In some ways, sketch comedy seems a step down for Buntport Theater, a group that has been developing original, comic, full-length works since its inception.
It’s also a skill they’ve never explored in Denver, and one which in most ways comes naturally to this group of seven inventors.
With its first sketch comedy show, Idiot Box, Buntport takes a tired premise and even a few hackneyed sketch formats and still creates something hilarious and clever, as if talent will overcome even the group’s worst impulses.
For structure, Idiot Box posits that tiny fairies inside every television are acting out the shows we choose to watch. One hour they’re in a soap opera, the next a cooking show. A channel surfer can exhaust them.
Those fairies, played by Buntport’s five actors, mostly serve for transitions. Otherwise, Buntport has borrowed the format of SCTV, creating a variety of sketches all derived from various TV shows.
And so we inherit the game show parody and the cooking show parody, frayed staples of sketch comedy. And in Buntport’s hands, even these can be amusing (well, not the cooking show, which is basically a single Stalin joke).
These creative powers instinctively know that there’s no such thing as a too-short sketch. They know that fully developed characters make every joke hit harder. And they know that delays kill comedy.
There’s also an adventure show, Tyler and Shane’s Outback Exploration, in which Edborg and Evan Weissman demonstrate that not all Aussies are brave and blustery.Among their pierced targets are the TV show 5-O and the Fuzz, in which two cops (Hannah Duggan and Erik Edborg) are shocked when suspects lie to them; their world is one bound by an honor code.
On public access, a school bully (Brian Colonna, cast against type and rising to the occasion) hosts his own talk show, falls for a victim and delivers a wallop of a surprise ending.
Erin Rollman proves once again her gift for standing on the border of creepy and taking the plunge. Her dating show contestant is a disturbingly deluded geek. But her Stacy Petrovsky, the capitalist Girl Scout, is a transcendent character given a return performance. This time, instead of selling cookies, she’s commandeering the TV news with an invented board game (Monopoly mixed with Risk: capitalism plus world domination) and tormenting her Brownie brother (Colonna).
Offstage, the performers owe all to troupe members Matt Petraglia and Samantha Schmitz, who somehow keep the manic show moving at a fluid pace. Full costume changes and proficient sound effects happen with the ease if not the budget of shows with far larger staffs.
By the time the cast resurfaces in fairy gear (technicolor Lycra bodysuits) to sing a Doris Day song, they’ve long ago won us over. And they know enough to take their bows while we’re still madly in love.
-Lisa Bornstein, December 19, 2003, Rocky Mountain News