Carmilla takes on NYC! — New York Theatre Festival 2026

HELLO VAMPS OF THE WORLD!!!!

I am so very thrilled to announce that hystyria: a carmilla adaptation has been accepted into the 2026 Winter New York Theater Festival and Carmilla will be enjoying her NYC debut! Staying true to its humble roots as a student-run independent study at Long Island University Post, this will be a self-produced endeavour from our small but painstakingly dedicated team and we need a bit of a helping hand. Perhaps.... your helping hand.... haha can you imagine..........

THE PLAY:

hystyria was born as an adaptation of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla, which predated Stoker’s Dracula by 20 years and erected many of the pillars of classic vampire media that we see today. Though Le Fanu’s novella was arguably ahead of its time in the way that it portrayed queer women, it reads as quite blatantly homophobic when considered in its original cultural context. Instead, hystyria is a deliberately queer adaptation of the classic and interprets the vampire myth as a metaphor for the simultaneous repulsion, confusion, and inexplicable magnetism of queer sexual awakening. The piece is intimate, female-centric, deliciously gothic, and highly influenced by physical theatre techniques and devising process.

PERFORMANCE DATES:

January 29, 2026, 6:15pm

January 31, 2026, 2:15pm

February 1, 2026, 6:00pm

VENUE:

Hudson Guild Theatre, 441 W 26th Street, NYC. Thee Big Apple!

OUR TEAM:

Riley K Webster — Playwright, Director, Exec. Producer

Alexandria Cote Nance — Co-Production Manager, Exec. Producer

Kayla Joya — Co-Production Manager, Exec. Producer

Thomas Khan — Lighting Designer

PRODUCTION HISTORY:

hysteria premiered on May 5th, 2025 as a one-night-only, fully staged, fully student-run culmination of my (hi it's me. riley. hi) independent study in advanced directing at Long Island University Post under the mentorship of Jason Jacobs. Since then, the script has undergone extensive rewrites to expand past the previous 45-minute mark and dive even deeper into the meat (flesh, blood, etc etc) of the story. The current script has been workshopped via Zoom with both original cast members and fresh faces and is now headed to New York City with the New York Theatre Festival. Yay for gothic theatre renaissance!!!!

BUDGET:

Participation in the festival comes at no expense to us, but all other production aspects which are essential in getting this show ready to premier do fall on our team.

Your donations will go directly towards:

Rehearsal space rental in New York City — (~$2000)

Program printing & marketing materials — (~$100-$150)

Professional footage — ($250) — allowing us to preserve and share the performance with future collaborators. SO much of marketing yourself and your work as an artist lives in the dreaded Reel and Portfolio. Having this footage would be utterly invaluable to us as early-career theatre artists and would make pitching this production all the more effective!

Prop and costume sourcing — (leftover funding allocated here. we are resourceful creatures.)

Stipends for our cast and crew — ($1000) supporting a team of 6 actors and 4 creative artists who are all working theatre professionals.

Every contribution helps us make this production possible and honors the time and artistry of our team.

WHY SUPPORT OUR ADAPTATION?:

Every artist approaches retellings of classic stories with different wants and experiences, and we all aim to extract certain metaphors and meanings that resonate with us personally. Carmilla is a queer female story that was originally written by a man and continues, to this day, in droves, to be adapted and retold by men. In an industry that overwhelmingly amplifies the work of male playwrights and directors more so than that of female artists, this is... unsurprising!

Countless male vampires in fiction get to be painted as, well, exactly what they are. Monsters. Female vampires, however, are far too often flattened into objects of sexualization in mainstream media, especially within the “lesbian vampire” trope. This is not to say that male vampires also aren’t sexualized, nor that the sexualization of vampires is entirely a bad thing since vampires as a concept are inherently sexual. But there is still horror behind that sexuality and what it reveals about the other characters in the story.

In hystyria, Carmilla is allowed to be the monster I see her as. She is an animal with an insatiable hunger that must feed one way or another. Her beauty, her charisma, and her intimacy with Laura are all parts of her nature, but so is her appetite. And Laura, too, has a hunger. This retelling explores desire that is deemed dangerous, uncontainable, or “wrong” by societal standards—though it manifests with a slightly different flavor in the two central characters—as well as the physical and psychological toll of repressing that desire.

At the very heart of this story is queerness. Queerness that is not written as a sexy sensational plot twist nor as a tokenized identity marker. Queerness that is sewn into the bones of the story. Laura’s desire for Carmilla is not a metaphor for something else nor is it made ambiguous for palatability.

We could not do any of this without each and every one of you. No amount is insignificant. Thank you for supporting new, live theatre and early-career artists :)

ALRIGHT. STAY FREAKY AND WEIRD. THANK YOU LOVELY PEOPLE MWAH MWAH

don't let the vampire bite.