You have to wonder at the sheer gutsiness of the Buntport Theater Company, whose members took an absurd idea and then – instead of playing around a bit, giggling and letting it go – decided to carry the concept forward, step by step, moment by moment, to its logical and intensely illogical ending, trusting that others would willingly give themselves up to this phantasmagorical universe. Jugged Rabbit Stew is an original musical whose sunnily innocent surface carries a darker underlay, an underlay involving blood, dismemberment, the way humanity destroys its gods, predation and carnivorousness – which takes on a whole new dimension when the meat in question not only walks and talks like a man, but can perform astounding feats of magic. All of this is pounded home by Adam Stone’s inspired rock songs, some hilarious, some carrying a thumping portentousness reminiscent of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The plot concerns Snowball (Erik Edborg), a giant rabbit who works with a magician called Alec the Amazing and All-Powerful (Evan Weissman). At his best, Alec can pull off only the simplest and most obvious sleights of hand; Snowball is the genuine magical power behind the act. This bunny is anything but sweet and fluffy, however. He’s a miserable, scruffy creature who looks a little like the ugly, ragged-toothed White Rabbit in Jan Svankmajer’s film Alice and who likes stealing things that others value and are useless to him, simply to make as many people as possible miserable: the VHS tape of a graduation ceremony, a gravy boat, an old-fashioned gramophone. All of these objects hover below the ceiling throughout the action. Snowball has confiscated the legs of magician’s assistant Mystical Marla (Hannah Duggan), replacing them with those of a middle-aged workman so that she can no longer dance; he took away Alec’s right arm. Despite the depredations he’s wrought on their bodies, both Marla and Alec are in love with him. Also dangling from the ceiling, seated, is Woman (Erin Rollman), a regular audience member whom Snowball loved until he spotted her one evening in the company of another rabbit. A chatty, cheerful person in pink ruffled shoes, remarkably unfazed by her predicament, Woman eventually falls in love with Alec’s disembodied arm, played by Brian Colonna, and the two enact a Hollywood fantasy in which she is the gutsy ranch owner and he the traveling farm hand (pun most definitely intended) who’ll save her land.

This is not the only place where the production underlines its own artificiality, satirizing magic shows and theatrical conventions in general (a character standing in the distinct spotlight that universally signifies a soliloquy overhears another in a similar spotlight, to the latter’s great irritation), and looking at the ways we use language to create story and propel action. They niggle over usage: the fact that a rabbit is not a hare (unfortunately, “hare” works much better for song lyrics) and whether the potatoes in TV dinners are whipped or mashed. Woman is a chattering ninny most of the time, but Snowball had originally imagined her as an intellectual and, toward the play’s end, she becomes the figure he’d imagined, lapsing into erudition and discussing his role as tragic hero: Is he the classical noble-but-with-a-fatal-flaw model, the romantic Byronic type in rebellion against convention, or a twentieth-century anti-hero?

Edborg’s crazed energy somehow shines through the face-obscuring bunny mask, and Colonna also manages to surmount a smothering black costume that covers everything but his right arm and delivers a sizzling performance. Duggan is by turns cynical, angry and pathetic as lovelorn Marla; Rollman makes Woman as appealing as she is fluff-headed. Weissman has tended to play the quieter and more sensitive Buntport roles in the past, but here he lets loose with a brilliant cascade of tics and tricks, and a balls-out singing style that parodies every dopey, mannered vocalist you could ever imagine.

With its truly startling originality, Jugged Rabbit Stew is one of the deepest, weirdest, funniest and most assured things Buntport has done in its decade of amazing theater. It also testifies to the fruitfulness of the collaboration with Stone, as the Buntporters take on the musical form, bow to its conventions, then twist it every which way and back until it becomes their own. Don’t miss this production.

-Juliet Wittman, May 27, 2010, Westword

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

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