One year ago, Buntport Theater showed its promise with Quixote, a satire of academia. Now the group delivers with 2 in 1, a sublime combination of one-acts developed by Buntport’s six members that provokes so much laughter it leaves cheeks aching.
The first act, . . . and this is my significant bother, contains adaptations of nine short stories by James Thurber, all dealing with marriage. The stories are presented in ’40s period dress and a dazzling variety of styles. The sole set piece, a raked bed, is transformed into sofa, car and other guises on which these goofy adults play out their foibles. After killing a spider for his wife, a man (Brian Colonna) cowers in bed, terrorized by a bat. A Brooklyn couple (Colonna and Hannah Duggan) fantasizes confrontations carried out by alter egos (Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman) standing behind the bed. In the most adventurous piece, a story is read over the sound system as lights come up for glimpses of the silent characters depicted. The scene plays out like a fotonovela, frozen images that pop out of the dark and burn into the retina.
The four actors (assisted offstage by company members Matt Petraglia and Samantha Schmitz) create wonderful, New Yorker-type cartoon characters, and their four disparate physical types complement the portrayals. Colonna’s old-fashioned, large-size facial expressions are both sweet and laughable, particularly when he plays a meek little man trying to woo his wife into the cellar so he can kill her. Edborg, tall and blond, gets the flummoxed leading man roles. Rollman has a pointed little face and takes on a breathy, slight lisp, while Duggan defies matronly harridan stereotypes even as she celebrates them.
Inconceivably, things get even better with the second act, Word-Horde, a dramatization of the study guide (that is, CliffsNotes) to Beowulf. A voiceover announces that the production is “intended as a supplementary aid to serious audience members. It is not a substitute for the text itself or a dramatic re-enactment of the text.” So don’t think you can get out of seeing the Olde English version.
Wearing laborers’ jumpsuits with prop-laden tool belts, the four actors do hilarious quickie performances of sections of the text, then run back through them for the commentary. Their props are made entirely of computer printouts covered in the name of the object they represent. So a paper crown has the word crown printed in gold, dozens of times. When Grendel loses an arm, streamers fly out with the word blood printed in red. This isn’t just silly; it’s a great wink at postmodernism, textual analysis and symbolism — as well as a cheap prop. The book’s dragon is a magnificent paper puppet with moving arm and tongue and a tail that wraps around the back of the stage.
The production never misses an opportunity for a joke, whether it’s grafting Dawson’s Creek star Joshua Jackson onto a Beowulf family tree or explaining why dead royalty was buried with jewel-studded armor. He needs things for the afterlife: “The implication, therefore, is that there are a lot of expensive costume parties in heaven.”
Both halves of 2 in 1 reveal a theater company absolutely sure of its mission and the path toward accomplishing it. New works, developed in collaboration and presented with startling innovation, are an exhilarating gift for theater lovers.
-Lisa Bornstein, March 23, 2001, Rocky Mountain News