Buntport’s Titus Andronicus! The Musical still kills.

Going to the theater alone is depressing, so part of my job as a reviewer involves coaxing, bribing and seducing friends and family members into accompanying me. Over the years, I’ve come to rely on these companions — wise and perspicacious people all — even when their opinions clash with mine. They provide a sorely needed outside perspective, moments of insight, a salutary reminder that not everyone sees the world in the same way that I do.

It takes some thought, figuring out who should be invited to what. So-and-so likes big musicals; someone else is drawn to British comedy; this friend is in love with language; this one admires spectacle. If a friend has seen too many clunkers in a row, I try to sweeten the pot with a production I expect to be excellent (though predicting excellence is harder than you might think). Then again, many of my friends don’t mind a bad show, because we have so much fun slicing and dicing it afterward.

It’s telling that everyone who’s ever accompanied me to Buntport wants to go again. For Titus Andronicus! The Musical — a restaging of the hilarious production the Buntporters mounted a couple of years ago — I invited Linda, who had never before visited this cavernous theater warehouse space on the outskirts of town. Within minutes of our being seated, amid the general cachinnation of the audience, I heard her low, musical peals of laughter. “They’re really clever,” she murmured.

Titus Andronicus is a Shakespeare play so awful that for centuries, many scholars refused to believe that Shakespeare had actually written it. Forced to concede the point, they scrambled for explanations. It was co-written with someone else. It’s not really that bad. It’s a parody.

The plot alone is a howler. It involves the Roman conqueror, Titus, and his captive, Tamora, Queen of the Goths. There are lots of sons — Titus’s, Tamora’s, the sons of Saturninus, himself son of the Emperor. You also get lust, hate, revenge, rape, murder, mutilation and rivers of blood. Each unbelievable plot twist seems to exist solely for the purpose of ushering in more mayhem.

In the Buntport version, five actors play all of the characters, using minimal costumes and scenery. There’s a board to one side of the stage adorned with caricatures of the actors’ faces. Beneath each face is a list of names, and above each name is a lightbulb. At the beginning of every scene, someone runs to the board and rapidly illuminates the relevant bulbs so you know which character the actor is supposed to be at that moment. Some characters, like Tamora’s sons, are represented by objects — in this case, a gas can and a radio. Evan Weissman plays only one role throughout — actually, multiple roles wrapped into one. This guy is called Someone Who Will Probably Die. Like Kenny in South Park, Weissman gets knocked off over and over again; unlike Kenny, he does it with a certain sneering élan.

In addition to the helpful character board and a second board on which the corpse score is noted in chalk, there’s a van in the middle of the space, painted to represent a house on one side and a forest on the other. This van is rolled from place to place by the actors as needed, while Brian Colonna, who plays Titus with insane energy, urges the audience to help by yelling, “Push, push.” Pretty soon it sounds as if you’re in an obstetrics ward with a horde of prospective fathers. And, yes, we do ultimately get a newborn on stage — Tamora’s son, who, because of his resemblance to her evil Moor lover, Aaron, she — Lady Macbeth-like — wants killed. (Aaron isn’t a Moor in the Buntport version; what gives away the child’s paternity is the fact that he’s inherited his father’s black mustache.)

The action is punctuated by song. At one point, Titus is convinced that he can save his two kidnapped sons by cutting off his hand. He, his brother and a third son compete for the honor of mutilation in a warbling trio. There’s also cheerful singing as Tamora instructs her sons in how to rape and mutilate Titus’s daughter Lavinia, played by Hannah Duggan.

The acting is frantically funny. Erik Edborg prances and weaves about the stage like an animated cartoon figure; Erin Rollman is a smoothly evil Tamora. No one can do silent exasperation better than Hannah Duggan: Her expression when Titus asks her to reveal the name of her assailants after the rape — she’s dripping blood and supposedly missing both hands and tongue — is priceless.

There’s no attempt to make a statement here, just a fast, effervescent evening of fun. “You’ll let me know when these guys do another production?” asked Linda as we left.

-Juliet Wittman, January 27, 2005, Westword

In putting together their original comedy Macblank, the folks at Buntport relied on the theatrical superstition that there’s a curse on Shakespeare’s Macbeth and that those performing it are in danger of unknown catastrophe. There really are actors who refuse to speak the play’s title in a theater, and it’s well known in theatrical circles that if the name has been spoken, the speaker must turn three times and spit over his left shoulder. Or quote a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Or something like that.

Macblank involves a company of five that is developing an experimental version of “The Scottish Play,” and their curse is Beth, played by Erin Rollman, who’s both the most superstitious and the most murderously ambitious member of the cast. Beth is blind, self-righteous, a whiner and a bully. She’s followed everywhere by devoted Greg (Evan Weissman), who’s given to quoting outworn proverbs and uttering strange non sequiturs. Hannah Duggan’s Miranda tries to serve as the voice of reason, but she only becomes genuinely animated and involved when describing her own life, whose turns and twists mirror several of Shakespeare’s plots. Brian Colonna is Rob, who lives a typical actor’s life. That is, he works six jobs, arriving at the theater exhausted to watch in horror as everything falls apart. And, of course, there’s the company star, the guy with the phony British accent: Ryan, as played by Erik Edborg.

These are smart, inspired and highly original comics, and their audacity alone has the audience spluttering with laughter. Beth recites, with profound satisfaction, example after example of problems attending Macbeth productions (she knows, because she’s Googled the topic); consults her horoscope in Cosmopolitan for hints that she, not Ryan, should be playing the lead; ignores lovelorn Greg; and wields a baseball bat with fiendish determination. Miranda glows as she describes a boyfriend “hung like a donkey,” a cousin who was served gerbils baked in a pie, and the time she accidentally made out with “a girl dressed as a guy.” The best monologue is delivered by Greg, who describes his childhood performing experiences in a meaningless mishmash of sense and sentiment that includes memories of his grandmother’s gifts of packets of saccharin. This is the kind of odd, discursive humor pioneered by the late, lamented Andy Kaufman — except that where Kaufman, under his mask of innocent passivity, was clearly a hostile character, Weissman’s Greg is all shiny eyed ignorant sweetness.

Buntport opened two shows in tandem this season. The first, Kafka on Ice, is brilliant, while Macblank shows signs of being hastily put together. Edborg, in particular, seems to only half inhabit his role. Ryan is fascinating at the beginning, and Edborg certainly rises to all the big comic moments, including a brilliantly uninhibited rendition of Puck’s epilogue in Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the English accent comes and goes, and when Ryan sustains a leg injury, Edborg can’t even be bothered to limp, climbing onto a chair with the supposedly injured limb taking all the weight — an Acting 101 mistake.

Macblank is more an extended comedy sketch — albeit a sophisticated one — than a play. After a while, the humor begins to feel a little repetitive, and you want a trace of plot and some character development. Still, even though this show lacks the inventiveness of Kafka on Ice, it makes for an entertaining evening.

-Juliet Wittman, October 28, 2004, Westword

The parking lot is full, and cars line the curb on both sides of the street. Inside, people throng the lobby. A couple is being turned away at the front desk: “I’m sorry. We’re all sold out.” When I first visited this place a few years ago, there were seven or eight people in attendance, including myself and my friend. Now word must be out that this is the place to be on Saturday night: Buntport Theater, the opening of Kafka on Ice.

We find seats and settle in to clip-cloppy, ’30s-style music that sounds like the Charleston. We’re going to be close enough to the action to see the sweat shine on the actors’ faces. There are rows of chairs on all four sides of a green square of artificial ice – not gleaming ice-rink stuff, but something that looks like ancient linoleum, scratched and scuffed.

What on earth do these people at Buntport think they’re doing? Franz Kafka is a melancholy figure, a Prague-dwelling German Czech, steeped in the history of his time, the creator of a dwindling, despairing art. Not noisily or grandly despairing, but art that’s a kind of falling away, a hopeless whispering, the toneless song of Josephine the Mouse Singer, the silent melting of flesh from bone in The Hunger Artist, an art of terror, self-loathing and wordless longing for what can never be attained – and all of it limned in that precise bureaucrat’s prose. Kafka’s best-known works include a novel about a man tried for an act he doesn’t even know has been committed – let alone by him – and ultimately executed. Another describes a castle from which it’s impossible to escape. And then there’s the long short story called The Metamorphosis, which almost every high school student knows and which begins, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

But all of these cheerful Saturday-night people haven’t come here to explore the sorrows of old Europe. They’ve come for a good time. And the Buntporters aren’t exactly known for their worshipful treatment of the classics. But then, they’re not known for denigrating or nullifying or being plain dumb about literature, either. So what are we going to see?

The bouncy music stops. In the darkness that follows, we hear the scritching of a pen on paper, like the sounds of a skate blade on ice. Under the sudden illumination of a single, bare lightbulb, we see Kafka, played by Gary Culig, writing at a desk. Within minutes, the rest of the cast has skated on in impressive unison – yes, wearing real skates – and the show takes off.

Kafka on Ice is part biography. It tells Kafka’s story, about his fear of his overbearing father, his unhappy love life, his friendship with Max Brod, the way in which Gregor Samsa’s predicament represents his own. But it also deals with the way a work like The Metamorphosis changes over time, as it passes through the minds of friends, readers, critics, fellow writers, teachers and tricksters like the Buntport gang. So at one point you have the great novelist Vladimir Nabokov (played by Erik Edborg) arguing that, contrary to some critical opinion, the insect in The Metamorphosis is clearly a beetle, not a cockroach. Then there’s a teacher (a hilarious performance by Erin Rollman) trying to communicate the idea of symbolism to her bored class while peeping periodically at her own cheat notes. The lights go out, and a voice reads a passage aloud in the darkness, bringing clarity and focus to the words. When the lights return, we watch a schoolboy cross the stage with his satchel on his back, reading as he walks.

The Metamorphosis goes through several transmutations: It’s played as farce, as an experiment with objects, as grinning, dancing musical comedy.

Buntport has its own way of dealing with Kafka’s life story. The writer’s meeting with his first love, Felice, is shown as a scene in a silent movie. She falls cutely about on the ice, while he, Chaplin-like, attempts to rescue her – all to the accompaniment of a plinking piano.

This show is anything but Kafkaesque. It’s lighthearted, giddy and goofy. As written, the climax of The Metamorphosis begins with a heartbreaking scene in which Gregor is drawn from his seclusion by the haunting sound of his sister playing the violin. In Kafka on Ice – which has earlier referred to Kafka’s thoughts on his own Jewishness – he hears the violin solo from Fiddler on the Roof.

Buntport creates an Alice in Wonderland world where objects take on their own life and shrink and grow at will. The city of Prague is represented by a pop-up in a book. Gregor Samsa is at one point a glove puppet, seconds later a remote-controlled mechanical toy, and finally, a costumed actor.

There are some really beautiful moments. Kafka sends Felice one of his stories to read; in her hands, it unfurls into the paper figure of a man, and she dances with it. “The writing does quite well with her,” observes Kafka. When Kafka proposes to another love, Milena, his words are made of light, flowing over the rows of audience members, across the ersatz ice and away up the walls. Her response is a calligraphic “Yes.”

I have a couple of quibbles. Every now and then, the script is repetitive. Culig is a good actor, but he has an endearing, vulnerable quality that doesn’t feel quite right for Kafka. Brian Colonna’s Max Brod is pinch-faced, squeaky-voiced and very amusing, but too much of a caricature – both as performed and as conceived. The real Max Brod was far more than a leech who took advantage of Kafka’s fame; he was also the author’s longtime friend and loyal advocate. But all six actors do well. Erik Edborg has to stifle his insanely anarchic instincts to play Kafka’s heavy-handed father, and it works. Evan Weissman’s turn as the charlady (in a uniform that’s pure French maid) is a hoot, as is Hannah Duggan’s determined yet perplexed expression every time she skates across the stage with a flour sack in her mouth (don’t ask). As for Erin Rollman, I don’t have words to describe her performance. She’s a brilliant comic universe unto herself.

All of which explains the crowd in the lobby. It’s safe to say that no one else – anywhere – is doing theater like this.

-Juliet Wittman, October 14, 2004, Westword

Buntport Theater has fun with one-acts and paper props

Now that Buntport Theater has come of age and is attracting reliably positive reviews and large, enthusiastic audiences, the six company members have revived one of their earlier works, an evening of one-acts titled 2 in 1. The first piece, “This is My Significant Bother,” is a dramatization of nine stories by James Thurber; the second is an explication of the Cliffs Notes explication of Beowulf (it makes sense when you see it — sort of). These are both slight pieces, but they’re clever and entertaining, and the sets and costumes are as inventive as ever. It’s pretty much impossible not to have a good time at Buntport.

As the evening begins, four actors — Brian Colonna, Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan and Erin Rollman — are lying on a large bed, their left arms in perfect alignment on the coverlet, their hands conspicuously wedding-ringed. They manage to stay absolutely still as the audience arrives and settles in. Perhaps they’re asleep. One of the evening’s pleasures is the way the actors manage to move swiftly and soundlessly during blackouts, so that we’re always slightly surprised at where they’re each standing or sitting when the lights come on.

Although he apparently labored over their composition, Thurber’s stories are sketches rather than fully developed character studies or descriptions of events. They have the wistful, unfinished quality of his New Yorker cartoons, along with a misogyny so self-deprecating that it almost seems forgivable. If his women are all-powerful, soulless harridans, well, his men are pretty silly, too, and sometimes downright irritating. (Although, in a fable Buntport doesn’t attempt, it’s only the male of the species who’s capable of seeing a unicorn in the back garden.)

“Significant Bother” is not intended to be laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a sincere and gently humorous homage to Thurber.

A husband manfully protects his wife from a spider but cowers under the bedclothes when he hears a bat. A woman stands up in court and insists she deserves a divorce because of her husband’s habit of holding his breath. In one of the most absurd and amusing pieces, a police officer finds a woman seated in a car while a man crawls on the ground in front of the vehicle; they are trying to ascertain whether a human being’s eyes will glow in the headlights as a cat’s or dog’s would. In another car scene, this time inside the car, a couple fights over whether Greta Garbo is a more important cultural icon than Donald Duck and bickers about where to stop for a hamburger, the wife insisting that the eatery must be a cute one. Meanwhile, the car is emitting a threatening and unidentifiable noise. Yet another husband orders his wife into the basement so that he can kill her and make off with his stenographer. Wise to his plan, she gives him orders on how to accomplish the deed. All of this is interspersed with interesting renditions of such ’30s songs as “Makin’ Whoopee” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” And the bed that anchors the play (in the very last scene, a man painstakingly smooths the sheets while his ex-wife discusses his failings with his wife-to-be) is manipulated by the Buntporters with their usual sangfroid, becoming by turns a car, a platform, even a cellar.

Perhaps the most interesting and unexpected piece is a mood story about a doomed love affair called “Evening’s at Seven,” which is told through a series of lighted tableaux separated by patches of darkness. It’s touching, original and sophisticated.

For the second play, the cast appears in front of a backdrop of text wearing dark-blue maintenance men’s outfits and tool belts that hold an arsenal of paper props. They proceed to act out the story of Beowulf, interspersing the action with textual commentary — and their own acerbic comments. In case you’ve forgotten, this Old English poem concerns the predations of a monster, the monster’s dam (or, as the Buntporters have it, “dam mother”) and a dragon. As always, the props are inventive; in this instance, they’re made entirely of paper. Beowulf’s army consists of a string of paper cutouts worn across Edborg’s chest like a bandolier; streams of paper representing blood from a wound are helpfully and multiply labeled “blood,” just as the paper crown bears the legend “crown.” The paper dragon is a thing of wonder. Periodically, we hear a voice reading from Beowulf itself and — though you’d need to know Old English to understand the words — the power and beauty of the text makes itself felt through all the loony shenanigans.

The acting is terrific, as always, though it concerns me a little that both Colonna and Edborg act so much from the neck upward. I’d like to see their voices and impulses coming from deeper in the body. In addition to the cast, Matt Petraglia, SamAnTha Schmitz and Evan Weissman helped create 2 in 1.

I’m getting tired of saying this, but if you haven’t attended a show at Buntport yet, you should. You won’t see anything like it anywhere else.

-Juliet Wittman, May 6, 2004, Westword