Vampires seem to be very much in vogue these days.  A downtown theatre company with the prosaic title Vampire Cowboys will finish up its four week run of "Alice in Slasherland"  this Saturday April 10.  The production is running  at the  Here Arts Center located at 145 Sixth Avenue.

The colorful mission statement of Vampire Cowboys states that it is a theatre company for anyone "who has ever waited in line for a haunted house, got lost reading a comic book ...when they should have been doing their homework... [or] spent too much time thinking about their Halloween costume."  Considering those parameters,  the 90 minutes of Alice in Slasherland certainly do not disappoint.

The play is essentially a spoof of contemporary horror films -  from the Friday the 13th and Halloween series, to Nightmare on Elmstreet.   The play has the feel of an extended Saturday Night Live sketch and the actors bring a tremendous amount of energy and inventiveness to their performances.  It would be interesting to see the company turn its comedic ability to parodying subjects other than the horror genre - for example,  politics.   It would also be intriguing to see the cast members experiment with improv.     

The play is written by Qui Ngyuen who is also the Co-Artistic Director of Vampire Cowboys.  He also serves as the Fight Director for the numerous battle sequences of the evening.   Particularly memorable members of the cast include Andrea Marie Smith who is an aggressively voluptuous devil out to undermine a  high-school prom.   Sheldon Best  spends a good portion of the evening  dextrously manipulating a  small  mechanical bear.  The bear functions as a sort of furry version of Chucky, the horror doll from the Child's Play movie series.    Tom Myers also has a lot of comedic presence.

The evening has a multi-media ambiance to it with several extended, clever video segments.   There is one delightfully demented video reconstruction of the "original" Alice in Wonderland story that looks like it could have come straight from Monty Python's Flying Circus. Shane Rettig also provides a consistently ominous music and sound design. 

Founded in 2000, Vampire Cowboys Theatre actually pre-dates the current heightened vogue in the winged nocturnal creatures. The leadership of the company comes with an impressive set of credentials.  Nguyen teaches stage combat at Columbia University and Rettig is on the faculty of Rutgers.  The director, Robert Ross Parker, is the editor of "The Dramatist", the Journal of the Dramatist Guild of America.  The company and its leaders have been awarded a number of  theatrical awards for their productions. 

The play's program encourages viewers to "Have fun!"  The audience members in the full house that I attended appeared to do just that.  Theater-goers interested in colorful, unpredictable plays should regularly check out the company's website: www.vampirecowboys.com.