a drink with me after,” Zavitsanos concluded.