The Twin Cities art scene this weekend is bringing bold new stories to the stage with two world premieres and a historical reenactment — transforming “Dracula” into an immigrant journey at Theater Mu, a subway ride into an exploration of empathy at Children’s Theatre Company and a courtroom battle into a tribute of Black resilience at Landmark Center.

‘Dracula’ was an immigrant, too

In Bram Stoker’s gothic novel “Dracula,” the fictional vampire cannot rest without lying in his native soil. He brings 50 boxes of Transylvanian earth to England, not out of sentimentality but as an act of survival. When hunters destroy his boxes, they sever him from his roots, leaving him unmoored and vulnerable.

But what if Dracula weren’t a monster? And what if those boxes of earth weren’t just a vampire’s refuge but a way to carry home across borders?

“To me, that sounds like an immigrant, right?” says New York-based playwright Ankita Raturi, whose new play “Fifty Boxes of Earth” makes its world premiere at Theater Mu. “You need your roots to build a new home for yourself, to have something to stay connected to. You can’t be who you are without it.”

In Raturi’s reimagining, Dracula is a nonbinary immigrant named Q (played by Che’Li). Here, Q arrives in a new neighborhood with boxes of soil meant for a community garden.

For Raturi, who grew up in Washington, D.C., and Delhi, India, this adaptation is also personal. “I grew up moving around a lot,” she says “A lot of my characters are young people, navigating moments of transition, of being in new places.”

As Q cultivates fantastical plants, Harker (played by Mina Moua) — a reimagining of Dracula’s love interest Mina Harker — is drawn to Q’s magic. Meanwhile, Harker’s father, John Harker (played by Alex Galick), grows increasingly suspicious.

Influenced by Raturi’s Indian heritage, the production blends contemporary dance, by choreographer Ananya Chatterjea, with puppetry by Vietnamese American community organizer Oanh Vu and Taiwanese-Indonesian American performance artist Andrew Young.

“In a Western tradition, you might think of a dance show as just dance, a theater show as just acting, and a puppet show as just puppets,” Raturi says. “But in a non-Western dramaturgy, those things aren’t traditionally separated.”

At its core, “Fifty Boxes of Earth” explores what it means to carry “home” with you. It transforms Dracula’s story of fear into a meditation on survival, longing, and the power of planting something new — wherever you are.

A subway ride through imagination

The Children’s Theatre Company is staging the world premiere of “Milo Imagines the World,” a new musical adapted from the children’s book by Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson. The production follows Milo (played by Toussaint Francois Battiste), a 7-year-old boy who sketches the imagined lives of his fellow subway passengers — transforming them into whimsical characters, including a breakdancer, a cowboy and a king.

As the train hurtles forward with musical numbers incorporating hip-hop, pop, country and funk, Milo begins to see beyond his own assumptions. Reality, he learns, is far more layered than his drawings suggest, including the complicated relationship he shares with his sister, Adrienne (Antonisia Collins).

Civil rights case staged where history was made

The Landmark Center will host a one-night-only encore performance of “Little Rock, 1942,” written by Terrance Newby and James Lundy. The play, featuring a cast of Twin Cities lawyers and judges, recounts the story of Susie Morris, later known as Sue Cowan Williams, a Black teacher at Dunbar High School in Little Rock, Ark., who fought for equal pay for Black educators with the support of civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall. 

The local school district argued that the wage disparity was based on merit, not race, but Williams challenged the system and won her case in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which was located at the Landmark Center in downtown St. Paul at the time. Despite her legal victory, Morris lost her teaching job and spent more than a decade working under temporary contracts at local colleges before a judge reinstated her position at Dunbar. She taught there until retiring in 1974.

Correction: A previous version of this story had the wrong name for the character Harker, played by Mina Moua in “Fifty Boxes of Earth.”

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