Buntport Theater Company put several peculiar messages on Facebook before A Knight to Remember opened. These implied that the theater group – known for the creative synergy of its members – was divided on this piece about Brian Colonna’s childhood fantasies of knighthood. Erik Edborg would not be involved, the messages said, nor would SamAnTha Schmitz, Buntport’s off-stage tech impresario. We shouldn’t expect to see Evan Weissman, either – though he has had one foot out the door since founding the political-activist organization Warm Cookies of the Revolution. We learned that Hannah Duggan would be doing the tech, which she promised to mess up, and that Colonna himself would take tickets at the front desk. Did this imply a serious schism within the company?

But A Knight to Remember turns out to be a lighthearted, entertaining and thoroughly Buntportian evening of theater.

The tech consists of Duggan sitting on the floor wearing a gigantic bean bag strapped to her bum (why? Because sitting on the floor for an entire evening is hard) and slipping photos and sketches into a trio of the kind of overhead projectors teachers used in the tech-bereft olden days. But Duggan – as those of us who know and love her realized ahead of time – was never going to perform her services with selfless devotion. She bitches and kibbitzes as Colonna attempts to re-create his memories, which include bits of old books about chivalry, memories of a trip to the Renaissance Fair, and a crush on a classmate called Danielle. Required to take the role of a knightly opponent, she corners Colonna and won’t stop whacking him until the entire scene implodes into a welter of blows and childish recriminations.

Erin Rollman plays many figures, from teacher to squire to dentist, often in hyper-quick succession. Like Duggan, she has no compunction about interrupting the proceedings, particularly in a long segment where she demonstrates her versatility by going from the evil Ursula in The Little Mermaid to the Hunchback in Hunchback of Notre Dame and then complaining when she’s prevented from playing all the characters in the final scene of Fatal Attraction.

But funny and talented as these crazy ladies are, the evening belongs to Colonna as he acts out childhood scenes, attempts to eat a cup of noodles with his sword and informs Duggan that she’s supposed to shut up when she actually has no lines. His performance is honest, masterful, modest and just plain charming, with moments of genuine sweetness and nostalgia. Of course, the gleaming, clanking suit of armor he wears (courtesy of Chris Weed) is almost a character in itself, and certainly helps.

Though the script and basic structure were put in place ahead of time, the actors are making up a lot of the play as they go, feeling moments of real irritation, pushing each other to the limit, and periodically coming back and reconciling like kids who’ve been told sternly to stop fighting and get along. So I can’t tell you if what I saw on Saturday night will be anything like what you’ll see when you go. In fact, Rollman at one point informed us they were skipping a scene that had worked brilliantly the night before. This company really does invent with the kind of freshness and vitality you see in children playing games and just making up one thing after another as they go along; in this way, their work illustrates the creative process itself.

Knight also hints at the dynamics within the company. I have no doubt that Colonna – who often seems to take a back seat – got a bit pushy about his idea, and I imagine the others really did give him grief, with Duggan and Rollman perhaps agreeing to help more out of friendship than conviction. But if their on-stage balkiness is real, it also turns out to be hilarious theater. Rollman’s big monologue about how she loves the limelight is doubtless as true as it is self-mocking. So A Knight to Remember works as comedy, theater, an evocation of childhood hopes and dreams – and a metaphor for the company’s communal creativity. Perhaps it also works to explore and expiate some real tensions. And it definitely proves that the Buntport troupe can always bring things together in the end. Long may this quest continue.

-Juliet Wittman, April 18, 2013, Westword

Early in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, there’s a longish scene of almost pure exposition as Prospero, a powerful scholar and magician, explains to his daughter Miranda why they are stranded on an enchanted island. Prospero had been the Duke of Milan until his brother stole his dukedom and sent them both out to sea on a rickety craft. By a miracle, they survived and arrived at the island, which they share with Caliban, a half-human creature who supposedly represents the basest and most earthy human instincts, and a creature of pure spirit, Ariel. And now, Prospero tells Miranda, he has called up a storm that will shipwreck his evil brother, his nephew Ferdinand and much of the court so that he can exact his revenge.

It’s from this scene that Buntport’s Wake: A Corruption of The Tempest by William Shakespeare derives its inspiration. Prospero is long gone here, but because he’s so present in the minds of Miranda, Caliban and Ariel, and because the story he told Miranda provides the structure for their lives, he haunts the stage. Except that what he described never happened: no storm, no ship, no prince for Miranda, no revenge, no forgiveness. All the three characters have to give their existence any shape is a cassette tape of Prospero’s that tells the ending of the story, but they’re forbidden to listen to it. On a set consisting of ramps, white tree branches, an upper room and a grass-topped cage containing Caliban, they wait. This Miranda is no beautiful princess-to-be, but a wild, mucky girl with haystack hair who — as Caliban points out to her — now smells as bad and fishy as people in The Tempest used to say he did.

Miranda’s relationship with Caliban is intense. Sometimes they’re a pair of children exploring or squabbling; sometimes she bullies him, teases or pulls rank; sometimes she’s tender. And as Caliban alternately whimpers, threatens to attack, mocks her or himself, it’s clear that he’s in love with her. Caliban was always a complex character — Shakespeare gave him some of the loveliest speeches in this play — but in Wake, everyone is trapped inside Prospero’s story, and to Prospero, Caliban was nothing but a brute. Meanwhile, ethereal spirit Ariel has become an ambiguous, gray-clad figure, someone Miranda summons with an imperious gesture when she wants something and who — as Prospero’s representative — intervenes when chaos threatens.

Prospero renounces his magic toward the end of The Tempest, breaking his staff and drowning his book. This is a late Shakespeare play, and it’s believed that Prospero represents the playwright himself bidding goodbye to his work and the multifarious worlds he created. In Wake, Prospero’s exit is less poetic and more despairing. It shatters what might have been a genuine moment of transcendence and jolts the action into fast-forward.

The acting in Wake is absolutely astounding. Erin Rollman gives herself completely to the role of Miranda, and lives it with passion and intelligence. Brian Colonna’s Caliban is rich and full — strong, squirming, ironic, childish and evocative. We’ve all seen many Prosperos: They have power and dignity; they tower over the action; their statements are grave and significant. But in his big gum boots, Erik Edborg’s Prospero is unique — loving with Ariel, hectoring Miranda and bullying Caliban — and he delivers the best-known lines in The Tempest in ways you’ve never heard them before. The Buntporters collaborated with musician Adam Stone on Wake and in addition to creating the island’s soundscape, Stone plays Ariel. He’s anything but the elfin character we might expect, but there is something ethereal about both Stone’s music — unearthly sounds, dissonances, snatches of song, bits of melody — and his quiet, intense presence.

Wake is imagistic, suggestive and evocative rather than logical. Irresistibly reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the play is also completely original. It’s about the way artists shape reality and narrative shapes worlds. And also about music, waiting, being half-mad with boredom and — in an unexpected moment as brief and radiant as a firefly flickering in the darkness — love. Like Vladimir and Estragon, Miranda, Caliban and Ariel find ways to pass the time — which, as Estragon commented, would have passed anyway. Like Beckett himself, the Buntporters find a music in nothingness and in the search for meaning where meaning can’t be found.

-Juliet Wittman, January 31, 2013, Westword

The opening scene of Sweet Tooth is mesmerizing: a bare stage, a woman in a fur coat standing in front of a white sheet and singing “It’s cold.” A hand appears from behind the sheet offering a glass, sprinkling water on the woman, and then the sheet is removed to reveal a rose-colored living room filled with various strange portraits of this same woman. We discover she isn’t really cold.

Des Esseintes did much the same. Inspired by reading Dickens, he decided on a visit to London. But having gone to an English restaurant in Paris where he found the clientele repellent (“laymen with broad pork-butcher faces and bulldog muzzles, apoplectic necks, ears like tomatoes, wine-sodden cheeks, bloodshot, foolish eyes”), he decided he didn’t actually need to experience the island itself; it was represented sufficiently by the restaurant and a guidebook. George and her people read Dickens, too, though they don’t really like his work, and their approach to life is similar.She’s George, a wealthy eccentric who has retreated from the world like Jean Des Esseintes in Huysman’s Against Nature, a quintessential work in the decadent-aesthetic turn-of-the-century tradition (think Oscar Wilde). George has decided to create a hermetically enclosed, aesthetically perfect little universe for herself, one in which artifice is elevated above nature and a simulated event is superior to the event itself. With the help of two devoted followers — Hortense the maid and the artist George calls Mister (because there’s no male equivalent to the word “mistress,” and she doesn’t like “gigolo”) — she invents fake interludes to appreciate.

Pastry being about as artificial as cooking gets, the three eat a lot of desserts, and the result is predictable. George gets a toothache — meaning she has to deal with a very real, pressing and painful reality. A dentist is called in, a practical, low-key guy called Dr. Manette (another Dickens reference), and the group invites him into its shared fantasy life. Will he break through the enameled craziness with his forceps and angled mirror, or move deeper and deeper into the rosy-tinted trap following a trail of poisoned sweets?

There’s a lot of wit and ingenuity here, and also guts: When the Buntport Theater actors come up with an original concept, they tend to ride it through to the bitter end, not shying away from the craziest implications, exploring every possible crevice. Which makes Sweet Tooth as intellectually stimulating as it is lively and funny.

The theme goes beyond ideas about art versus reality. George isn’t just a solitary aesthete like Des Esseintes. She’s a monstrous and destructive narcissist, a controller and manipulator, a deeply sick woman with the power to draw others into the depths of her sickness. She can get Dr. Manette to see a mouth full of inflammation and decay as beautiful, persuade Hortense to sacrifice her very self, and play poor Mister like a sad little puppet. “The dark parts give me trouble,” George observes early in the play, and soon enough, those dark parts threaten to swallow the light.

Sweet Tooth is a collaboration with musician Adam Stone, and he provides a series of strange, passionate and funny songs on such topics as abscessed teeth and Pear William cake.

This is a generally dazzling piece of work. But while Hannah Duggan’s Hortense is unpretentiously self-effacing and Erik Edborg does a sterling job of portraying an ordinary dentist caught in an extraordinary situation, as George, Erin Rollman comes across like every movie diva you’ve ever seen in an old film, and Brian Colonna is all fluttering mannerism as Mister. These are both excellent actors — it’s Rollman’s stillness and gravity that makes the opening scene such a stunner — but rather than playing people who behave artificially, they play the artifice itself, unleashing a horde of tics, shticks and pecadilloes we’ve seen from them too many times before. It’s enough to make your teeth hurt.

-Juliet Wittman, November 1, 2012, Westword

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