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

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