Buntport Theater is always up for a new challenge. With “Indiana, Indiana,” the endlessly witty collective takes on acting. Real, character-driven acting – while telling an uncharacteristically melancholy family tragedy.

It’s a departure for this proven team known more for awing audiences and its unique brand of smart, irreverent humor.

“Indiana, Indiana” is something else indeed. Something dark and lovely. Sad and wonderful.

At the same time, “Indiana” marks a welcome return to Buntport’s presentational roots, every few moments conjuring another bit of its simple, signature stage magic.

Based on Laird Hunt’s elegiac, nonlinear novel, “Indiana” is about a simple old man named Noah who spends his late years drifting through his memories. There are those before Opal, and those after Opal. The sad circumstances of his detachment from a wife with an affinity for flames are worthy of John Irving.

What makes “Indiana” so intriguing is its approach to the chaos of memory, and Buntport’s approach to staging it.

The set is initially draped in a white sheet. Grainy, mood-establishing home movies play not on the wall but more askew: on the floor. The sheet is pulled to reveal an entire wall of stacked Mason jars, as if lining a Midwestern general store. Each jar is randomly filled – with straw, buttons, love letters and even bones. Each represents a memory from Noah’s life. Accessing a needed one here after so many decades looks akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

We see Noah’s story in bits, just as this old-man mind remembers them – hazy, incomplete, fragmented and unreliable. We’re in the land of “50-percent clarity,” we’re told – Noah remembers half the story, and we get only half its meaning.

He’s played with sad sobriety by Evan Weissman. Coaxed into talking by caring neighbor Max (Brian Colonna), we go back and forth in time to meet his teacher father (Erik Edborg) and devout mother (Hannah Duggan). With Noah’s eyesight failing, Max also reads aloud old letters from his beloved, Opal. These letters come with corresponding home movies, cleverly projected on everything from a woman’s apron to the back of an umbrella to the side of a washing machine.

In these murky journeys into the past, we discover Noah is a seer, a gift he’s reluctantly used to help cops solve crimes but has never been of any use to himself. His flashes come with crackling sounds and bursts of light, like a synapse not so much firing but short-circuiting.

The unfolding mystery of Noah’s current solitude culminates with a visit to his wedding, during which two glowing Mason jars, one blue and one red, swing from attached cables.

It’s an ambiguous but strangely moving effect.

“Indiana, Indiana” is in league with the Denver Center’s “Plainsong” and its coming sequel, “Eventide” – both based on novels that are as much read to an audience as performed. But Buntport’s creation shows just how beautifully real theatricality can be intermingled into such storytelling.

This brief journey is much to process at once, but it’s all captivatingly staged, and the story arcs satisfyingly.

While it might help to have read the novel, “Indiana” succeeds on it its own theatrical terms. Yes, it’s strange. Some might think there’s not much sense to it.

But, as we’re told along the way, “There might be!”

-John Moore, September 12, 2009, Denver Post