Reviews Archives - Page 13 of 23

Denver Post- Fanciful trip inside O’Neill’s head

Just imagine if Buntport Theater had Eugene O’Neill’s ego.

Why, the world would be theirs.

If “The 39 Steps” can play for two years on Broadway, think how warmly a national audience might embrace the smart, quirky little inventions Buntport turns out four times a year in their little warehouse on Lipan Street.

Lucky for us their ambitions remain so humble.

Their latest, “The World Is Mine,” plays out inside the mind of America’s greatest, most damaged dramatist as he recovers in a hospital from an appendectomy. O’Neill is just getting started on “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” the play he wrote to be his epitaph: a bleak, boozy look back at his messed-up childhood.

Sickness underlines “The World Is Mine,” mostly of the self-inflicted or indulged variety. But it was in actuality sickness – specifically recovery from a nasty bout with tuberculosis – that turned a young, derelict O’Neill to writing in the first place. That, in essence, makes “The World Is Mine” as much about creation as disease. Even if writing can be equally consumptive.

We open in O’Neill’s living room in Connecticut – as the patient remembers it. A furrowed Erik Edborg, as O’Neill, enters with a hospital gown covering a business suit. He’s setting the scene for “Long Day’s Journey,” and he hasn’t quite settled on the floor plan. So there are duplicate set pieces. A lamp might yet go here – or there – so, for now, they exist in both places. Lights turn on and off with a flick of his finger.

He’s narrowing things down.

O’Neill was consumed with the complex psychology of his characters, and “The World Is Mine” turns out to be a fanciful and elucidating examination of his own inner workings. He doesn’t just simply conjure the ghosts from his masterpiece – his nomadic actor father or morphine-addicted mother. He does what all whiskey-soaked brains do: He intermingles past and present.

So a nurse reminds him of the daughter he never saw again after she ran off with Charlie Chaplin at age 18, but still lives perpetually in his subconscious. A Swedish emissary who has come to deliver O’Neill’s Nobel Prize reminds him of the disintegrating brother who came to viciously resent his sibling’s success.

These visitors at times become their doppelgangers, most devastatingly when the affable Swede (Brian Colonna) suddenly delivers a scathing attack on O’Neill that doesn’t so much pierce the writer but send him scrambling for a pen.

In one of many delightful twists, O’Neill is both inspired and tormented by his coquettish third wife, Carlotta (a wonderful Erin Rollman), the provocateur and collaborator who shares both his mind and hospital room (she’s been admitted for nerves).

Buntport, well-known for its whimsical staging conceits (Let’s just say they give new meaning here to an “Irish coffee table”), most cleverly illustrates O’Neill’s pathological self-absorption. The women wear mustaches that mirror his own. Not only does O’Neill’s adult portrait now hang on the wall of his childhood home, there are two facing versions of it (Who can decide on one’s best side?). All these characters are merely variations of O’Neill himself.

Of Buntport’s more than two dozen original productions, “The World Is Mine” is easily among its best-acted and written. O’Neill’s life was so absurdly laced with tragedy, including suicides by two erudite sons, it would be easy to almost lampoon it.

Instead, the play is melancholy and earnest down to its wonderful title. It’s a line Edmond Dantes yells in “The Count of Monte Cristo” – a role that defined and haunted O’Neill’s actor father. He said the line 6,000 times and didn’t once mean it, O’Neill says. He considered his father a condemned man, “doomed to live life as the same person.” Just like the rest of us.

O’Neill single-handedly changed how we think about theater. And Buntport, collectively, is doing the same thing.

“The World Is Mine” is a prescient introduction to “Long Day’s Journey,” which the Paragon Theatre will also be presenting, opening Feb. 13. Together, they will make for terrific companion pieces

-John Moore, February 4, 2010, Denver Post

A mustached woman, wearing a red velvet gown, reclines on a turn of the century love seat. Her bare feet dangle above a piano bench set to the right of the love seat. The woman holds a glass of whiskey and puckers her lips. Books are stacked in separate piles on the floor.

Westword- Buntport channels its inner O’Neill in The World Is Mine

The members of the Buntport Theater troupe have always been interested in the creative process. They’ve imagined Alexandre Dumas creating his three musketeers after reading a novel borrowed from the library; suggested what would happen if Ovid, having burned the manuscript of Metamorphoses in a fit of pique, came face to face with one of his creations on the road, the woman-turned-cow Io; and woven the strands of Franz Kafka’s own history into the plot of his best-known work, Metamorphosis.

In The World Is Mine, Buntport gives us Eugene O’Neill in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy and thinking about beginning work on Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the play that dramatized the life of the author’s booze-drug-and-self-pity-soaked family and that he famously said was written in tears and blood. (In an interesting piece of artistic cross-fertilization, Paragon Theatre will open Long Day’s Journey Into Night next week.) The Buntporters treat this somber material with their usual fizz and humor without in any way trivializing it. They tackle O’Neill’s self-absorption head on: The set represents the inside of his mind, and the three other characters – all mustachioed like O’Neill himself – exist only as he sees them, or pretty much as he sees them; every now and then, one or another hints at an alternative self the playwright hasn’t noticed. The action takes place in the living room O’Neill envisions for his play; it has a sofa, piles of books, patterned wallpaper, a desk – or are there two desks? It takes a second to realize that much about this realistic-seeming set is out of kilter: in addition to the two desks, there are two chandeliers and two telephones; there are also a plethora of light switches and an oddly too-low entrance space. The kind of tape theaters use to mark the placement of props and furniture outlines almost everything. A profile of Erik Edborg, who plays O’Neill, is mounted on the back wall, facing left; opposite it, the same portrait has been flopped so it’s facing right. Or rather, facing itself. We half notice that there are glasses everywhere. And once the action begins, we find that the entire place bleeds alcohol as characters pour drinks from almost every available object, from a chandelier to a telephone.

One of the playwright’s sons has committed suicide; he is estranged from his surviving children, a drifter son and his daughter, Oona, who, to his fury and chagrin, has married a clown: Charlie Chaplin. O’Neill is being taken care of by a nurse, Cathleen, who reminds him of Oona and whom he will transform into the Tyrones’ dim, flirtatious Irish maid in Long Day’s Journey Into Night – hence the absurdly high heels she wears along with her mustache. His wife, Carlotta, is on the scene, too. She talks about creating a space where he can write (as the real Carlotta did), but mostly she babbles about the Chinese furnishings she plans for the house they intend to build and parades around in a succession of elegant dresses and surprising hats. The final character is Erland, come from Sweden to give O’Neill the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, which he must present to the playwright in the hospital because he is too weak to travel. Erland sometimes morphs into Jamie, who represented O’Neill’s loved and hated older brother in Long Day’s Journey.

As always, Buntport manages to lighten ponderous material while finding in it unexpected depths. One trick the company uses brilliantly is to concretize the metaphorical; the booze-soaked room, for instance, tells us everything we need to know without the characters having to stagger and slur. Oona’s image appears unexpectedly on a screen; O’Neill finds there’s no way to get rid of the costume his actor father wore in The Count of Monte Cristo, which reappears every time it’s bundled out of sight. What better way to communicate the iron hold of the past? Then there are the twin portraits. They’re clearly a sign of O’Neill’s narcissism – he’s trying to figure out which profile is the better – but they also represent the artist confronting himself, the man who must write versus the man who’d do anything, including kill himself, to avoid the pain of writing.

The World Is Mine raises the central question about Eugene O’Neill’s artistry: the fact that his focus is so relentlessly, claustrophobically inward. In their humorous and unpretentious way, the Buntporters – actors Edborg, Erin Rollman (Carlotta), Hannah Duggan (Cathleen) and Brian Colonna (Erland), along with co-creators SamAntha Schmitz and Evan Weissman – suggest that when feelings run deep enough and genius is sufficiently capacious, personal obsession becomes universal and transforms into art.

-Juliet Wittman, February 03, 2010, Westword

A man wearing a half mask sits on top of a washing machine. A man wearing suspenders stands next to him. A dirt road is projected on the floor around them. A wall made of many glass jars can barely be seen in the dark behind them.

Westword- Buntport’s production of Indiana, Indiana is pure poetry.

Every now and then, the Buntport troupe decides to remind audiences that they’re not just clever, funny, creative and entertaining; they’re also artists. And that’s just what they do with Indiana, Indiana, a production based on a novel by Laird Hunt of the University of Denver. The story isn’t complicated. An old man, Noah, who’s always been a little touched, remembers his life and obsesses over his brief, lost marriage to Opal. Scenes from his life – his childhood, his short stint as a mailman, his interactions with his parents – are acted out in a surreal way; periodically, someone called Max reads him letters from Opal, most of them communicating a kind of febrile ecstasy. It turns out that Opal, too, had mental problems, and was committed to a mental institution by (I think) Noah’s father, Virgil. Virgil may also have ended Noah’s visitation rights, so there’s longstanding and unresolved pain between father and son.

The piece is imagistic and poetic rather than literal. With their usual deft and imaginative stagecraft, the Buntporters have filled the evening with fluidly surprising moments. One thing transforms into another, windows and doors appear where once there were none, furniture slides on and off the stage, and mood and meaning are created by the interplay of different media: music, human voices and bodies, still and moving images, concrete objects that shimmer with an undefinable significance. At one point, an actor begins playing the saw. No sooner has the creaky note sounded than it starts to rise and purify, and we realize we’re hearing the haunting sound of a woman’s voice. For weeks, Buntport’s Facebook page sported a request for Mason jars; filled with a variety of things that denote the thoughts and events of Noah’s life – corks, dried leaves, yarn, used tea bags, buttons, seed pods, sticks, bones – these homely objects become a shimmering wall that dominates the set.

The visual metaphors are so luminous and beautiful that I hate to admit that sometimes I don’t quite see why they’re there, or what they have to do with the theme or storyline – a storyline that isn’t, in itself, particularly riveting. Take the man playing the saw. This is a moment of pure visceral pleasure, and interesting thoughts follow about the melding of the mechanical and the human, the artist’s ability to make something ethereal out of something mundane – just as the company does with its canning jars. It’s all very lovely and touching in an abstract sort of way, but what does the saw man have to do with Noah? There’s another, equally inventive moment that works gloriously, however: the joining together of Noah and Opal, done with swaying lights in a way I won’t describe because you just have to see it for yourself.

As actors, the Buntporters have taken a risk with Indiana, Indiana. They’ve set aside their usual hilarious antics and are playing it straight and vulnerable – an approach that reveals just how accomplished they’ve become. Taking on characters that range from the town sheriff to the genial Max (Noah’s son, perhaps?) to a coughing minister (Is he sick? Why doesn’t the script tell us?), Brian Colonna works with quiet assurance and is as good as I’ve ever seen him. Hannah Duggan is nurturing as Noah’s mother and purely touching as Opal. Playing Noah, Evan Weissman dons a mask early on, a weird, puff-cheeked thing, above which the dark line of his hair looks like a cap. He takes it off only once, when Noah and Opal come together, but manages to communicate all of Noah’s passions and regrets from behind this ambiguous mask. And while I never quite figured out what had caused the rift between Noah and his father, Erik Edborg’s profound sorrow as he walked slowly across the stage stilled all my questioning.

Buntport’s low-tech, high-creativity approach has had us seething with laughter often enough. This time, it’s the force behind an evening of quietly hypnotic beauty.

-Juliet Wittman, September 16, 2009, Westword

Highlands Ranch Herald- Play floats Indiana memories

A glowing back wall of shelves, lined with quart-sized glass jars full of assorted objects seems to set the mood for a curious, poetic, magical interpretation of “Indiana, Indiana,” adapted from a novel by DU Professor Laird Hunt, who teaches creative writing.

It plays through Oct. 3 at Buntport Theater, where Buntport’s clever ensemble is known for its often biting and funny take on various literary classics, but has not before worked with a living writer. The group of six writes together and develops ingenious staging within a limited budget.

The book begins: “In the center of the county in the center of Indiana in the heart of the country, down a long, dark hallway, Noah Summers, a simple man who has led a far from simple life, sits in front of a flickering fire, drifting in and out of sleep. On this dark and lovely night, he sifts through the shards of his memories trying to make sense of a lifetime of psychic visions and his family’s tumultuous life on an Indiana farmstead.” After a beginning like this, “Once upon a time” will not suffice anytime soon!

Focused on a character named Noah, the non-linear script pulls closely from Laird’s language as it floats through periods in the rural man’s life, especially before and after Opal, but not necessarily in chronological order. The love of Noah’s life was mentally ill and lived most of her life in a hospital after she set their home on fire. Her letters to Noah, mostly removed from reality but filled with lovely words and images, pop up frequently through the book and play, as it takes Noah from young, just-married man to an elderly man, looked after by his son, Max.

Laird Hunt generously gave the creative group permission to develop a theater piece, not knowing what would evolve. Evolve it has, into a spellbinding 90 minutes of theater.

Evan Weissman plays the part of Noah, aging with a mask and body language.

Hannah Duggan, who observed on opening weekend that the group felt really happy with the results, plays Noah’s Bible-quoting mother Ruby, as well as the young Opal and three other roles, making the switch effortlessly, it seems.

Erik Edborg plays the scholarly father Virgil, who quotes from the classics, while dealing with practicalities of running a farm. Edborg also plays Mr. Thompson and an itinerant saw player, who trades Noah music for tomatoes.

Noah, who has trouble with reading and writing, is a clairvoyant, who sees things no one else can. He helps the sheriff solve crimes and predicts happenings– which affects his perceptions of reality at times.

Brian Colonna, the fourth cast member, portrays Max, Noah’s son, born after Opal is hospitalized; the sheriff; postmaster and minister.

The other two company members collaborated in writing and handle the technical side of this show, although Erin Rollman usually is onstage with the others and SamAnTha Schmitz regularly deals with technical effects and business. Projection is more complex than usual with fires, weather and other special effects, and some props appear from above on cue when needed.

Hunt’s book is described by the company as “a beautiful and surreal tale of love and loss in America’s heartland.” It is for sale at the box office for those inspired to get acquainted with the author following the performance.

-Sonya Ellingboe, September 15, 2009, Highlands Ranch Herald

A man with glasses examines a letter. Behind him an image is projected on a white door.

North Denver Tribune- Buntport’s Beautiful Indiana Indiana a Gem

Buntport Theater continues to challenge themselves and their audiences, moving into a new realm with Indiana Indiana, an adaptation of Laird Hunt’s novel. Buntport has proven again and again that they can do many things well, particularly excellent comedy, but this production takes things in a much more serious, thoughtful, and even surreal direction, doing so beautifully. The production also integrates all aspects of the production brilliantly, with scenery, lighting, and projection all in tune to enhance the world of the play.

This play is a series of scenes that tell a story, but not in a conventional, linear sense. It is the story of the life of Noah Summers, told through his memories, which individually supply incomplete pictures of what has happened. We learn he was married, briefly – maybe. We meet his parents. We know and accept that “he just knows things that the rest of us don’t know,– and we get a visceral sense of the anguish he is feeling. Through the combination of all of these snippets of memory, we connect with him, even though his experiences are very unlike our own.

In spite of the nonlinearity of the story, the scenes are remarkably consistent in style and tone. As the focal point of the story, Noah wears a mask which sets him apart from the other characters. Scenes are staged creatively and diversely, helping to keep the audience in rapt attention throughout.

Evan Weissman is wonderfully understated and complex as Noah. He drifts through the show, onstage throughout, paradoxically anchoring things as they flow in all directions. His anguish is palpable, made the more remarkable as it comes and goes in the nonsequential scenes. All other characters are played by Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, and Brian Colonna, distinguishing the different roles through minor costume variation, vocal changes, and physical adjustments. Edborg is quirky, remorseful, and at times menacing as Virgil, Noah’s father. Colonna shows great range, first as the sympathetic and helpful Max, later as the Minister, a role with complexity and strength, and also as the Sheriff, nonjudgmentally looking to Noah for insights into unsolved cases. Duggan is appropriately maternal as Ruby, Noah’s mother, and efficient and by-the-book as the Nurse. Near the end she appears as Opal, delivering a very complex character that is both sympathetic and disturbing.

Normally, I separately describe the scenery and lighting, and credit the designers. Here, however, the Buntport ensemble has created an exquisite integrated visual collage that includes set, lighting, sound, and projections. The visual impact of the dramatic wall of jars is amazing. Bits and pieces of the set move on and off from all directions, with projections appearing and disappearing on any and all available surfaces. I can honestly say that I have never seen these technical aspects of a production integrated so completely and creatively into the action onstage as well as they are in Indiana Indiana. Without this tight integration, the impact of the show would have been less. Even the costumes, though somewhat neutral in tone, fit with everything else.

In the course of only about 80 minutes, Indiana Indiana gives the audience both an emotional and an intellectual understanding of the tragic, beautiful, and real life of Noah. Neither type of understanding is complete without the other, but combined, the whole person that we are connects with this character in a much more complete way. In the past, I’ve always left Buntport entertained, with a broad smile on my face. After Indiana Indiana, I was smiling, yes, but also thinking, feeling, pondering, and basking in the glow of a wonderful experience.

-Craig Williamson, September 15, 2009, North Denver Tribune

Light shines through a wall made of many glass jars. A man wearing a half mask sits in the foreground.

dscriber.com- Forget New York and LA – Colorado theater kicks serious ass

Nobody gives a damn about the arts.

Too bad.

Likewise, unless it involves killings, multiple births, rich people, cults, meth labs or big boobs, nothing that happens between New York and L.A. matters.

Wrong.

Denver’s Buntport Theater opened its ninth season two weekends ago with their version of a novel, “Indiana, Indiana,” by Boulder writer Laird Hunt. What happens onstage is miraculous. I’ll tell you why.

First, a disclaimer. Usually, a reviewer is like a food taster. He or she checks out the product, chews it over, masticates it into a 500-words-or-less paste, regurgitates it. Signals whether it’s safe to consume or not.

This isn’t that. I’m a fan, a partisan, a booster. I’ve watched them for nine years, seen nearly all of their two-dozen-plus productions, and I’ve never had a negative experience. I’ve always been glad I attended.

Why is that important? It’s the definition of good art – something that not only entertains you, but sticks with you and expands your sensibilities. This is what Buntport does. As I’ve written many times before, for many different publications and websites, they are a group of six who work together as performers, designers, writers, technicians, ticket-takers, whatever needs to get done to make it happen. They are Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Erin Rollman, SamAnTha Schmitz and Evan Weissman.

To this point, they’ve been focused primarily on comic extrapolations of classic texts, leading to hilarious results in works such as “Titus Andronicus! The Musical,” “Moby Dick Unread” and “Kafka on Ice.” (I mention the catchiest titles, to whet your appetite.)

This time, they’ve taken the work of a living writer and translated it onto the stage. It’s serious, but not somber. It provokes feeling, but it doesn’t make a play for your emotions. It is what it is, and it’s fascinating and delicious.

A blank white rectangle on the floor is the playing space, often overlaid with transparencies that move us through fields, onto roads, into the rain. This barren space is backed with a wall of glass jars, containing objects, memories, properties. The wall’s panels unhinge to make doorways, windows, hatches. A few pieces of furniture fly down, across or roll onto and off the set.

The story’s told without a break. It’s Noah’s story. He’s the only constant, played by Weissman, half-masked as an old man tumbling through his fragmented memories. He’s slow, or gifted, or both; a farm boy in the Midwest dominated by his brief experience of marriage to the similarly minded Opal, who’s taken from him.

The other players (Colonna, Duggan, Edborg) drift in and out around him, playing wife, mother, father, preacher, sheriff, townsfolk. Flashes from Noah’s mind, projections, fall onto blank surfaces periodically and play themselves out cryptically (Rollman and Schmitz work off stage this time).

So what is so miraculous about this? For all its fragmentation, “Indiana, Indiana” coheres. It’s fluid and eloquent, there’s no wasted movement to it, no moments of awkwardness. The years of work this group has done together gives them an unmatched ability to communicate clearly and deeply.

It’s not an adaptation into play form. No other group will ever be able to pick up and recreate what they do. That’s what makes “Indiana, Indiana” worth getting up and going to. When its run is done, you’ll never see it again. It will never move to Broadway. It will never be on TV.

Here’s a statement that can be found in every Buntport program: “At Buntport, we strongly believe that Denver is NOT a staging area on the way to ‘bigger’ and ‘better’ things. Wonderful, vibrant Art is happening right here and now! . . . We strive to provide a wide variety of high quality programming that cannot be found anywhere else.”

I don’t really know how they do it. I don’t think I want to penetrate that mystery. I’m happy they’re here. I will hijack their achievement to help make my own assertion that there are no more excuses for overlooking what good art can do for us, for ignoring anything of value that sprouts up outside the spotlight’s scope. Which is why I will keep on about them until they selling out every show.

When the lights came up and the bows were taken, the person next to me was too moved to get up. For a minute, too changed. That’s what good art does. That’s why you should see it.

-Brad Weismann, September 15, 2009, www.dscriber.com

Denver Post- Buntport arrives at a state of grace in ‘Indiana’

Buntport Theater is always up for a new challenge. With “Indiana, Indiana,” the endlessly witty collective takes on acting. Real, character-driven acting – while telling an uncharacteristically melancholy family tragedy.

It’s a departure for this proven team known more for awing audiences and its unique brand of smart, irreverent humor.

“Indiana, Indiana” is something else indeed. Something dark and lovely. Sad and wonderful.

At the same time, “Indiana” marks a welcome return to Buntport’s presentational roots, every few moments conjuring another bit of its simple, signature stage magic.

Based on Laird Hunt’s elegiac, nonlinear novel, “Indiana” is about a simple old man named Noah who spends his late years drifting through his memories. There are those before Opal, and those after Opal. The sad circumstances of his detachment from a wife with an affinity for flames are worthy of John Irving.

What makes “Indiana” so intriguing is its approach to the chaos of memory, and Buntport’s approach to staging it.

The set is initially draped in a white sheet. Grainy, mood-establishing home movies play not on the wall but more askew: on the floor. The sheet is pulled to reveal an entire wall of stacked Mason jars, as if lining a Midwestern general store. Each jar is randomly filled – with straw, buttons, love letters and even bones. Each represents a memory from Noah’s life. Accessing a needed one here after so many decades looks akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

We see Noah’s story in bits, just as this old-man mind remembers them – hazy, incomplete, fragmented and unreliable. We’re in the land of “50-percent clarity,” we’re told – Noah remembers half the story, and we get only half its meaning.

He’s played with sad sobriety by Evan Weissman. Coaxed into talking by caring neighbor Max (Brian Colonna), we go back and forth in time to meet his teacher father (Erik Edborg) and devout mother (Hannah Duggan). With Noah’s eyesight failing, Max also reads aloud old letters from his beloved, Opal. These letters come with corresponding home movies, cleverly projected on everything from a woman’s apron to the back of an umbrella to the side of a washing machine.

In these murky journeys into the past, we discover Noah is a seer, a gift he’s reluctantly used to help cops solve crimes but has never been of any use to himself. His flashes come with crackling sounds and bursts of light, like a synapse not so much firing but short-circuiting.

The unfolding mystery of Noah’s current solitude culminates with a visit to his wedding, during which two glowing Mason jars, one blue and one red, swing from attached cables.

It’s an ambiguous but strangely moving effect.

“Indiana, Indiana” is in league with the Denver Center’s “Plainsong” and its coming sequel, “Eventide” – both based on novels that are as much read to an audience as performed. But Buntport’s creation shows just how beautifully real theatricality can be intermingled into such storytelling.

This brief journey is much to process at once, but it’s all captivatingly staged, and the story arcs satisfyingly.

While it might help to have read the novel, “Indiana” succeeds on it its own theatrical terms. Yes, it’s strange. Some might think there’s not much sense to it.

But, as we’re told along the way, “There might be!”

-John Moore, September 12, 2009, Denver Post

A man dressed in black sits on a stool holding a jar. Behind him light shines through a wall made of jars filled with sundry objects. In the foreground a window with curtains, bathed in green light, hangs in the air.

ARTICLE Denver Post- With “Indiana,” inventive Buntport troupe evolves its approach

There’s a word for the adroit, unpredictable symbiosis that turns a Ukrainian short story into a theatrical mud bath, adapts a confusing Shakespeare tragedy into a musical comedy or propels an episodic Colorado novel into the Twilight Zone.

“Many times, the act of ‘Buntporting’ the show happens after we’ve made the choice to deal with certain material,” says Buntport Theater actor Brian Colonna, reflecting on “Indiana, Indiana,” the singular novel that inspired the latest Buntport collaboration. It opens on Friday.

“We’ll say, ‘You gotta put some Buntport in.’ This novel is so beautiful and strange already. The nonlinear story line begs for some Buntporting, as well.”

Buntport: It’s a verb and a noun. In the Buntport Theater’s eccentric stagings, the actors have slogged sloppily through a mud pit, offered a goldfish playing Ophelia in “Hamlet” and staged an Ice Capades-inspired interpretation of some particularly bleak Franz Kafka material.

Their latest challenge is translating University of Denver professor Laird Hunt’s dark, poetic novel “Indiana, Indiana” into a theatrical drama.

The novel maps the fitful interior and exterior landscapes of protagonist Noah. Its deliberately cryptic content – Noah’s memories focus heavily on what his father calls “fifty percent stories” that omit half of the tale – and nonlinear structure could have been written specifically to be Buntported.

“When you’re reading, you can sit on it for a second while you put the puzzle pieces together, so the challenge was how to put it on stage without making it too artsy,” said ensemble member Hannah Duggan.

“We don’t want people going ‘Wha . . . what?’ We’ve tried to stay true to the book.”

“Plus we thought it would be nice to actually meet a living author,” said actor Evan Weissman.

“People like to hear songs they know, set to different words. That’s a given,” said Duggan. “And when it comes with really bad dancing and colorful costumes, you just can’t beat it.”

That’s a wry reference to Buntport’s longtime reliance on public-domain works, a dictate of the company’s lean budget. (It also avoids possible rows with authors surprised by particularly elastic translations of their work.)
The innovative, collaborative Buntport Theater company dates back to 1998. Then, seven Colorado College alums – Colonna, Erin Rollman, Erik Edborg, Duggan, Matt Petraglia, SamAnTha Schmitz and Weissman – began creating what Denver theater critic John Moore once called “the most quirky, creative and thought-provoking new material in Denver.”

Thanks largely to the runaway success of “Titus Andronicus! The Musical!” – which was staged four times with long and often sold-out performances before the company retired the hit in 2007 – Buntport earned a reputation for edgy comedy. That’s a mixed blessing because its productions aren’t always cheeky and blithe.

The company’s adaptation of “Indiana, Indiana” steps outside Buntport’s unique mixture of intelligence and silliness and incorporates multimedia elements.

“There may be a moment or two of levity, but it’s generally a dramatic show,” Weissman said.

“I don’t think it’s the type that will have people laughing out loud,” Rollman said.

“Indiana, Indiana” maintains Buntport’s tradition of collaborative theater. Although most members of the company have met Hunt, the novelist wasn’t involved in translating his novel from paper to proscenium. Opening night will be as surprising to Hunt as it will be to people who never heard of his book.

“The adaptation takes on a life of its own, and we have to respect that, while always making sure that we’ve maintained the feeling of the original,” Rollman said.

“Anything can be Buntported. You just have to figure out how.”

August 30, 2009, Claire Martin

Denver Post- Dirty fable well told, with a dollop of mud

Some might be a bit off-put to read that a theater company is adapting an absurd 1835 Ukrainian short story that scholars have classified as “grotesque realism.”

Don’t be frightened … It’s Buntport!

That means it’ll be inventive, accessible and, yes, even fun.

“The Squabble” typifies all the qualities that make Buntport a singular company. It unearths an obscure source story and transforms it with intelligence and affability, using mind-expanding storytelling techniques along the way.

The Buntport ensemble has told its many original stories on fake ice, suspended above the stage and even upside down …

“The Squabble” is performed in a 12-foot-by-19-foot mud pit.

Yep, 5 cubic yards of wet, sloppy mud. Sure, it’s a gimmick – with a purpose. Just hearing the players trudge through their trough creates sounds that add real, visceral pleasure to the tale.

“The Squabble” is based on Nikolai Gogol’s fable, “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich.” Our setting is a village called “World Town” – think of it as Ukraine’s “Our Town.”

Gogol wrote bizarre tales, like the one about a nose that detaches itself from a soldier’s face, intent on living an independent life. Here, he gives us villagers who are content to live in what they call “a magnificent puddle.”

World Town, populated with names like Wanda Wickerstickly, is a harmonious place with no theft or acrimony. That is, until a great friendship between two neighbors is torn asunder when one casually calls the other a “goose.” This innocuous epithet builds, like the butterfly effect, into a sad storm of acrimony that draws the whole town into their down and dirty mess.

Bob Boxinoxingworth (Erik Edborg) and Bob Luggalollinstop (Brian Colonna) are opposite halves of a whole. One’s lanky, clean and proper. The other’s rotund, blunt and kind of gross.

Their tale is told in Brechtian style, so our narrator (a well-spoken pig played by Evan Weissman) and other ensemble characters (played by Hannah Duggan and Erin Rollman) watch along with us in plain view with props and costumes.

The mud pit is more than a visual and auditory novelty. But don’t come looking for wrestling. It’s not a playpen, but a character unto itself.

This is not terribly deep terrain (the pit or the story), but it’s always a pleasure to sit back and watch what grows whenever Buntport simply … adds water.

Here we meet endearingly bizarre characters like Duggan’s Monty Python-worthy judge, Alfred Fredfredfredful. We see Wanda dronishly pin dirty rags to clotheslines hung along both rows of seats, furthering the idea that life here is simply impossible to keep clean.

Still, chins are up.

You won’t understand everything Buntport puts before you. (Who ever does?) But when you combine these delightfully feuding neighbors with the players’ whimsical storytelling style and there’s just something very “Fantasticks” about the whole, brief evening.

And fantastic.

-John Moore, May 22, 2009, Denver Post

In the foreground, a bald man with a big beard and a beauty mark on his forehead is yelling. In the background, a man in a patterned jacket stands in a shallow mud pit, smiling. A clothing line of red long underwear hangs behind.

Blogspot.com- CULTURAMA: Buntport’s ‘Swabble’: Tale of enmity triggers laughs

Denver’s Buntport Theater produces interesting, entertaining work. That may sound simple, but it’s an objective few artists or arts groups ever achieve. They achieve it again with the final play of their eighth season, “The Squabble,” with an unmistakable and unstale Buntportian approach. If you want to enjoy yourself at the theater, this is the one you should be attending.

Here are more remarkable facts about Buntport. They do good work consistently. They are without pretense. They are committed to working here. They work collaboratively.

They are a little tiny Utopian island for me, really, floating in a sea of self-indulgence, bad choices and egomaniacal hobbyism. Which is why I am so biased in their favor. Caveat lector.

The creative sextet – Erik Edborg, Brian Colonna, Evan Weissman, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, and SamAnTha Schmitz – have produced 26 shows together to date, by their count. They have staged unusual fare such as “Kafka on Ice,” Moby Dick Unread,” and “The Odyssey: A Walking Tour.” You could say it’s a little gimmicky – or you could say it’s no-holds-barred. The group is unafraid and unashamed to use whatever techniques help them reach the audience.

The physical setup for “The Squabble” resembles nothing so much as the ring for a messy wrestling match. It’s a rectangular box containing several cubic yards of mud. The ensemble (save for SamAnTha, who handles the offstage functions) treads through the muck, acting out an adaptation of the source material, a short story by Gogol.

The mud is an obvious metaphor for the conflict the protagonists, here named Bob Boxinoxingworth (Edborg) and Bob Luggalollinstop (Colonna), find themselves, er, mired in. It also gives the troupe plenty of dirty laundry to hang out on the clothesline framework that lines the perimeter of the action and extends up into the seats.

It reflects the identifying imagery that places the story in a jerkwater town in Imperial Russia – a “lake” that is a Main Street puddle, a town that’s proud of the evenness of its roofline, and a populace of supercilious idiots that are conscientious mainly of the freshness of their breaths.

Rising from this background like cardboard cutouts are the two Bobs, who share pedantic obsessions and spasms of covetousness, and who finally clash over Bob L.’s use of the pejorative term “goose.” Bob B pivots and fidgets himself into a frenzy, while Bob L (Colonna doesn’t take the low road in his fat suit), sways menacingly, to hilarious effect.

The fable of their feud, which ripples outward in effect until the entire village is temporarily consumed by it, is narrated by a rather well-spoken pig (Weissman) who is clever enough to both make witty observations and avoid being turned into sausage. Weissman’s turn as the identically-named but one-eyed simpleton Bob Boxinoxingworth is equally pleasing.

Rollman plays out an unrequited romance with herself. She’s both the contentious, ever-ironing Wanda Wickerstickly and the chief of police, Peter Apropopanoosh, complete with Pythonesque walk and accent, that Wanda seems to favor . . . when she’s not shrieking the overture to “Carmen” (everyone seems to have his or her classic theme, which murmurs out of their mouths add odd times). Duggan has cartoony fun with the characters of town nudnik Tony Tumblestumpington and magistrate Alfred Fredfredfredful.

Anyone who might object to wacky and surreal nature of the proceedings doesn’t know how to take a spat with a grain of salt. The former friends spurn reconciliation, and their bickering moves into the realm of actual litigation. Anyone familiar with the world of legal machinations will recognize how that kind of thing throws even the best-intentioned lust of vengeance into a flaccid torpor.

The bickering ossifies into a dimly remembered grudge. The search for legal satisfaction becomes a quasi-religious hope for deliverance. The rain keeps falling; the town rots away in the mud.

That Buntport can make us laugh so heartily while keeping the edge of melancholy keen keeps the larger perspective about childish behavior with us. Seeing “The Squabble” won’t solve the world’s problems, but it sure casts a fresh light on our roles in perpetuating them.

-Brad Weismann, May 26, 2009, bradweismann.blogspot.com