Buntport Theater

Reviews

A man sits center wrapped between two women. The women seem to be having fun. The man looks worried.

Denver Post- Buntport’s “Sweet Tooth” is a blast of intellectual nitrous oxide

Yet, I can’t help but celebrate the happy occurrence as being, if not divine, at least cheeky, providence.Granted, the opening of the delirious musical “Sweet Tooth” and the arrival of a newly gussied up Blu-ray of “Sunset Boulevard” to my mailbox are purely coincidental.

Because Buntport Theater’s latest collaboration with composer-lyricist Adam Stone features a character who bears more than a passing resemblance to Gloria Swanson’s in Billy Wilder’s classic. And yes, perhaps there’s a touch, too, of Carol Burnett’s hilarious skit about Norma Desmond.

With her red turban, her vivid red salon and her ready-to-do-whatever-it-takes devotees, George (Erin Rollman) is quite a piece of work. The question that eats at her is: Is she the piece of artwork she desires to be?

You see, George is so bent on curating reality, making it perfect, that she becomes a recluse. She never leaves her home, not even for a medically necessitated emergency.

Instead with game assistance from her loyal servant Hortense (Hannah Duggan) and her sometime paramour and portrait painter Mister (Brian Colonna), she re-creates adventures — from North Pole travel (“baby, it’s cold inside”) to a spelunking foray that plunges the stage and the audience into darkness.

The first musical number “It’s Cold,” finds George decked out in fur — hat, coat, muff — trying her darndest to create a frozen tundra. Hortense mans a fan and splashes her with ice water.

Only George’s attempts are starting to fall short of the aesthetic perfection she hopes for. On top of that, she has a tooth in need of a dentist.

Will a dental emergency nudge our eccentric friend back toward reality or instead provide her an opportunity to achieve her grandest creation? Will Dr. Manette (Erik Edborg) bring a dose of common sense and a shot of Novocaine to the zany proceedings or get drawn into George’s feverish endeavor?

Such is the hilarious set-up of “Sweet Tooth.”

“Sweet Tooth” is Buntport’s third collaboration with talented and evolving composer-lyricist Stone. In their second, 2010’s”Jugged Rabbit Stew,” an angry bunny contemplated his destiny. It won the Ovation Award for best new work that year.

The Buntport collective has made a bold habit of ginning up absurd scenarios that take on quandaries that have been the stuff of philosophical head-scratching for ages. For instance, can a brilliant simulation — a.k.a. “art” — be better than the real thing?

This sounds heavy. Instead, with perfectly timed performances by a remarkably attuned ensemble and rich work from Stone, it’s spry, at times silly and always smart. Consider it intellectual nitrous oxide. It won’t hurt a bit.

-Lisa Kennedy, October 25, 2012, Denver Post

A group of four clowns in multi-colored and patterned clown outfits surround another shrugging clown, who wearing all white.

Berkshire Fine Arts- Buntport Theater Roasts Beef Censorship Knocked Out in Denver

Buntport Theater was founded by six graduates of Colorado College in the 1990s. When they went to the dean of Denver theater, Henry Lowenstein, for advice he said, “This will never work.”

The Henry (named after Lowenstein) annual awards nominations were announced on June 15th, and Buntport was nominated for outstanding production of a play, two supporting actors and one supporting actress, two outstanding new play nominations, and one outstanding costume design. This would be a knockout season for any company, and for Buntport, it happens year after year. Lowenstein recently admitted he had been wrong.

Buntport ended a smashing season with The Roast Beef Situation. The play, or perhaps riff, is a new invention, and visits the age old problem of censorship.

The company makes you think thrice or quadrice and quince about this subject of nagging, monumental importance for which neither the state nor artists have yet come up with an answer.

Jumping off from a famous and silly ditty by Henry Fielding about the eternal importance of roast beef in English life, the exploration is deliciously novel. Roast beef enabled the English to eat and fight, “without it they’re good night.” Theater audiences customarily sang about roast beef before and after new plays. The Royal Navy still dines to the tune. You don’t need this background, however, to understand how important roast beef is to the history of censorship.

Carlo Delpini (Brian Colonna) said the word ‘roast beef’ on stage without musical accompaniment, a requirement of the 1737 Licensing Act designed to muzzle political protest in any form. Naked words are banned. This may be why feisty opera composers struggled to have words spoken in their scores.

Delpini was thrown into jail with three equally horrific villains who had bludgeoned their victims to death. You could imagine the three murderers singing out, “Tough Tittie,” as the jailor arrivers with Delpini. Instead they launch into a diatribe on the inevitable inequities of the law. The jailer (Evan Weissman) is the only character with a visible prop, a mallet he uses to call the inmates to attention and also to summon the court when he acts the judge.

All are stock characters from Commedia dell’Arte and ask, “What to do with stock? How do you make stock lively?” The answer is in these tart performances.

In one stage dimension, Delpini is Pierrot. Erik Edborg, the classic love interest Harlequin, joins Duggan, Rollman and Weissman done up in colorful Commedia regalia. Full of humorous physicality like a leg which becomes a shot gun (Delpini cheats at this one, as his shoulder meets his knee) the show is a visual feast.

Themes of theater life erupt. Delpini is jealous of his rival Joseph Grimaldi who played his Friday in a production of Robinson Crusoe. The perils of performance, the danger of language, and even the necessity of repetition are tossed around with wit.

SamManTha Schmitz contributed lighting which softly went from vignette to vignette and was stark at a scenes’ conclusion. Her sound was apt, music provided by a cupped hand, rattling and banging by mallet and other clever devices. Interjected scenes from the Robinson Crusoe production are evoked with images of an island paradise projected flickering on cell bars.

The company is committed to a thoroughly ensemble approach. There is no hierarchy. Written in concert, directed and performed in concert, this clever troop comes up with moments you have never seen before, or even thought about.

We were not able to see another production, Tommy Lee Jones Goes to the Opera Alone, but it was a huge success. It will be reprised for three days at the end of June.

The American Theater Wing honored the Buntport group with a grant last year, noting that Broadway stretches three thousand miles across the country. Broadway could well take a page from this inventive and highly theatrical troop.

-Susan Hall, June 19, 2012, berkshirefinearts.com

In the foreground a clown that has a puff of white feathers for hair looks into the camera like they don’t know what’s going on. The clown right over their shoulder looks as if they are sneaking into the picture. The clown in the background holds a finger to their chin as if they are posing for senior portrait.

Westword- Buntport takes on centuries-old entertainment law in The Roast Beef Situation

The six members of the Buntport Theater Company like taking up strange facts, historical anomalies and odd and eccentric bits of information and working them into their communally created plays. After one Buntporter spotted Tommy Lee Jones standing in line for tickets to La Bohème at the Santa Fe Opera, they came up with the inspired idea of turning the actor into a giant puppet, seating him in a coffee shop with a chatty waitress and a piece of pie in front of him, and having him muse on life, art, music, performance and Puccini in Tommy Lee Jones Goes to the Opera Alone. The marriage of symbol, action and words was potent (and will be returning to Buntport for three days at the end of this month). Some years ago, in The Mythical Brontosaurus, they created a character who had to be coaxed out of near catatonia because of a crisis of faith: He had found out that the brontosaurus was no more, that it was only a juvenile specimen of a previously discovered lizard.

So when they learned that an eighteenth-century clown named Carlo Delpini had gone to prison because he’d said the words “roast beef” on a stage unaccompanied by music, thus contravening a meaningless and idiotic law laid down by the Lord Chamberlain, they were inspired.

Absurdity and humor definitely flavor The Roast Beef Situation. The costumes — evocative of commedia dell’ arte, with Delpini in the traditional white clown outfit with a soft shape-changing hat and the others sporting bald heads with curls of various hues, some of which are used periodically as facial hair — are brilliant in their shape, color and detail. There’s a loaf of French bread in the hand of a prison guard that turns out to be amusingly rubbery rather than stiff. All of the personalities are clownish, and there are scenes that repeat like a leitmotif.

But unfortunately, the repeating scenes don’t add the resonance they should, and the piece just doesn’t work. Jokes get repeated too often. When Delpini first gets to prison, he finds that every one of his fellow inmates has bludgeoned a man to death, yet they’re all shocked by his crime — not the words “roast beef,” but the fact that he’s an actor. Yes, actors were once considered vagabonds and trash, and, yes, the joke is mildly funny at first — but not funny enough for the number of airings it gets. Delpini’s envy of the famous clown Grimaldi, who redefined the entire concept of clowning, likewise gets mentioned a couple of times too often. (Still, clowning is a topic I’d rather like to see the Buntporters explore sometime, given their own entirely original form of it.)

Mockery of absurd laws is an obvious theme, and Erin Rollman carries a long list of them, which she periodically unfurls from her breeches — another comic touch that works for a while but gets overused. But the play doesn’t have much new to say about censorship or persecution — though the Lord Chamberlain actually continued to control what was seen on England’s stages for more than two centuries. In 1963, the crazed comic genius Spike Milligan was told he could only mount The Bed Sitting Room, a post-apocalyptic satire of London nine months after World War III in which the protagonist had turned into a bed sitting room and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan into a parrot, if he made several cuts and changes, including the following: “The mock priest must not wear a crucifix on his snorkel” and “Omit ‘the perversions of the rubber….’ Substitute ‘the kreurpes and blinges of the rubber.'”

This being a Buntport production, there are still some very funny moments, of course. In an inspired piece of mime, Brian Colonna as Delpini demonstrates a comic bit in which he raises his right leg and uses it like a gun — not very effectively — and Rollman promptly shows how it should be done, finishing with a loud and convincing gunshot. Colonna’s highly physical description of a traditional Punch and Judy show is also terrific, and so is the discussion that Evan Weissman initiates about the difficulties of living up to his name, Plausible Jack.

But the semi-serious points the company wants to make feel fragmented and unconvincing, and the moments of high-flying absurdity aren’t quite frequent enough to carry the evening.

-Juliet Wittman, June 13, 2012, Westword

A clown with a poof of fabric for hair, looks off cloyingly in the foreground, while another clown behind them sticks out their big fake butt looking as if they had just farted.

Boulder Magazine- The Roast Beef Situation

There is something both ludicrous and noble about the notion of one man or woman speaking out alone in protest against what s/he considers unfair, either for just him/herself or for the community in general. Remember the famous photograph of one man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square. Remember the names of famous whistle-blowers: Deep Throat (against Nixon), Jeffrey Wigand (against the tobacco industry), Sherron Watkins (against Enron), Gary Webb (against the CIA). And then there is Carlo Delpini, the most noble and most ludicrous of them all. One man speaking two words made it possible for the great traditions of theatre to continue.

As Buntport tells the tale, the emphasis is put much heavier on the ludicrous than on the noble. But nevertheless, it took ba—well, guts, to stand up and perform an act that was sure to land him in jail. Though as he tells it, he just sort of forgot and spoke out loud by accident at the end of a song about roast beef. But land in jail he did and was there subjected to a mock trial conducted by his fellow inmates – also portrayed by Commedia del arte characters such as himself.

The end result is funny, challenging to the audience, brilliantly staged and acted. It is ripe with those flashes of genius and intelligent (but bent) turns of humor we have come to expect in a Buntport production. It is impossible to explain everything that is going on in a Buntport script. They truly defy explanation; you have to be there and see them for yourself. A special pat on the back for this particular production must go for the costuming, lighting design and sound design. Sound effects add a dimension not possible with the spare staging of this show. The del Arte costumes are authentic and multi-functional, bright and ridiculous.

For some, Buntport is an acquired taste; you may not care for or understand the first show you see, but if you go to a second or third, you are hooked. I truly think it has to do with the first show you see. They are all so unique that if the first one tickles your fancy or challenges your understanding, then you will come back again and again. I was lucky – my first two shows were The Odyssey: The Walking Tour and Titus Andronicus: The Musical – two of the funniest and most cleverly staged shows I’ve ever seen. For those of you who have yet to acquire the Buntport addiction, get on the bandwagon. What’s wrong with you???

A Wow factor of 8.5!

-Beki Pineda, June, 2012, Boulder Magazine

In the foreground, a clown wearing a huge ruffle collar looks off in the distance while another clown in the background looks into the camera with a smile on their face and arms crossed.

Theater Colorado- “The Roast Beef Situation”

It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while a production is so innovative, so creative, so inventive, that I hardly know how to describe it. And with “The Roast Beef Situation,” words fail me. It is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. And that, frankly, is a good thing.

While the plot confounds, the premise is clear. The Licensing Act of 1737 censored all theater productions in England. Plays had to be approved by the government before they could be performed. One of the more draconian requirements of the law required that theaters could not use any dialogue that was not accompanied by music. That’s right. No dialog without music.

Carlo Delpini, a professional actor, clown, and pantomimist, was imprisoned in 1787 for violating The Licensing Act by uttering the words “roast beef” without music. It was, in his words, a “mistake.” That “mistake” (“misteak?”) is the premise for “The Roast Beef Situation.”

Buntport casts Delpini as the jailed protagonist, trying to rationalize his captivity and escape it in any way that is both possible and legal. (It turns out that it’s legal to escape from prison in a boat, but it’s not possible.) As for the lesser lunchmeats, well, you’ll have to see “Roast Beef” for yourself.

“The Roast Beef Situation” asks the obvious question: does this law make sense? And it also answers that question, with a random poll of 500 Londoners who think it does not make sense. As Delpini says, “quelle surprise.”

The performances are engaging, exaggerated, and thoroughly entertaining. The period costumes and makeup are surprisingly effective. The white face makeup and the lipstick focus our attention on the facial expressions. And those faces, at times, are as essential to the story as the script.

If we take “The Roast Beef Situation” simply as “food for thought,” one would quickly come to the conclusion that The Licensing Act of 1737 is misguided but irrelevant in 2012.

Do we dare ask the contemporary question “do these laws make sense?”

 

  • Foreign law has been banned in Kansas courts.
  • Pregnant women in South Dakota must be told that they have an “existing relationship” with the fetus before going through with an abortion.
  • It is illegal for undocumented immigrants in Alabama to get water in their homes.
  • Various states have enacted voter suppression laws, despite a lack of evidence of voter fraud.
  • The Wisconsin governor is attempting to prevent same sex couples from having hospital visitation access.

 

A lot has changed since 1737. Unfortunately, silly, senseless legislation has not changed. “The Roast Beef Situation” is a timely reminder of how the Ship of State sometimes veers far off course.

I was “plausibly perplexed” at times. In the end, though, I was dazzled by the concept, the performances, and the challenge of “The Roast Beef Situation.” This production is a unique experience that I recommend highly to all theater enthusiasts. You will laugh, you will scratch your head, but you will not be disappointed.

-Bill Wheeler, June 8, 2012, theatercolorado.blogspot.com

Two clowns in the foreground look as if they have done something bad. The clown behind them looks nervous.

blogspot.com- The Roast Beef Situation

The creativity involved in the conception and execution of Buntport Theatre’s new show, “The Roast Beef Situation,” is inventive genius par excellence. This is no surprise since it has been conceived, directed and acted by some of the brightest comic lights in this theatre community. They are: Erin Rollman, Erik Edborg, Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan,and Evan Weissman. It is an honor to get to see the works with which these artists are blazing trails of comedy and dram-edy here and now in Denver.

This latest in a series of comic plays gives censorship a well-deserved comeuppance! And that is why you should go. This piece makes us see how actors and clowns who survive on their audience’s sometimes-fickle good will are often the victims of laws such as the one that caused Carlo Delpini to be thrown into an English jail in July of 1787. Delpini broke the law that forbade unlicensed theatres to use dialogue that was unaccompanied by music. In a moment of weakness he spoke the words “Roast Beef” rather than sang them.

Censorship has been with us always. This was true at the time of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. The deposition scene in Shakespeare’s “Richard II” caused more than a little eye rolling and Christopher Marlowe’s work came under the scrutiny of Elizabeth I’s Star Chamber for many reasons. Marlowe barely escaped experiencing its secret brutality first hand.

At that time theatres were closed by Puritans, and actors blamed for lewdness. (In all honesty one must say that only occasionally were actors to blame for such things.) For the most part the closing of theatres was due to ecclesiastical sanctimony, political power mongering and public alarm resulting in mob panic. Many times these maledictions came about because of the much feared and widespread epidemics. Whether it was the resurgence of the Plague, which was feared by everyone or some other societal scourge feared by those in power such as a political uprising of one kind or another, the afflicted community many times blamed it upon the theatre.

The Commedia del’Arte and its presentation is – whether this reviewer is its greatest fan or not – magnificently put forth. In this show the renowned Buntport humor, which so deftly demolishes funny bones, takes a back seat to historical research regarding the persecution of actors and the satirical evisceration of those ne’er do wells who hurt the theatre by living by the letter of ridiculous and nonsensical laws.

Commedia del Arte is this company’s style of choice in producing this new work. It’s a valid choice and those who find an endless stream of pratfalls and baguette whippings, accompanied by repetitive clangs and whistles palatable will find this aspect of the proceedings delightful. This reviewer has nearly always found the initiation of such theatrical expressions enjoyable. However… after the hundredth repetition thereof he tends to find them tedious.

That said, one may find exceptional work in the muggings, sly transitions of hairpieces to beard and moustache and many other sly subtleties in the theatricality of the very correct stylistic presentation of this play. The costuming and makeup of the actors in their portrayal of these eighteenth century thespians is superb and indelible. It puts one in mind of the costuming and also the depiction of the facial landscape in films by Federico Fellini such as “I Clowns”, “Casanova” and “Fellini/Satyricon.”

SamAnTha Schmitz’s lighting design plays games with the viewer’s subjective and objective points of view. The shifts in her lighting design make one feel as though he were viewing an actual moment in theatrical history one moment and pulled back into a modern theatrical depiction thereof the next. “The Roast Beef Situation” is a blood-rare and gently mooing serving of existential theatrical Truth.

See it!

-David Marlowe, June 4, 2012, david-marlowe.blogspot.com

Denver Post- “Roast Beef Situation” is well-done, smart fun

The ridiculous gets the sublime once over as Buntport Theater Company performs its devilishly original play “The Roast Beef Situation,” through June 16.

The collaborative, idiosyncratic company (whose most recent show featured a Tommy Lee Jones puppet) has cooked up a fine slice of Commedia dell’Arte. The Italian-born, theatrical tradition gave audiences the sad fool Pierrot, his nemesis Harlequin as well as the bickering pair Punch and Judy to name but a few of the stock characters that populate the form.

The play’s goofy title gives a vigorous nod to just how absurd the law — especially in the hands of miscreant politicians — can become.

Based on a historical event, “Roast Beef” tells of the jailing of actor, dancer, clown Carlo Delpini in 1787. During a performance, Delpini (Brian Colonna) strays from a willfully sentimental ditty written by Henry Fielding about a cut of meat and utters two words without musical accompaniment.

You know actors and their disregard for hewing to the writer’s words, but the wrath wasn’t Fielding’s. Actors were prohibited from performing plays with spoken dialogue unless approved by the government.

Britain’s Licensing Act of 1737 granted the Lord Chamberlain the right to approve, or not, all plays with dialogue. (It wasn’t until a Parliamentary act in 1843 that this changed.) The act was a way to muzzle satirists and others craftily poking fun at politicians.

“The Roast Beef Situation” becomes fleet fun as Delpini and his cohort find themselves in the clink. With a little help from SamAnTha Schmitz’s spare lighting design, ensemble members Erin Rollman, Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan and Evan Weismann play Delpini’s clown posse — Morey, Grub, Stan and Plausible Jack — as well as stand-ins for other characters in the tale’s priceless recounting.

Deliciously layered, “Roast Beef” is a romp with “meta” implications: about censorship as well as the role of the actor in society. It is silly and smart simultaneously. How often does a clown comedy send one on a quest to learn about Georgian-era jurisprudence?

The uses and abuses of laws and taxation are given a hard and hilarious gander. There’s even a bit of slapstick mischief around professional jealousy: Delpini is aggravated by Giuseppe Grimaldi’s popularity. After all, wasn’t it he, Delpini, who cast Grimaldi as Friday to his Robinson Crusoe in the pantomime performance on Drury Lane?

The laws regulating theater are so arcane and legion that Morey keeps them tucked away on a scroll, which is consulted again and again. This becomes just one example of the expert physical comedy buoying this linguistically nimble ride.

The costumes are impressively outlandish (when Grub portrays “the love interest,” his rump becomes a rack). So, too, are the variety of bald wigs. In addition to lights, Schmitz is also responsible for the sly sound design.

For those with Coulrophobia (a fear of clowns), Buntport’s troupe feels your pain. Or at least acknowledges your condition, even as they tease it boldly, brilliantly.

-Lisa Kennedy, June 1, 2012, Denver Post

Three clowns stand in the line looking into the camera. The one on the left is turned to the side pushing their obviously enhanced giant butt out. The clown in the middle stands as if they are innocent and the one on the right sticks their belly out and holds it with their hands as if approving and surveying things.

echnorati.com- Roast Beef vs The Wrath Of The Titans

Entertainment companies demand that Google take down listings promoting their new movies. A clown is jailed in London for saying the words “roast beef” on stage.

Which seems the most likely to be true?

Both.

Denver’s raucous Buntport Theatre’s latest production, “The Roast Beef Situation,” premiered during the holiday weekend.

While the 32nd production of the Buntport in its 11 years might not seem so bizarre, after all the six-member cast has no director and has done shows like “Kafka On Ice,” the takedown notices from Hollywood either show how incompetent studio lawyers are or how far they are willing to go to make viewers pay as many times as possible for the same content.

Google reported the DMCA notices in its latest transparency reports. The Internet giant wants people to know what it is being asked to do. Torrent Freak and others reported on the latest actions.

Although “The Roast Beef Situation” is based on the dilemma of the clown Carlo Delpini 225 years ago, the cast demonstrates that copyright issues can simply be another way to control what is said in public. In the 18th century, the British government sought to strictly regulate what could be said in its theaters, the Internet of its day.

Brian Colonna, who plays the clown thrown into a jail full of murderers who bludgeoned their victims, wants to know if the spoken word can be owned. First he has to convince his jail mates that he deserves to be in the same cell with them.

Mark Twain didn’t think so. He thought all ideas were second-hand and therefore not actionable

“The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism,” he wrote in a letter.

Spanish surrealist Salvadore Dali, whose most famous painting was “The Persistence of Memory,” followed Twain by a couple of generations.
“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

Perhaps if a more friendly word, recycling, was used, it wouldn’t sound so bad. Mozart did it.

-Robert Weller, May 29, 2012, technorati.com

A clown in the foreground looks off to the side as if the two clowns behind them may be up to something nefarious. The two clowns do, in fact, look up to no good.

Westword Blog- Buntport’s The Roast Beef Situation blends Commedia dell’arte and satire

Tommy Lee Jones Goes to the Opera Alone is a tough act to follow, but Buntport Theater Company is going for it with the last show of the season, The Roast Beef Situation. The play, which opens at 8 p.m. tomorrow, is old- — as in eighteenth-century, clown-troupe-style Commedia dell’Arte old — school comedy, with a fresh satirical take on censorship.

The Roast Beef Situation begins with a true story, which goes like this: In 1787, a clown named Carlo Delpini was thrown in jail, along with the rest of his company, for speaking the words “roast beef” on stage without any music playing in the background. Per Lord Chamberlain’s Licensing Act of 1737, only licensed theaters performing approved material could perform words on stage without music.

Buntporters stumbled on this piece of trivia in an arts and culture magazine based out of New York, called Cabinet. From there, they brainstormed and collectively penned The Roast Beef Situation, their 32nd production together. “In the process of him being in jail with all the people in the show, he kind of takes back ‘roast beef’,” says Brian Colonna, the Buntport collaborator who will play Delpini. “We kind of just blew it up right there, based on that little story about the clown going to jail.”

The Roast Beef Situation is layered with a condemnation not just of the act of censorship that sets the play in motion, but of the absurdity of the law and government enforcement of it. The levity of the clown comedy is interrupted by political barbs directed at authority. With the theater emerging as an art form, says Colonna, “the establishment is a bit concerned people would get to say things they wouldn’t approve of. Performers were starting to do that. The Lord Chamberlain, who made the law, was being satirized at the time.”

While creating clown comedy, Buntport had to deal with the dimension of creepiness that clowns have taken on in recent years, thanks to Pennywise, John Wayne Gacy and Poltergeist. “I feel like people hear ‘clown’ and they’re like, ‘Yeah, I don’t think I’ll go see that,'” Colonna admits. “Poltergeist ruined clowns for everyone.” But these are not modern, conventional circus clowns; they are designed largely in the Commedia style, with Delpini dressed as stock-character Pierrot, with a white buttoned frock and cap. There is nothing creepy about them; they’re just ridiculous.

“They’re inspired by the real outfits,” says Colonna of the costume design. “Erin (Rollman) made them, and at the moment they’re one of my favorite aspects of the show.”

There is always humor to be found in laughing at the inadequacies of others. The common themes of competition and self-doubt among artists did not escape Buntport as places to find humor. “We mention Grimaldi, who is probably the most famous clown from that era,” Colonna notes. “Delpini is only a footnote. His friends bring up Grimaldi constantly.”

And, as always with Buntport comedy, the company hopes for more than just laughs. “There’s a line that goes, ‘To know what is ridiculous, you must know what is sublime,'” Colonna says, drawing a connection between the text and the experience he and his collaborators hope to create with this show. “I think people will mostly get the ridiculous, but hopefully, for one second, the sublime will pop up.”

-Shaughnessy Speirs, May 24, 2012, blogs.Westword.com

A life-size puppet of Tommy Lee Jones sits at a diner table that is surrounded by a yellow and white checkered floor surrounded by darkness. A waitress stands next to the table as if she is about to take his order.

Westword- Buntport’s Tommy Lee Jones Goes to Opera Alone is brilliantly original

Buntport Theater Company has always had a creative way with music: The ensemble’s choices for openings, accompaniment and intermissions are spot-on, and some of its shows have included fruitful collaborations with local musicians. So when two Buntporters spotted tough-guy movie star Tommy Lee Jones standing in line at the Santa Fe Opera for tickets to La Bohème, it got their speculative juices going. The result is a brilliantly original piece of theater called Tommy Lee Jones Goes to Opera Alone, with a large puppet Tommy Lee Jones at its center.

This puppet is around five feet tall, pale and thin-limbed, with imposing eyebrows and large, highly articulated hands, courtesy of Denver puzzle-box master Kagen Schaefer (robotics teacher Corey Milner helped rig those hands for action). But if the hands are eloquent, the mouth is permanently shut tight. Four actors, all wearing black suits and masks, provide the animation: Brian Colonna works the head, Evan Weissman and Erin Rollman the tricky hands, and, sitting almost completely still, his features obscured, Eric Edborg serves as the puppet’s voice.

The action is set in a coffee shop where Tommy Lee Jones goes regularly for coffee and pie. He has a longstanding teasing and affectionate relationship with waitress Jane – Hannah Duggan, the only troupe member who gets to be an actual, freestanding human being. Jones wants to talk to us, the audience, and he has a lot to talk about: cowboy boots, movies, his background, how human speech evolved (and the price we paid for it) and, of course, opera – the grandest use to which those evolved voices can be put. He shares his ideas about the quality of Elvis’s singing, Puccini (“sincere and at the same time counterfeit”) and live performance (“You are always seeing…something that will never happen again”). He’s particularly fascinated by Turandot, the opera Puccini left unfinished at his death. Periodically, he activates a gold pocket watch from which arias emanate.

Buntport has always made a point of bridging – or rather, completely ignoring – the line between high and low art, so it’s no surprise that this production humanizes and demystifies opera. Tommy Lee Jones explains that the melodies of many popular songs come from opera, and shows that opera belongs to everyone – him, us, and irrepressible waitress Jane, who feels free to sing along and contribute her own ideas about plot.

Puppets have been in Buntport’s DNA from the beginning: In this company’s hands, anything from a stuffed bear to a car antenna can become human. And puppets also hold a strong fascination for the rest of us, from bloodthirsty horror-movie mannequins to child-mesmerizing Muppets. Much of the play’s meaning is imagistic rather than verbal, and there’s something deeply evocative in the three black-clad puppet manipulators, who look sometimes like nurturers and sometimes like bringers of death. The puppet isn’t realistic, and yet by the end of the evening, it has acquired some strange semblance of life. Which means you have to ponder what it signifies when a man’s body parts assert emotional and physical independence, when his right hand is at odds with his head. No wonder the poor man has dreams in which he’s trying to fit his boot over his ears. And when these figures desert the puppet to fold in on himself, we feel real sadness.

There’s a sense of continuous recursion, boxes within boxes, stacked Russian dolls. At one point, Jane mirrors the action by staging her own mini-puppet show, using a ketchup bottle, a fork that morphs from a character in Turandot into a pie-eating utensil, a syrup bottle. Turandot supposedly reflects events in Puccini’s own life, and the plot of the opera in turn gets re-enacted here – in a very unexpected way.

The acting is terrific, reflecting the company members’ deep commitment to the work and each other. Duggan, in particular, adds irresistible sparks of life and humor with every entrance.

Part of Buntport’s mission is to make art transparent. There’s no attempt at illusion or concealment: All the transitions and manipulations happen right in front of your eyes. Tommy Lee Jones is, among other things, a meditation on the process of creation, the relationship between artist and audience, and the fact that a great work of art changes over time and is therefore never finished.

-Juliet Wittman, April 3, 2012, Westword