The Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club was wise to schedule the current production of Dracula, Mac Wellman’s take on Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel, after parent’s weekend. Throughout, it is unsparing, unsettling and unwaveringly weird.

Wellman has built himself a nice little perch above the landscape of traditional American theater, from which he occasionally leans out and spits at the ground below. He is one of contemporary theater’s dark princes of sensual excess and linguistic innovation; his works focus on the spectacle and grotesquery of extreme personalities and places.

To complement his eccentric creations, he employs language so richly textured and wildly unconventional that it seems to be drunk on its own words. Dissolving the long-hewn pillars of “good message” and “good taste,” he gives gaudy and vulgar personalities, vaudevillian song-and-dance and narrative non-sequitur the freedom to run amok onstage.

Many words have been used to describe Wellman’s play—surreal, intense, innovative, complex, depraved, witty, excessive, frightening, hysterical, manic—but “easy to like” have never been among them.

Mainstream acceptance, of course, has never been Wellman’s goal. The current Dracula, now at the Loeb Experimental Theater, deserves much credit for remaining staunchly true to Wellman’s spirit and creating a hauntingly memorable evening.

The audience enters the black box theater and discovers it filled with fog. A couple of large, industrial-looking contraptions sit on the floor. These structures, which vaguely resemble natural forms, and throughout the performance will morph into laboratories and cabaret-club walls, are lit from the inside with ghostly colored lights. The audience can’t make sense of any of it, but knows they are somewhere else.

When the lights die, a figure creeps onstage. Suddenly she flicks on a flashlight, delivering a quick start to all. The action immediately roars forward; characters, entering with minimal warning or fanfare, cut large and impressive figures. Sharp and striking sound effects abound, from snaps of a whip to the clanking of metal wheels.

Just when the audience is getting warmed up, three decidedly vampy Vampyrettes in lace (Grace M. Catenaccio ’04, Ipek Mutlu ’05, Cara Zimmerman ’05) perform a dance that’s part trance, part burlesque. Then they dive hungrily at a squirming baby in a cloth sack, smacking their fangs. To borrow a line from Count Dracula, this play is “pure otherness.”