Buffy The Vampire Slayer

For a fantasy-obsessed theatre nerd, Dan Minkle isn’t what I was expecting-he’s tall and muscled with a mane of curly hair and the handshake of a lumberjack. “Can I get you anything before the show starts?” he asks me. I’m too distracted by the array of nasty-looking medieval weapons spread out on a nearby mattress to reply. A guy in a red faux-satin shirt and leather pants walks by. Either he’s supposed to be a vampire, or Menudo’s missing their lead singer.

No, I’m not in some sort of sadists-only singles bar. This is the final dress rehearsal of Demonslayers, an action-fantasy-comedy that’s Boston’s latest fringe-theatre offering. Minkle and his cohorts make up Suit of Sables, a company united under the notion that theatre is just more fun when someone onstage is getting his or her ass whupped. Founded in 2005, Minkle’s company is a ground-up project dedicated to providing our little city with the kind of stunt-happy action generally reserved for film or TV.

“We do a lot of stuff that you usually don’t see when you come to the theatre,” he explains, fitting himself with a pair of fingerless gloves. “I haven’t seen that much in the Boston area with real down-home stage combat. We take the training that we have and do that.” As a UMass Theatre Arts alum who’s studied everything from the rapier to the lightsaber, Minkle’s got a decade of stage combat training under his belt. Likewise, his cast brings an equally wide range of experience to the table. “We have a kung-fu artist, people who are trained in dance, all sorts of theatre movement,” he says.

Of course, it helps when you’ve got a Society of American Fight Directors-certified actor on your hands. That would be Lara Jay, Demonslayers’ ass-kicking, wisecracking star. If you’ve ever been to Salem’s drunkalicious Halloween festivities, you may have seen her performing on the street as the omnipresent black cat-she does it every year. She’s also worked on Suit of Sables’ previous two productions, The Wizard of Elderwood and The Young Blade.

The small stage of the Actors Workshop is bare, save for a beat-up sofa and a leather armchair. Minkle and company have never really sprung for fancy sets. “Our actors really put on the riches of the show,” he tells me. “We concentrate on the characters and the action.” Though Demonslayers obviously draws heavily from what Minkle calls the “stake-and-fang genre” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blade, Van Helsing), there’s another influence at work here: Shakespeare. Like Minkle (who wrote, directed and acts in Demonslayers), the Bard favored the drama of human conflict over anything else. The company’s name even comes from a line in Hamlet: “Let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables.”

As the play gets underway, the company delivers on its promise to inject some new blood into modern theatre’s rotting corpse. Demonslayers centers on Ryan Cross (Jay), a take-no-prisoners vampire hunter protecting a ditzy teenage girl from fangy death at the hands of the “undead underworld.” Minkle’s script is rich with the kind of self-aware tongue-in-cheek dialogue that makes shows like Buffy so surprisingly watchable. “Demonslayers is not so much a spoof as a loving kind of homage to the genre,” Minkle explains. You can tell he’s had fun writing lines like, “There’s a special place in hell for traitors, sergeant,” to which a vampified ex-ally replies, “I know. I’ve been there.”

What really makes Suit of Sables’ production wicked fun, however, is the action. Demonslayers unloads scene after scene of Ryan and her cohorts dispatching vampires, zombies and werewolves with weapons ranging from broadswords to shovels. Sure, there’s a huge cheese factor at work here-vampires sneak offstage after being staked-but that’s part of the fun.

However you feel about Suit of Sables’ particular aesthetic, Demonslayers is anything but dry theatre. “I love when the audience goes ‘Euoooghh!’” Minkle says enthusiastically. Euoooghh indeed.