In ‘Best Town,’ a society suspended is the backdrop for a play about isolation
Coloradans are perhaps more familiar with the element molybdenum than other because we have one of the largest moly mines in the world up at Climax, near Leadville. Another big moly mine is located in a remote area of British Columbia about 550 miles north of Vancouver, and in the late 1970s, Amax Canada built a town nearby for mine workers. They named it Kitsault, and as a way to retain workers, they built up an entire infrastructure of modernity in the wilderness including a mall, a library, rec center and hospital.
Opening in 1980, Kitsault was only inhabited for about 18 months when the price of molybdenum — which is used in steel production — crashed and all 1,200 workers abandoned the town. What they left behind was a near-pristine ghost town, an early-’80s mini-city frozen in time with books still on the shelves of the library and stuff on the shelves of the grocery store. (This video shows it in detail.)
That’s the backdrop for the new play Best Town from Buntport Theater Company, with a script imagining what it’d be like to live in such a place. As with all Buntport shows, this is an original play created by the five members of the ensemble and acted by Brian Colonna, Erik Edborg, Erin Rollman and Hannag Duggan (the fifth member, SamAnTha Schmitz manages off-stage tech and other stuff.)
In creating the show, the Bunportians wanted to show as much of the town as they could, and to do so without creating a bunch of alternating sets, they hit upon the clever device of using models with cameras. The set is equipped with a variety of screens of different sizes, and models are wheeled out on cars while the characters poke a live video cam into its nooks and crannies.
Even before the show starts, Best Town leans heavily into the ’80s, with a pre-show mix of some of the most execrable pop hits of the time (“Eye of the Tiger,” “Don’t Stop Believin’” and the like). Olivia Newton John figures prominently in places, and Rollman’s character Hilary enjoys wearing leg warmers and headbands. Colonna plays Dodge, who spends a fair amount of time on a riding mower, and Edborg is super-nerdy Stan. The fourth character, known only as Number Four, is played by the feisty Duggan, although her usually over-the-top persona is tempered somewhat in this show to that of an almost-sweet mine worker with a lot of philosophical questions.
Loneliness and isolation are dominant themes in Best Town, and although it’s got a few laughs throughout, the play is more somber than many of Buntport’s productions. The four characters are in the same boat, trying to make sense of who and where they are and there’s not a lot of conflict to drive the action. As such, Best Town seems adrift in places, not entirely sure where it wants to go and taking a long time to get there. Repeated gags, like Dodge’s “Little Man” residing in his injured hand and an endless fascination with Thomas Pynchon’s unreadable 1973 novel “Gravity’s Rainbow” seem untethered from the action and don’t always land.
Best Town may not be Buntport’s best in terms of a fully realized story, but it does have quite a few of the troupe’s signature quirky humor scattered throughout — alongside winning performances from the four actors. We may not have much of a plot to cling to, but there are plenty of nice moments where life’s big questions are distilled into focused discussions around minutiae. And what better place than an abandoned town where life was abruptly suspended to contemplate the meaning of “it all?”
-Alex Miller, May 28, 2023, Onstage Colorado