As a rule, plays usually begin about the time the characters enter the stage. But little about Buntport Theater’s elegant and hilarious “…and this is my significant bother” goes according to the rules. Before the show starts, the four members of the troupe are peacefully snuggled together like spoons in the bed that’s the show’s main prop; at the start of the show, they all arise and exit.

This is only the first charming touch in the group’s nimble theatrical adaptation of eight tales by James Thurber, which I recommend unreservedly to anyone who’s still alert by the 11 p.m. starting time. Perhaps nobody has made unhappy American married life quite so funny as Thurber, and these multiple visions of wedded hell make for a delightful hour of comic vignettes.

The Denver-based group, whose name comes from a mangling of “Kennebuckport,” was formed in 1996. Its members, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Erin Rollman, and Brian Colonna – three former Colorado College students and a current one – are fine character actors all, and as a group, their timing is nearly perfect. In this, their second production, they made me impatient to see their third.

Broadly speaking, it’s not difficult to turn Thurber’s prose into theater; but Buntport Theater deserves praise for turning it into such good theater. The most imaginative adaptations are “Helpful Hints and the Hoveys,” in which Edborg and Rollman, standing behind the bed, portray the refined self-images of the dozing Colonna and Duggan, and “The Evening’s at Seven,” the show’s one poignant moment, which is presented as a series of momentary tableaux while Rollman speaks the text offstage.

Colonna is especially good as the hapless Mr. Monroe, who vanquishes a spider but finds himself overmatched by a bat; as Mr. Hovey, attempting to take a magazine’s advice of “cutting down on the intensity of your thoughts a half-hour before retiring”; and as Mr. Preeble sweetly saying to his wife, “Dear, let’s go down to the cellar!”

The rubber-faced Duggan shows off her terrific fidgeting skills while waiting for her husband to finish eating in the venomous “A Couple of Hamburgers.” As Mrs. Preeble, she’s perhaps the most efficient of Thurber’s cruelly efficient women – directing her husband on how best to do away with her. “Any other husband would have buried his wife in the summer!”, she complains.

As the husband in “A Couple of Hamburgers,” Edborg irritates his wife on as many levels as possible. And he gets perhaps the evening’s biggest laugh as Mr. Bidwell, speaking in his own defense.

Rollman may show the greatest range, from the demure wife in “The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery,” to the shrill Mrs. Bidwell, telling the judge that “the bond that had held us together snapped rather more easily than I’d thought possible,” to the coldly confidant Mrs. Monroe.

Technically, the show comes from the “three planks and a passion” school: a bed that turns into the front seat of a car or the door to the cellar; the sound of bat wings zooming around the room; and some effective Thurber-era popular music.

But in this production the low-tech is a plus, not a minus, as it focuses our attention more closely on the acting and, especially, on Thurber’s inexhaustible imaginative vision of married life, depicted through characters who are endearingly stoic in the face of their absurd situations.

-Mark Arnest, circa 2001, Colorado Springs’ Gazette