The title of Buntport Theater Company’s latest – “A Knight to Remember” – is a clever if mildly hazardous title. It teases a smirk at the pun, but also raises expectations of a theatrical experience that aren’t fully met in the company’s final show of the season.
The subtitle of the play is: “My quest to gallantly capture the past by Brian Colonna,” which gives more than a hint at its first-person ambitions. But Buntport being arguably the most inventive ensemble in town means Colonna is not alone on his journey to understand his boyhood.
Hannah Duggan, or “DJ Hannah Duggan,” as she’s credited, operates overhead projectors, lights and sound. She also makes absurd forays into the action.
Erin Rollman joins Colonna “as everyone else,” Though there comes a time when the deft, aware performer bristles cleverly at her place in this recounting of the life of Brian.
“A Knight to Remember” is, in part, about how things capture our imaginations, especially our young, hopeful, heated imaginations. An idea: about chivalry. An accessory: A shiny coat of armor. Another human: in this case, a girl who clasps her hands in the strangest way during one of those class portraits. You know the kind, the one where the teacher stands to the left and there are at least two risers of children, beaming or not.
Like many memory-oriented works, this one moves between details peculiar to the teller (the family trip to Germany, the serious orthodontics, the schoolboy crush) and those that bind us to a moment in time. Here, that would be the ’80s. There’s a funny bit about Colonna hijacking Rollman’s graduation year, because it was just a more interesting year.
Actually, there is a fair amount of onstage bickering about the very undertaking. And it is this notion of an ensemble performing a one-man show that provides the most Buntport-ian “in.” It is the type of meta-playfulness they do so darn well: taking on a simple (sometimes outlandish) idea and exposing layers existential and theatrical.
Alas, quests can be ragtag. (Just ask Don Quixote.) This outing is a bit ragged for a company whose work is more often fluid, funny and taut.
-Lisa Kennedy, April 27, 2013, Denver Post