Revenge Song: A Vampire Cowboys Creation

Vampire who now? A Vampire Cowboys creation? What exactly does that mean? Well, dear audience, allow me to present you with an origin story of sorts. Back in a previous century, a young director and a young playwright were attending graduate school. And one fine day we ran into each other in the local comic book shop. Qui is always fond of saying that this was “before geek was chic.” What were two young “serious” theatre artists doing reading comics? We went for a beer, that became several beers, and had one of those impassioned, youthful conversations that allow you to imagine things being different. We both loved comics and movies, science fiction, action, and martial arts epics. Why, we wondered, was the theatre only permitted to tell certain kinds of stories? Couldn’t plays be fun too? We cooked up a show that eventually (with the collaboration of countless other theatre makers more talented than us) became our company, and finally our aesthetic. We called this Vampire Cowboys.

We had three main goals. We wanted to bring popular stories and genres to the stage. And disrupt the rules about how those stories are told. We wanted to tell stories about badass heroes that were BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and female identifying. Everyone deserves heroes that feel and look like them. And everyone should feel included in cheering those heroes on. Finally, we wanted to expand who feels invited into the theatre to celebrate those victories.

I’m so excited to bring our particular brand of mayhem to OSF and the Lizzie. Revenge Song is a rollicking, swashbuckling, gut-busting musical-comedy-adventure spectacle. But at the same time, I hope it’s iconoclastic and subversive and blows up expectations about who gets to fall in love, kill the bad guy, and save the world.

Thanks for helping us break the rules.

— Robert Ross Parker