Scary on stage is a hard trick to pull off.

It’s more difficult to lose yourself in a room where you know that the actors are actors and that the lights and sound are being manipulated.

Which makes Buntport’s first foray into the realm of terror an impressive undertaking. Because, above all, Horror: The Transformation is scary.

Not in a deep, psychological way, but in the more visceral, trying-to-prepare-yourself-for-the-next jolt manner.

Based on an 18th-century story, The Transformation’s basic story is that of a man who heard voices telling him to kill his family. But the plot is both less thrilling and less involving than the general atmosphere Buntport creates.

From the beginning, all is unsettling. First, there’s the set: a life-size, two-story dollhouse with a cutaway front wall that reveals the family inside. That house contains mysteries, revealed with an impressive showmanship and creativity that shows theater can equal or surpass CGI effects.

The house is furnished, but not quite comfortable. There are signs of life within, but not enough to make it homey. And the dim lights cast on the stage set an audience on edge waiting for the shocks.

Within that house gathers the family: pleasant parents Theodore (Brian Colonna) and Catherine (Erin Rollman), his sister and her brother (Hannah Duggan and Evan Weissman) and Theodore and Catherine’s children, represented by hollow-eyed puppets that are passed off and portrayed by the entire cast.

Enter a mysterious stranger, Carwin (Erik Edborg), a magician who is in fact less threatening than what the house itself contains. Soon Theodore is hearing disembodied voices, leading to the play’s denouement.

It’s not the story; it’s the style. Scenes are punctuated by blackouts that threaten sudden shocks. Walls move and bleed. The family itself comes from no realistic period: they speak in a kind of heightened Edwardian style but dress in a contemporary manner and live in a contemporary home. Between the words are spaces, filled with foreboding.

The story needs some work – some propulsion, and coherency. And the puppets are nifty, but not given as much character as they could be.

Combine those two facets with the atmosphere, though, and The Transformation could be a horror of the best kind.

-Lisa Bornstein, November 25, 2005, Rocky Mountain News