Don’t underestimate the silly.
Done well, silly is of inestimable value (although I will try to estimate it herein). And at the top of their game, nobody does silly like Buntport Theater Company.
Seal. Stamp. Send. Bang. reveals the musical theater talents of the troupe’s five performers, who are a) fair to middling and b) brilliant. As always, they work in collaboration with Samantha Schmitz, who does bang-up technical and design work here.Their 25th original piece (can we just bow down to that achievement for a moment, please?) is, of all things, a musical. A synth-pop, ’80s-inflected, joyous story of lonely lives intersecting via the absurdity of the U.S. Postal Service.
Of course, it doesn’t help to catch the first 30 minutes of American Idol (fixed, I tell you, fixed!) before heading over to the theater. Five minutes and several missed notes in, my brain was showing the hand to Simon Cowell and telling him to stop being so mean. Because, despite the fact that none of these performers are gifted singers – a fact they cop to in the program – all of them have pleasant voices. More important, they know how to put over a song. Because they are, first, actors, and they get that singing a song is telling a story. They get an invaluable boost from Adam Stone, who wrote music and lyrics that are both catchy and clever, acknowledging musical theater conventions (check out that 11 o’clock number at 9:15) but not falling off the cliff of parody as so many recent musicals do.
Erin Rollman’s Susan is a blond-braided mail carrier, licking her wounds from her divorce and oblivious to the besotted Pete (Evan Weissman, who takes on three fully realized roles here), who drops unaddressed postcards into the mail in the hope that she’ll hear his words of love. Seal. Stamp. Send. Bang. is full of loopy interconnections of the Seinfeld sort, as diabetes, postcards and Tennyson crop up in unexpected places. It all plays out on the street of neatly crafted home fronts and Astroturf lawns, where each home spins around to reveal a mail truck, a deathly fluorescent office and home interiors.
Pete, the neighbor, responds to his mail carrier’s presence with the most ludicrous of love songs, singing:
I know you’re fragile
I’d handle you with care
Package you with peanuts
And bubble wrap your hair
Meanwhile, sad, strange Jason (Erik Edborg) is trapped in the dead-letter office, a soulless room out of Office Space where he spends his days trying to divine the source of dead letters, until a sadistic postal inspector (Brian Colonna, truly maniacal) shows up with questions and an electric-shock dog collar.
When he goes home, he finds his cousin, or sort of his cousin. No one quite knows, as evidenced in a riotously funny patter (edging on rap) song in which the two argue over how they are related. It’s also one of the best-staged songs; I only wish there had been more choreography from this group’s strange collective imagination. As the cousin, Hannah Duggan gets the night’s biggest laughs, beginning with her demented grunts and culminating in an entire song sung from the inside of a cardboard box. The idea that theater has lasted 3,000 years without a cardboard box singing and dancing onstage is criminal at the very least.
There’s no message to take away here. Even the bittersweet is mostly sweet. What you get, though, is a 75-minute, fully realized musical (the score is tracked) – and, for an extra $10, you can take home your own original cast recording.
—Lisa Bornstein, March 6, 2009, IWantMyRocky.com