The troupe’s latest original work is a true laugh fest — for vampirologists and Sonic fans alike.

Do vampires wear socks and, if so, what kind?

These are just two of the many, many questions about vampires that arise in Buntport’s latest comedy, The Vampire of Lafayette. It’s a knee-slapping, rib-tickling, shoot-milk-out-your-nose funny romp that flips back and forth between a Sonic drive-through in Lafayette, Colorado, and a nearby graveyard, where a bickering vampire couple is trapped together for eternity.

As the audience considers the spot-on Sonic menu onstage before the curtain, the lights drop to show Brian Colonna as Sonic assistant manager Douglas Allen Madison holding forth on vampire lore via the drive-through mic (OK, that’s a first). He’s soon joined by Liliana — a black-clad, ghostly white Erin Rollman — who’s a regular walk-up customer and Sonic fan whose order is always two cherry limeades.

After chewing the fat with Doug for a while, she’ll return to the grave where her husband Teodor (Erik Edborg) is pinned in place like a mounted insect by the limb of a crabapple tree. He’ll bitch that she took so long the ice melted and diluted his drink, while she rolls her eyes and blows him off in an exchange that’s clearly run on repeat for the century or so they’ve been interred together.

We don’t know why these two are able to make do with Sonic cherry limeades as opposed to the typical vampire fare of fresh blood, or what they did before the Sonic opened. We do know that Liliana is sick to death (ar-ar) of schlepping back and forth to the Sonic and having to listen to Teodor’s whining when she returns. Doug — the self-professed amateur vampirologist who is blissfully ignorant of her obvious vampire traits — is her only other contact, and all he wants to talk about is her least-favorite topic: vampires.

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While the show establishes all this at the top, those familiar with Buntport and its regular cast will be wondering where the fourth cast member, Hannah Duggan, is. Never fear: She soon appears (her costumed arm, anyway) as a giant, wisecracking earthworm who befriends Teodor.

Erin Rollman and Brian Colonna in ‘The Vampire of Lafayette.’ | Photo: Buntport

Clever set design

All of the action takes place on an ingenious, convertible set that rotates to either the Sonic drive-through or the gravesite. So we can see the occupants, the coffin is flipped vertically, with Teodor’s arboreal accouterment protruding several feet out from his shoulder. The whole thing can also flip horizontally when the action switches topside, and it’s built into a good-sized approximation of earth, with holes for Duggan’s worm arm to poke through.

Many a Buntport production centers the humor on musings about the mundane set against some ludicrous situation, and Vampire is no exception. The troupe finds the funny in the minutiae, like Teodor’s obsession with his miner’s headlamp or the worm teaching him hip jargon, such as adding “AF” to create a superlative. As silly as they are, Buntport stories are also deeply human, creating moments and laughter by making connections everyone can relate to.

Colonna’s characters are typically chipper nerds with encyclopedic knowledge of history and trivia, and his Sonic manager is precisely that. Here, that earnestness is layered with an absurd level of innocence atop some pretty decent roller-skating skills he put to work as a Sonic carhop. When he tries to impress Liliana with a “skate dance” he’s worked up, she shuffles off before the performance, leaving him to do it alone while downplaying his disappointment. We laugh but also feel for him as he suffers the enthusiast’s dilemma: No one is as interested in his obsessions as he is.

Often playing the straight man, Edborg here has a field day playing a vampire who’s never gotten to really behave as one (although he does have the ghoulish laugh down). It’s not clear whether the tree limb randomly grew through his shoulder or if he was staked by vampire hunters and the stake itself somehow grew. But as Doug at one point informs us, crabapple trees are not “industry standard” for making stakes capable of killing vampires so maybe it’s how he “survived.”

Whatever the case, Teodor is a dork himself, trying to imagine life up top as he remains trapped below with only a talking worm for company given Liliana’s disdain for him. It’s enormously entertaining to watch Duggan be as funny as ever with only a disembodied sock puppet to work with, and even more hilarious when she reveals herself to Liliana and the two take an active dislike for each other.

It all comes together in a frenetic, very silly scene at the end, where everything is more or less revealed and the Buntport team extracts every ounce of hilarity from the set of circumstances and personalities they’ve crafted. It’s truly one of their best and funniest outings in recent years, although, alas, the rest of the run is mostly sold out. I, for one, would love to see this become an annual spooky-season tradition.

Erik Edborg as the trapped vampire Teodor in ‘The Vampire of Lafayette.’ | Photo: Buntport