The Buntport may not be the most important theater company in Denver – yet. For now, the six twentysomething smartypants from Colorado College will have to settle for being the most creative, intelligent, irreverent, inventive, refreshing, spontaneous and clever theater company in town.
But stay tuned. Most important may be just around the corner.
Chicago has Second City and Toronto has the Groundlings. Maybe one day the theater world will identify Denver with Buntport.
With all due respect to the first-class but hyperserious endeavors at the LIDA Project experimental theater, the Buntport is the closest thing Denver has to wickedly funny but legitimate experimental theater. No one does anything quite like they do.
With a combination of brain power, irreverence and inspiration of inexplicable origin, Buntport has created a niche in the Denver market by creating parodies of the classics that range from the silly to the profound.
| photo by Sandra H. Elkind |
The Buntport’s current multimedia production of “The Odyssey: A Walking Tour” is neither as funny nor as long, coming in at only 50 minutes, as last season’s breakthrough satire of “Titus Andronicus.”
But it won’t take long to appreciate the notion that brilliance never should be measured by running time.
Drawing on their best pals from the Denver theater community to form a swollen creative team of 18, “The Odyssey” is performance art rooted in the primary players’ training at Colorado College in a program called avant-garde technological guerrilla theater.
“The Odyssey” is a walking tour of a combination museum and fun house called “Odysseyland” (“Coming soon: Calypso’s Island in May 2007”). Exhibits line the walls as they would in any museum, such as tin cups with the accompanying study card, “There’s nothing like pottery to make you feel like you are actually in a museum, is there? Penelope used these pots as primitive holding devices for some sort of ancient liquids.”
Audience members are given transistor radio headsets to hear our two chipper tour guides Vickie (Hannah Duggan) and Todd (Brian Colonna, sounding a lot like that guy on those creepy CD cleaning devices). But you soon realize the entire performance has been committed to audiotape, and the guides are lip-synching their own wacky words to great comic effect.
The group splits into two separate tours (a discount is offered for those wanting to later go on the other tour). Each takes us on separate adventures inside the theater, which has been curtained off to create at least 10 distinct sets, one (the King of the Wind) built 20 feet off the ground.
Vickie’s tour begins in the Mount Olympus dorm room where Zeus’ college-age children party hard. Apollo, Artemis and Athena are the toga-wearing offspring (though in the lobby, Athena takes the form of a light bulb). This may seem odd until you remember that Athena was Zeus’ favorite daughter, the only one allowed to use her father’s thunderbolt (lightning, electricity, light bulb get it?).
Athena pleads via speakerphone with Zeus, who is relaxing in Miami, on behalf of Odysseus, who has been stranded long ago by Poseidon with Calypso. Odysseus is a Ken-doll mannequin with the voice-box of Stephen Hawking.
Just to show that anything can, and will happen, the scene calls for the Buntport’s back gate to come up and Erik Edborg as Poseidon to drive up in a 442 Oldsmobile. Last Thursday, that also made the alley’s three surprised, real-life dumpster-picking winos part of the madcap scene.
Next, with the help of three faces we see on hanging television sets backed by real human bodies, we flash back to Odysseus’ blinding of Poseidon’s son Polyphemus (the cyclops) with a Q-tip. (“I don’t regret blinding his son. I regret yelling my name back at him.”) We also visit Hades and Circes’ human swineherd. If you take Todd’s tour, you’ll meet the Sirens, the Lotus Eaters and tour the Isle of the Sun God.
And it all takes place to an underscore that includes “The Wanderer,” “Margaritaville” and “Walk This Way.”
If it all sounds a little silly, it is. But there are a hodgepodge of legitimate, ancient theatrical styles on display, including puppetry and Japanese Kabuki. The brilliance of the design is that the audience is placed at so many different points of view. The action takes place below us, above us and all around us.
One entire soundless scene has the audience following a a progressive picture story across a wall sized, neon-lit drop. The drawings by Galen Shoe tell the tale of Scylla the sea monster, who threatened passing ships and ate six of Odysseus’ companions (and also answers the question, “Where’s Waldo?”).
Some of it will leave you scratching your head, but more so your funny bone. These kids are freakin’ geniuses. Dare we say the future of Denver theater?
-John Moore, October 4, 2002, Denver Post