In the updated, slimmer, far more terse version of Morag Shepherd’s two-hander My Brother Was A Vampire, only occasional wisps of the crisp, tart and sardonic banter between Callum and his sister Skye from the earlier version remain. Played by actors Tyler Fox and Ariana Farber who are considerably older than the two actors who took the roles when the play premiered in 2022 on the Plan-B Theatre stage, Callum and Skye show clearly their behaviorally and psychologically nuanced coping experiences with abuse and dysfunction and their shared dispassionate sense of fatigue which relentlessly shadows their lives.
The darkness, vulnerability and brutality in Shepherd’s rendering of the symbolism of vampirism are prominent in this updated version, which is having a special engagement of three performances this weekend at the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival before heading to a 10-show run in Scotland at the Edinburgh Fringe, the historical grandmother of the Fringe experience. The show is directed by Stephanie Stroud and stage managed by David Knoell.
Callum is three years older than Skye. The play is told in reverse chronology. In the first scene, they are in their thirties, and in each successive scene, they are five years younger. The first scene (“the ending”) shows Callum appearing starved and gravely ill, while Skye seems in perfect health. Likewise, they are often at opposing ends of the emotional spectrum in that scene. Meanwhile, in the last scene, both are in the childhood years.
Unquestionably Shepherd’s darkest play in her body of work, My Brother Was A Vampire’s reverse chronological approach is a brilliant move. As dysfunctional as their own lives have become in part due to their after-the-fact ways of coping, nevertheless Callum and Skye do not and cannot deny the reality of what happened during their childhood. For some, the subjective experience of living through their past trauma in adulthood might involve having gaps in their memory, or revising or rewriting the family history, or blurring the lines as well as diminishing them between the abuse and abuser.
Callum is desperate for the hypnotizing calm to go to sleep for good. For Skye, it is the ability to fly, even if it means being stuck in the same landscape of fears, memories and frustrations. One could accept calmly the loss of the will to find hope and to live. They are unique siblings bound by the pain of acknowledging the virtues of resistance and disobedience on their journey even when honesty is not necessarily the easiest thing to bear or confront. With choreographed movement by Meghan Durham Wall, Fox and Farber emulate the sensation of flying. Meanwhile, Griffin Irish’s sound design accentuates the mise-en-scène impact in the play.
In her recent plays such as The Big Quiet and Worship, the subject of suppressed truth drives their respective narratives and that the only way that a person can ever think about living in peace is embracing the wisdom of becoming uncomfortable to finding and reconciling with the truth. In the earlier version of My Brother Was A Vampire, there remained somehow a small but resilient perception that there must be a better world where one can fly off to and share with those whom we care about the most and feel the safest with in sharing.
Shepherd has followed her best instincts in bringing forward the horror elements. The emergence of this darker version of Shepherd’s My Brother Was A Vampire could not be more timely than in 2025. Today, with an abusive predator in the nation’s highest office, countless numbers of children of migrants and immigrant families have been separated from their parents and many do not know if they will be reunited with them. What will their trauma look like in their own experiences not only at the moment but after the fact in their adulthood? The horror is that while many of us know this is incontrovertibly wrong and inhumane, there are many others who look at this abuse without thinking that it could be possibly wrong and even try to justify it. Callum and Skye offer one compelling case example of the horrors that do not exclusively reside in fiction but are manifested persistently in brutal realities that many will do everything in their power to hide while victims endure the psychological scars in silence with little chance for the compassionate relief they deserve.
The latest production is a collaboration of Immigrant’s Daughter Theatre and Lil Poppet Productions. GSLF performances will take place today (July 25) at 10:30 p.m., July 26 at 9 p.m. and July 27 at 4:30 p.m. at the Alliance Theatre at Trolley Square. For tickets and more information, see the Great Salt Lake Fringe website.