My Brother Was a Vampire is the kind of theatre that stokes a fire in the base of my spine. It’s exciting and dangerous, and there’s something that feels almost ancient about the simplicity of two actors telling a story with just a few sound effects and a couple of footstools. But don’t let the simplicity of the production fool you. The themes of the play are ancient too. Fear and love are two of the oldest and deepest things we carry, whether in Salt Lake City or Edinburgh, Scotland. Facing the Monster in “My Brother Was a Vampire” (Front Row Reviewers)

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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. The darkness, vulnerability and brutality in Shepherd’s rendering of the symbolism of vampirism are prominent in this updated version. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. Morag Shepherd’s brilliant My Brother Was A Vampire set this weekend for special engagement at Great Salt Lake Fringe, before heading to Edinburgh Fringe (The Utah Review)

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More than anything, this is the story about the trauma of loving someone—how it can feel like both flying and falling, like giving yourself over to something that might save you or drain you dry. My Brother was a Vampire: Flying Backward through Queer Grief and Gothic Memory (Rhetorical Review)