Buntport Theater’s "The Vampire of Lafayette" Blends History and Invention in New Review

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What Lurks Beneath the Museum Placards

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There is a particular kind of tiny local museum where a few artifacts, some faded photographs and a handful of placards constitute the entire known history of a place. Buntport Theater Company’s The Vampire of Lafayette feels like an homage to those museums, and to everything the imagination can do with the gaps between the placards.

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Buntport can’t help but be somewhat erudite, even when dealing with a topic as silly as vampires who require cherry limeades to quench their irrepressible thirst. There are facts here about worms and vampirologists and local history, alongside considerably less scholarly information about Sonic’s latest burger specials. But the facts never become the point. Instead, they feed an extremely silly story about two vampires in the midst of a marital dispute, a feckless romantic whose expertise in vampirology somehow doesn’t help him recognize that his crush is a night-stalker, and a worm who is mostly there for moral support and to defend the honor of worms.

The characters drive The Vampire of Lafayette , and there is great pleasure in discovering what makes each of them tick.

Erin Rollman’s Liliana is rightfully infuriated at having to service the vampire who may have murdered her, an indignity she protests in the pettiest ways available to her, like letting the ice melt in his refreshing Sonic drink. Meanwhile, it’s difficult to imagine Erik Edborg’s gentle, romantic Teodor murdering anyone in the first place. (Neither vampire is entirely clear on the details.) Pinned to his own grave by a crab apple tree protruding from his shoulder, Teodor bides his time singing old mining songs and nursing the grievances of a very long relationship.

Hannah Duggan’s Worm is firmly Team Teodor and won’t hesitate to fling vitriol at Liliana, even if delivering an insult requires munching her way through six feet of earth first, “ nyam, nyam, nyam, nyam .” And Brian “Byron” Colonna’s Douglas Allen Madison has somehow devoted himself to the study of vampirology without recognizing that the woman he is infatuated with is quite obviously a vampire, an infatuation he must release through expressive roller-skate dance.

The company has built an equally playful physical world around them. The set allows a coffin to swing between horizontal and vertical positions while the actors stroll—and occasionally dance—above and below ground. An illuminated crab apple tree adds another layer to the contraption. At one point, Rollman perched on the headstone high enough above the stage that admiration for the set briefly gave way to concern for her continued survival.

That cleverness is part of what Buntport does so well, but so is the company’s extraordinary comfort with one another. These performers have spent years making theatre together, and that familiarity creates an ease that can't really be manufactured. On the night I attended, something as insignificant as a dropped pencil became a tiny piece of banter. Neither performer seemed concerned that the other wouldn't catch it, and then they slipped effortlessly back into the play.

That ease makes The Vampire of Lafayette a particularly comfortable kind of ridiculous. The production can wander through history, memory, metaphor and the supernatural without becoming weighed down by its own cleverness. Its research is visible, but it is always in service of play.

If anything, I wanted the production to linger a little longer at the end. Its climax delivers exactly what the evening has been promising: all four of these increasingly strange characters finally colliding in an uproarious confrontation. The plot may have tied up its necessary loose ends by the time the lights come down, but I hadn't quite caught up with it emotionally. After spending the evening getting to know these characters in greater and greater specificity, I wanted another beat, or perhaps another scene, to settle into where we'd left them. Liliana and Teodor’s outcome, specifically, could have done with another beat. A little ambiguity would have been welcome; I just needed slightly more time to feel the ending before it was over.

Still, The Vampire of Lafayette is an enormously likable piece of Buntport nonsense: strange, specific, intellectually curious without becoming intellectualized, and deeply interested in its collection of weird little people.

It also has excellent vampire noises. The hisses and exaggerated “mwa-ha-ha”s gradually becoming near impossible to dislodge from your brain.

I mwa-ha-ha’d the whole drive home.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/denver/article/Review-THE-VAMPIRE-OF-LAFAYETTE-at-Buntport-Theater-20261003)._