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Close up of a woman sitting on a large bed wearing a blue button up sweater. Her long hair is gathered up in a hairnet 1940s style. She is pointing at something in the distance.

Denver post- Buntport finds new laughs in its archives

Adjectives that would seem like useless hyperbole anywhere else often find their legitimate homes when referencing Buntport Theater’s work. The young collective presenting original works on Denver’s Westside really is uniquely talented, madcap with energy and originality, and, as some have said, “genius.”

But nobody’s perfect.

Buntport’s latest excursion is the old-school “2 in 1.” It’s a throwback on multiple levels, but mainly because Buntport performed the two original one-acts in 2001.

Remounts are good business when you’re Buntport and always attracting new audiences to your mainstage productions and the excellent, biweekly “Magnets on the Fridge,” which closed for the season last week. It gives newbies a chance to see the work that made the company what it is today.

But Buntport has moved forward and, dare I say it, matured a lot in the three years since these were first produced. The interim has seen multiple self-written and -directed full-length plays, one-acts, “Magnets” episodes and at least one musical for this company, one of the busiest in town. So reaching back into their short history has to come at a sacrifice.

Act one is “… and this is my significant bother,” the Buntporters adaptation of some of James Thurber’s short stories. They attempt to explore the American humorist’s literary world, which is full of insight into both relational psychosis and the mind of the individual Everyman in mid-20th century America. Although the series of stories operates partly on Buntport constants (including an excellent multipurpose set and the use of different storytelling voices), it doesn’t always hit.

The theater company is obsessed with style and period and varying their stories’ approaches whenever they can, so this – subtle scenes involving couples in bed, kneeling in front of a running car, or amid awkward conversations about loving and longing – is Buntport’s tribute to the America of “New Yorker” cartoons in the ’30s and ’40s.

And it’s fair to say that this style doesn’t work as well for Buntport (and its core audience) as, say, the detective aesthetic of the ’40s – the setting of their tight, seriocomic “McGuinn and Murry” – or the Elizabethan era that was home to its spoof on Shakespeare, “Titus Andronicus: The Musical!”

They hit most clearly in one short where Brian Colonna’s aloof husband tells Hannah Duggan’s hard nosed wife of his plans to kill her and marry his stenographer. “No, I’m not going to bed,” he quips toward the end. “I’m going to bury you in the cellar.” It’s the least subtle of the pieces, but it’s also the one that clicks on levels that venture beyond the players psychoanalyzing simple-minded, nostalgic, Rockwellian images.

They get closer to comfort with act two, “Word-Horde: A Dramatization of the Study Guide to Beowulf,” which could be called “Compleat Text of Beowulf (Abridged).”

With the help of an ominous, omniscient voiceover acting as the voice of reason, the four Buntporters (Colonna, Duggan, Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman dressed in black and yellow mechanics scrubs, an homage to Cliffs Notes) act as the Everyman student circa 2004, mumbling obscenities and frustrations underneath faux-sneezes as they work their way through the text line by line … almost.

Like “Titus,” “Beowulf” lends itself to the self-deprecating, fast-talking production style. It’s olde, wild and weird, and the Buntport players – whose outlandish writing is more concise and pointed here than in the first act – seize every opportunity to poke fun at the book and themselves.

They perform against the backdrop of an enlarged version of the aged text. Props and costumes made of paper, handily attached to their tool belts, help move the story forward. And the audience gets a treat – we’ll call it Buntport spectacle – when it comes to the dragon at the end of the story.

The two shorts work better as a pair than they would work alone. The night gets off to a slow start. But it builds with Buntport’s incredible attention to detail, such as Duggan’s tuning the car radio in the first act, a pantomime timed perfectly with the audio. And it closes with a laugher.

Not genius, especially when held up to their previous work. But still not a bad night of theater.

-Ricardo Baca, April 30, 2004, Denver Post

Denver Post- Buntport just a bit off with ‘McGuinn’

Every time the Buntport Theater takes to the stage with its latest original production, you can all but tape-measure the leap in its rapid development as an innovative, intelligent and comic young theater company.

But that does not equate to a satisfying evening for its audiences every time out.

Buntport is a 5-year-old company that presents only ensemble works of its own creation. A glorious musical adaptation of “Titus” performed in a transformational van put Buntport on the local map in 2001.

Last year’s Kabuki-esque “Cinderella,” featuring actors changing form and character before our eyes with a script written entirely in gibberish, helped Buntport win The Denver Post’s Ovation Award for best new work.

“McGuinn and Murry,” its 13th and latest production, is easy to like but nearly impossible to love.

In some ways the play is both spoof and homage to 1940s Raymond Chandler-style film noir. Its malleable magic is immediately evident not only in the way two terrific actors (Brian Colonna and Erin Rollman) slip in and out of the skins of eight (by my count) characters, but more impressively in the way one simple, large office desk spins, splits apart, expands, collapses and unfolds into seven distinct and often surreal settings.

But “McGuinn and Murry” is more clever in concept than in execution. It falters in the one department where Buntport has been above reproach. The writing, so consistently taut and clever in nearly every previous staging, lacks its usual confidence, precision and wit. The dialogue is uncharacteristically repetitive and only occasionally rises to the witty repartee of the period it satirizes (A terrific exception: “Let’s all put our pieces down before someone squirts metal”).

Worse, the constant yelling establishes a tone that goes beyond the tough-talking demeanor of the day and strangely into the realm of the cold and mean.

As a result, we have exasperating characters telling a tiresome story that becomes intricate to the point of oblivion.

McGuinn (Colonna) and Murry (Rollman) are a pair of hard-boiled detectives, partners seemingly patterned in the vein of Nick and Nora Charles, minus the sexual tension. They are so underemployed they make up fictitious crimes to solve. When McGuinn says, “Even our pretend cases are dull, doll,” he’s not kidding.

But one morning, a series of misunderstandings propel the plot on a course that is part “Maltese Falcon,” part “Murder By Death” and part “Three’s Company.” After his wife has gone missing, the whiskey-soured McGuinn comes to believe he may have played a part in her disappearance.

The charm of the production is also its downfall. Audiences watch as the realigned set pieces take us to unexpected locales. With four sticks and some rope, for example, the desktop cleverly becomes a boxing ring. While most settings are grounded in reality (a restaurant, nightclub, park), others are straight out of “Being John Malkovich” in the way they play with spatial distortion.

The desktop rises to become the front door of an apartment where, when McGuinn walks in, he immediately finds himself atop a kitchen counter. In the evening’s extended climax, the desk turns into a miniaturized skyline where, from our faraway vantage point, we see a chase played out with Matchbox cars.

But these brilliant transformations require so many long and choppy set changes that they sabotage the storytelling momentum. The payoff requires far too much patience.

But even on an awkward opening night, it was clear Rollman and Colonna are two of the best and smartest performers working in Denver.

Rollman has the most fun of the two, playing characters such as an uptight Murry, McGuinn’s ditsy wife Budge and an uncanny “Fat Man” – an oxygen-deprived old fight fixer. She also has the best lines, such as when, as Budge, she discovers a letter advising McGuinn to get rid of her. “I don’t think my husband should be receiving a letter like this … not at the house, anyway,” she says in a sublime moment.

Colonna’s Phillip Marlowe-like McGuinn draws somewhat on Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Jackie Gleason, but he’s at his best when he’s simply being himself.

There is every likelihood that with pros like Colonna and Rollman, “McGuinn and Murry” might still find the right comic tone. But even if it is not Buntport’s best work, Buntport on an off-night is still better than a night at many other theaters in town.

-John Moore, January 09, 2004, Denver Post

A 1940’s looking detective wearing a fedora hat looks off into the distance dumbfounded with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth while his female partner looks worryingly at him.

Boulder Daily Camera- Noirish ‘McGuinn and Murry’ is clever, but that’s it

Buntport Theater is a group of young theater artists who located to Denver after going to school together in Colorado Springs. The company has carved out a niche for itself locally with a clever brand of comedy and a reputation for prolific output since it moved into its current space in 2001.

And, as evidenced by last week’s opening, Buntport already is an important addition to the local theater scene, if for no other reason than its youngish audience, significant for an art form that tends to rely on an older crowd for its patronage. The opening night sell-out crowd for “McGuinn and Murry,” the company’s 13th original production, was made up largely of people in their 20s and early 30s, most of whom already were familiar with and sold on Buntport’s particular sense of humor.

In “McGuinn and Murry” that sense of humor is equal parts silly and clever. It adds up to an admirable production, but one that doesn’t leave a lasting impression.

The play is done in 1940s crime novel style, a la Raymond Chandler and his noirish stories. McGuinn (Brian Colonna) and Murry (Erin Rollman) are partners in their own detective firm. When they can’t drum up any business they resort to creating some of their own. Murry sends a playful note to McGuinn’s home, but Mrs. McGuinn intercepts it and suspects her husband is cheating on her. Mrs. McGuinn has a lover herself, but nonetheless, her suspicions drive her dramatic accusations, which set the quirky detectives into investigative mode.

While Rollman and Colonna star in “McGuinn and Murry,” the company’s five other members – Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Matt Petraglia, SamAnTha Schmitz and Evan Weissman – also receive writing, design and directing credit.

There’s a vibrancy to the group’s effort, including the writing. The script is as smart as it is whimsical, a mix of postmodern irony and hard-boiled ’40s repartee. McGuinn longs to get “the dust of this dirty town off my feet,” but he’s also aware that his current investigation “folds in on itself in a self-reflective manner,” a wink to the audience that he’s aware of the show’s noirish conventions.

And the genius of the play is that the whole thing – the dialogue, the plot, the characters and even the set – keeps folding in on itself in a self-reflective manner. The main stage piece at first serves as the door and office table for the McGuinn and Murry agency, but the contraption, built with several hidden compartments and attachments, unfolds and refolds into the McGuinn’s kitchen, a nightclub, a park bench, an Italian restaurant, and a boxing ring.

Likewise, the actors play dual characters who are mirror reflections of each other – Murry and Mrs. McGuinn are dead ringers for each other, as are McGuinn and Pauly, Mrs. McGuinn’s lover. And the dialogue is sprinkled with funny little lines where the actors comment on what’s taking place with their characters or the story.

One of the best scenes comes when Colonna and Rollman maneuver the set piece into a cityscape that serves as a backdrop for a road trip. They move matchbox-sized cars along a dirt miniature dirt road that sprawls out before the city while playing seven characters who inhabit the cars.

Overall, Colonna and Rollman succeed at pulling off the era’s style, the sharp wise-guy tone done in that ’40s noirish mode. Both understand where the humor is in the script and play it with ease. And they don’t miss a beat as they work the set into its different configurations, no small feat.

Ultimately though, cleverness is all “McGuinn and Murry” has going for it. Great comedy sheds some light on the human condition, however whimsical. But this show’s creators are content to serve up whimsy and cleverness for their own sake. As a story, it’s too convoluted to make a deep impression, and while the show is good for a laugh, it’s neither a lasting nor a cathartic laugh. It’s like a meal that tastes good, but still leaves you hungry.

-Mark Collins, January 9, 2004, Boulder Daily Camera

Westword- Detecting Noir • Buntport stalks laughter

McGuinn and Murry is a spoof of those ’40s detective movies in which the men wore fedoras and the women had gams. It’s a lighthearted, skimming take on the genre that’s neither cliche-ridden nor weighted by scholarship. The helium that keeps this smart, entertaining trifle aloft is Buntport Theater Company’s irrepressible inventiveness.

A pair of washed-up detectives slump around their dusty office. The phone never rings. No shadowed, mysterious, cigarette-holder-wielding blonde ever appears at the door. McGuinn is a onetime prizefighter who disgraced himself by throwing a match. Murry is a tough broad, given to barking out orders. To pass the time and keep their wits sharp, the two P.I.s try to stump each other with hypothetical cases. Murry sets McGuinn a puzzler that involves a letter sent to his home, but the letter gets into the wrong hands; soon McGuinn is frantically pursuing what he believes to be a real case — in which he is somehow the suspect — while Murry applauds the veracity of what she perceives as his performance.

Obviously, there’s a lot of playing with frames of reality here, and transformation rules. Brian Colonna and Erin Rollman, who play McGuinn and Murry, respectively, take on many additional personae, signaling the changes through adjustments in voice and posture, or with props that serve as a kind of shorthand. Colonna assumes a black eye patch and becomes the lover of McGuinn’s wife, Budgie. It takes only a change of footwear, a fluffing of her blouse and a shuffling off of Murry’s severe jacket for Rollman to metamorphose into the breathy adulteress. The set is transformed with the same economy and dexterity. Everything evolves from the office’s hefty desk and its two chairs. Panels slide aside; boxes are opened and props tossed in or whisked out of them. The desk becomes the kitchen of McGuinn’s home, complete with stove, cabinets and a clothesline sporting a tabbed rubber girdle. With a little more manipulation, the desk is a bar, a cityscape, a park bench, the lair of a fat, wheezing Mafia reprobate apparently based on Marlon Brando. Much of the evening’s entertainment stems from the surprising and creative shifts in character and set.

Conventions are created, then casually broken. For example, the one door on the set is raised and appears to open onto the top of the investigators’ desk or, in the household scene, the kitchen counter. I’d guess this was the only way Buntport could make the desk-becomes-everything-else concept work structurally. When the door first opens, we’re surprised momentarily, but the two actors play it straight, and we come to accept the anomaly. No sooner have we done so than Budgie snaps at her husband to stop walking on the countertop.

There’s a knowingness to all of this, a self-referential quality. At one point, parodying Lana Turner’s famous line about whistling from To Have and Have Not, Rollman explains to Colonna how to exit: “You just put your hand on the knob, and you walk out…the door.” The peculiarities of the door in question only underline the humor. If there’s a misstep, Rollman and Colonna treat it as if it were intentional, and somehow their skill and assurance, along with the mocking quality of the entire show, make the moment doubly funny.

Props take on a life of their own, and scale becomes meaningless. When all of the characters need to meet at the park, they arrive in a succession of toy cars, which are guided over the surface of a kind of relief map by the actors.

The only problem is that the set changes, while fun to watch, take too long. The dialogue is witty and bright, but it’s not so deep that we want to contemplate a scene’s final lines for several minutes. A piece like this demands speed.

Both actors are talented, but it’s really Rollman, with her elastic face and ability to morph from character to character, who carries the show. She gives life and spirit to each of her characters: mannish Murry, flirty Budgie, the creepily disembodied-seeming fat man. There’s something unformed about her stage persona, as if she were just waiting to flow into one role or another. The characters she creates can be hard-edged and defined or oddly amorphous. She can make you laugh by raising an eyebrow, and she seems to know instinctively just how long to hold the expression for maximum effect without milking it. Sometimes she appears to have the unfinished, partially defined quality of a James Thurber cartoon. Colonna, too, has wonderful moments — particularly the flashback during which he re-creates the thrown fight, striving mightily to help McGuinn’s wimpy opponent score a hit.

Like all of Buntport’s scripts, this one was created (through both writing and improvisation) by the entire group — Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Matt Petraglia, SamAnTha Schmitz and Evan Weissman — in addition to Rollman and Colonna. And, like all their work, it has inspired moments along with a few that are less inspired.

The first time I visited the Buntport Theater, there were six people in the audience. Every time I return, I see that the numbers have grown. And this is a crowd you can’t pigeonhole: children, teenagers, young adults and their parents, entire families that have arrived together, people who look like students, businessfolk, bus drivers, intellectuals, bums or bohemians. Buntport is attracting a following not because everything they do is completely successful, but because their work is sophisticated, welcoming, unpretentious and, above all, original.

-Juliet Wittman, January 7, 2004, Westword

Close up on a dopey looking cop wearing sunglasses and holding his six shooter up to his face.

Rocky Mountain News- Brilliance plays on “Idiot Box”

In some ways, sketch comedy seems a step down for Buntport Theater, a group that has been developing original, comic, full-length works since its inception.

It’s also a skill they’ve never explored in Denver, and one which in most ways comes naturally to this group of seven inventors.

With its first sketch comedy show, Idiot Box, Buntport takes a tired premise and even a few hackneyed sketch formats and still creates something hilarious and clever, as if talent will overcome even the group’s worst impulses.

For structure, Idiot Box posits that tiny fairies inside every television are acting out the shows we choose to watch. One hour they’re in a soap opera, the next a cooking show. A channel surfer can exhaust them.

Those fairies, played by Buntport’s five actors, mostly serve for transitions. Otherwise, Buntport has borrowed the format of SCTV, creating a variety of sketches all derived from various TV shows.

And so we inherit the game show parody and the cooking show parody, frayed staples of sketch comedy. And in Buntport’s hands, even these can be amusing (well, not the cooking show, which is basically a single Stalin joke).

These creative powers instinctively know that there’s no such thing as a too-short sketch. They know that fully developed characters make every joke hit harder. And they know that delays kill comedy.

There’s also an adventure show, Tyler and Shane’s Outback Exploration, in which Edborg and Evan Weissman demonstrate that not all Aussies are brave and blustery.Among their pierced targets are the TV show 5-O and the Fuzz, in which two cops (Hannah Duggan and Erik Edborg) are shocked when suspects lie to them; their world is one bound by an honor code.

On public access, a school bully (Brian Colonna, cast against type and rising to the occasion) hosts his own talk show, falls for a victim and delivers a wallop of a surprise ending.

Erin Rollman proves once again her gift for standing on the border of creepy and taking the plunge. Her dating show contestant is a disturbingly deluded geek. But her Stacy Petrovsky, the capitalist Girl Scout, is a transcendent character given a return performance. This time, instead of selling cookies, she’s commandeering the TV news with an invented board game (Monopoly mixed with Risk: capitalism plus world domination) and tormenting her Brownie brother (Colonna).

Offstage, the performers owe all to troupe members Matt Petraglia and Samantha Schmitz, who somehow keep the manic show moving at a fluid pace. Full costume changes and proficient sound effects happen with the ease if not the budget of shows with far larger staffs.

By the time the cast resurfaces in fairy gear (technicolor Lycra bodysuits) to sing a Doris Day song, they’ve long ago won us over. And they know enough to take their bows while we’re still madly in love.

-Lisa Bornstein, December 19, 2003, Rocky Mountain News

A male gameshow host is leaning against the podium of contestant Marti who has long blond hair and spells her name with a heart over the I.

Denver Post- Theater group tunes in to TV’s vast wasteland

The busy Buntport Theater Company, which is to rest what adult companionship is to Michael Jackson, is parking it on the couch this December for a brief series of comic parodies targeting all things television.

The Buntporters are calling “Idiot Box” their first foray into sketch comedy, but aficionados of their biweekly original book-club sitcom, “Magnets on the Fridge,” will quickly recognize its irreverent style and sensibility.

Though there may not be a subject more rife for Buntport’s sophisticated and intellectual brand of comedy than the vapidity of television, “Idiot Box” does not aspire to be much more than ticklish. This is neither high concept nor particularly biting social commentary. It’s just, for the most part, very funny.

And not surprisingly, it is executed at a level of exactness, characterization and timing that betters most companies around town who do sketch comedy for a living.

During a stretch when Buntport will open its 12th and 13th original mainstage productions within three weeks, and while still cranking out its midweek “Magnets” episodes to a stunning standard of originality, it’s frankly a bit of a relief to see Denver’s hardest-working theater company unburden themselves of the need to be so darned relevant all the time.

“Idiot Box” plays on the fact that most of us only have vague notions of the way televisions actually work. It opens with an unseen conversation between some kid (Andy Vickory) rattling off his blah blah scientific theories about electron beams and cathode rays, and an adult(-like) Evan Weissman, who sets his precocious counterpart straight: Actually, young Andy, tiny fairies are trapped inside our television sets and are forced to act out whatever show is playing on the selected channel.

That’s how televisions really work, Andy. Cathodes. Hah.

Our five bickering and sardonic fairies operate on a stage framed by the simple outline of an old fashioned television set. When these proletariat pixies interact behind a silhouette that represents the television screen itself, we get to know their off-camera personalities. When they are in front of the silhouette, they are considered on-duty, and subject to the channel-changing whims of their unseen despotic couch potato.

Among the easy targets are buddy-cop shows, soap operas, the Food Network, inane game shows, vapid local newscasts, the strange preponderance of Australian outdoorsmen on American television and, most especially, the emerging genre of “Mean TV,” with all its subhuman reality genres including cruel coupling contests and demeaning prank shows.

Among the less-obvious gems are Erik Edborg performing “Cooking With Stalin,” a cooking show for dictators. “Remember what Lenin says,” we are told, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few hundred people.”

The incomparable highlight is the triumphant return of young Mitchell and Stacey Petrovsky, Buntport’s longest-running and most revered characters (played by Brian Colonna and the queen of comedy, Erin Rollman. Bow before her.).

For three years, the Buntport’s signature traveling sketch has been Mitchell and Stacey’s riotous foray into Girl Scout-cookie capitalism, which featured a diabolical pre-teen Stacey domineering her braided and brown-skirted younger brother in her pursuit of the local cookie-selling crown. Here, maniacal Stacey is being interviewed on the local news about her science fair invention, “Monopolize Your Risk,” a board game of “capitalistic skill and global domination.”

Television presents such a target-rich environment that by the evening’s short (70 minutes) end, one wonders how topics such as infomercials, sports, humiliating talk-show revelations and Paris Hilton escaped unscathed.

Given more time and energy, you might expect to see more multimedia touches from Buntport and some sort of social commentary beyond Hannah Duggan’s prescient observation that most of us like to watch others humiliate themselves on TV “just so we can feel patently superior to them.”

After all, the evolution from “The Dating Game” to “Average Joe” is as apparent as the bloodlines linking “Candid Camera” to “Punk’d.”

But while some parodies such as the situational game show “Blame It On” are standard stuff, Buntport on a day off is still vastly superior to any banal collection of “Saturday Night Live” sketches.

In small ways, “Idiot Box” manages to accomplish what Buntport always has been known for. It manages to stretch the sketch-comedy form like those poor fairies’ multicolored, skin-tight Lycra costumes.

-John Moore, December 19, 2003, Denver Post

Westword- Fairy Amusing • Buntport’s clever Idiot Box shows the tiny rubes behind the tube

Speaking as someone who was terrified of the telephone when I was a child because I couldn’t understand how the voices of people I knew could get trapped in this black plastic thing, I am very grateful to Buntport Theater Company for explaining how a television works: Little fairy people are trapped inside the box and act out all the shows and commercials.

In Idiot Box: An Evening of Sketch Comedy, five Buntporters illustrate this theory with a series of sketches. There’s a lot of danger in the premise. To begin with, it could lead to a show that’s unbearably cute. And skits featuring game shows and other standard television fare have been done. And done and done. Apparently every time a Saturday Night Live writer runs out of ideas — clearly a frequent occurrence — he comes up with such a scnenario. It’s inevitably lame, because there’s no way of mocking a genre that comes across like a parody of itself in the first place. But Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, Evan Weissman and Brian Colonna, who (with SamAnTha Schmitz and Matt Petraglia) created Idiot Box and also perform it, avoid these traps. They’re very good actors and deft, witty writers. No skit goes exactly where you think it’s going; no flight of lunatic fantasy is too ridiculous to be undertaken; no joke gets belabored past the point of funniness. The whole evening is light and stylish, and the group is smart enough to stop the entire proceeding while you’re still rocking with laughter and wanting more.

There are, of course, takeoffs on standard TV fare: a cop drama, a game show, a reality series, the Food Network. These are punctuated by scenes in which we see the fairies — only their silhouettes are visible behind a transparent white screen — warming up, arguing, making shadow puppets and discussing whether work in the microwave business wouldn’t be less stressful and more satisfying. Then there’s the sound of someone channel surfing — the idiotic bursts of dialogue, laughter, music and impassioned selling we’re all so familiar with — and another skit begins.

In a dating-game show,

a horrified Evan Weissman is paired with a sluttily oozing and squeakily singing Erin Rollman as “another couple you can look down on.” Edborg gets in shots at arrogant chefs, along with some cogent allusions to current events, in “Cooking With Stalin.” There’s a takeoff on nature shows featuring daring Australians handling snakes and alligators, only here the two Australians are terrified of anything resembling untrammeled wildlife. “Birds,” says one of them. “You can’t trust them.” In a Sesame Street-style show, song, metaphor and action are used to teach kids how you find a clitoris.

Where the lines aren’t that strong, the characterizations are. When the characterizations flag, a clever or audacious comment comes to the rescue. Duggan shines as the female half of a cop team and as the gum-chewing girlfriend of the pathetic, mindlessly violent host of The Bully Show. Evan Weissman is a convincing straight man with a hilarious repertoire of hapless expressions. Brian Colonna is so filled with delight at his (or perhaps it’s her) own cleverness in the game show that he can’t stop patting himself on the back — and we can’t stop chortling every time he does it. As comedians, Edborg and Rollman take things right to the edge and then over it. Why is Edborg imitating a chicken behind that scrim, and is he really going to lay an egg? How does Rollman come up with these insane characters? All her bits are funny, but one of them takes the cake: a monstrous adolescent who’s just won a science fair with her world-conquering board game, Monopolize Your Risk. This girl is such a bullying, self-satisfied, evil, lisping little megalomaniac that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but you do know you can’t take your eyes off of her.

-Juliet Wittman, December 18, 2003, Westword

A woman in blond pigtails leans over blowing a raspberry in the face of Cinderella, who looks upset and holds a broom.

Westword- Major Props • Buntport dazzles with silly yet serious inventiveness

In Elevator, the first of Buntport Theater’s two original one-acts presented under the title Misc. , three people stand in an elevator, pretty much unmoving. We’re treated to several silent minutes, during which we study the actors’ expressions. A fourth person gets into the elevator, then gets off. There’s a blackout. Then the exact same scene is replayed, except this time you can hear the characters’ thoughts. The tall, skinny guy (Erik Edborg), who seems so convinced he’s fat that he has somehow persuaded the other characters of that fact, is a hugely talented and successful author who’s completely at a loss about how to begin his next book. He’s on the way to pitch this shaky project to his new editor. Unbeknownst to him, the new editor (Erin Rollman) is standing right beside him. She’s a smartly dressed woman clasping her briefcase in front of her, and she’s alternating between exultation at being handed so eminent an author and the conviction that she herself is an imposter. The third rider (Evan Weissman) is on his way to the top floor to commit suicide. As for the fourth insouciant player (Hannah Duggan), you’ll have to find out her motivations for yourself.

The dialogue begins with musings — some of them very funny — about butter, umbrellas and untucked shirts, but it becomes deeper and more complex as the piece progresses. People’s thoughts and words overlap. Sometimes the characters seem to hear each other. At least once, they clearly do. But each rider’s individual solitude is never entirely broken.

Something serious is being explored here, although with a light touch. We’re reminded that an elevator is an essentially liminal, almost timeless space. Ideas about time, language and memory surface again and again. The characters ponder the power of narrative and the way all of us create a coherent life story for ourselves. The editor remembers having once kissed the Blarney Stone in Ireland and wonders if she’s too facile with words. Foreshadowing the ubiquitous dualism of the second play of the evening, <Cinderella, she wonders if it wouldn’t have been better to kiss the back of the stone instead and lose her verbosity.

Elevator is pleasant and amusing, but it needs some trimming and tightening.

The second piece bubbles with cheerful invention as the same four actors play out the story of Cinderella, using movement, nonsense syllables, props, masks, many kinds of music and semi coherent sentences that seem to have been distorted by helium. Erik Edborg is a wistful Cinderella who consoles himself in his solitude by making a puppet of his left hand and having it serenade him. Erin Rollman plays both the good mother and the wicked stepmother; for the latter, she simply turns, revealing a mask on the back of her head. Of course this requires moving, even dancing, backward for the rest of the evening, and the result is scuttling and grotesque and hilariously funny. Duggan, also appropriately bifurcated, plays both ugly sisters. And, red-lipped and wearing a platinum wig, Weissman serves as the impresario, uttering frantic nonsense syllables as he tries to make himself understood.

Masks, puppets and doubles abound as Edborg morphs into a plastic doll and back into Cinderella again and Weissman dutifully puffs out his pants to impersonate the prince. The only character who remains resolutely herself throughout is the Fairy Godmother, played as a helmet-haired teenager by a silently exasperated Rollman.

Buntport is made up of several onetime students from Colorado College who studied Eastern European theater together. (Surely no one who hadn’t would come up with the pronunciation “pranshay” for “prince.”) These folks can do astonishing things with objects, and their inventiveness is amazing. They push boundaries and sometimes touch on the profound, but it’s all done with lightness and a fizzing good humor.

-Juliet Wittman, October 2, 2003, Westword

A man with an odd haircut is cuddling up to a blow up doll.

Rocky Mountain News- ‘Misc.’ a refreshing comic turn

Buntport embraces strengths in one-acts

The laughs are fast, furious and dizzyingly inventive in Buntport theater’s latest original production, Misc.

The umbrella title encompasses two one-acts that are entirely unrelated but for their lack of sets and their boundless creativity. After a period of more serious work, it’s refreshing to see Buntport return to its metier: comedy that fulfills its premise in every gesture.

In Elevator, the audience’s patience is tested as four people ride in near silence during a two-minute elevator ride. Soon, though, that ride is replayed in longer form, with the actors voicing the inner thoughts that accompanied every facial gesture or posture shift.

As a past-his-prime wunderkind writer, Erik Edborg grasps desperately for a book pitch as his mind caroms through his skull, lighting on topics from Fabio to butter to sex to claustrophobia. He shares his space with Evan Weissman as a young man contemplating suicide and Erin Rollman as a rising editor who fears she’s a fraud. Their stories cleverly overlap, and Hannah Duggan enters on a sublimely subversive short ride.

Elevator stretches its premise and would benefit from a 15-minute cut. <Cinderella (Less Than Cinderella), on the other hand, is crammed so full of brainstorms that it’s likely a dozen more jokes were left in the rehearsal room.

This four-actor version of the fairy tale is told nearly without words but overflows with clever musical choices and transformative costumes that fill the usual role of the company’s scenery. It may also be the only version where the audience not only hopes Cinderella doesn’t get the prince but wants to bash her over the head with her own dustpan.

Edborg plays the title character, an ugly loser with a ratty blond wig. Duggan takes on both evil stepsisters, with her costume and makeup split neatly down the middle along with her personality. Rollman does extraordinary work as a stepmother performed with a mask and a dizzying physical impediment.

Weissman, the company’s newest member, gets his moment here as a narrator/harlequin who speaks in fairy tale pidgin English and is unwillingly conscripted to play the prince. The entire cast comes off as a group of perverse living Muppets, and while kids may enjoy the show, it’s unabated delirium for adults.

As always, there are company member unseen onstage but intimately involved in the plays’ creation. This time, those shunning the spotlight are Brian Colonna, Matt Petraglia and Samantha Schmitz. They must be cited, because all seven Buntport brains were working at full power on Misc.

-Lisa Bornstein, September 26, 2003, Rocky Mountain News

Four people wearing business casual attire stand together. All of them are looking up. One is holding a large yellow envelope.

Denver post- >(more than) funny • Buntport’s new work inspiring, as usual

All aboard the Buntport bandwagon.

I have grown completely enamored of Denver’s Buntport Theater Company. After taking in the latest brilliant effort in a steady stream of groundbreaking original material from its seven wits, I can announce that I would watch anything these kids came up with anywhere and at any time.

Why, I’d watch them stand still in an elevator. I’d even watch them reinterpret the dustiest of old fairy tales.

And that’s just what they do in their 10th original work, “Misc.,” two one-acts titled “Elevator” and “< (Less Than) Cinderella.”

Buntport’s pieces aren’t always ingenious but they are always funny, surprising and wreathed in magic. Their writing and execution is both inspired and inspiring to anyone who appreciates the difficulty of the creative process.

The beauty of “Misc.” is that it does not rely on the company’s well-established individual talents. This is a risky conceit that constitutes a confident leap forward in the complexity of their repertoire. And they do all this without a set.

“Elevator” is a 45-minute look inside the minds of four strangers during one short and awkward elevator ride; while “< (Less Than) Cinderella” is the classic story performed without discernible words. That might seem like a disparate match, but these are companion pieces. The first story must be communicated with minimal movement; the second only with movement and sound.

The evening opens with a square pool of light on the floor that represents an elevator’s interior. First we witness the actual, seemingly uneventful two-minute elevator ride in a generic office building, the kind where strangers feign tolerance for only as many floors as they must travel. The sole dialogue comes from one man informing another that he has a spot on his shirt. The elevator stops and a woman gets on; she also becomes the first to get off.

After a short blackout we see the same event unfold again, only this time without the constriction of time. Now we hear detailed thoughts, and it’s soon evident that every glance and weight shift we saw in the first scene was a clue to understanding the longer version of the same story.

Because the writing is smart and concise, we soon know the characters intimately: Erik Edborg is a washed-up and terrified novelist heading to a pitch meeting without a pitch; Erin Rollman is the unknowing underling from the same office assigned to meet with this writer; and Evan Weissman is a claustrophobic man contemplating suicide. When the elevator stops, Hannah Duggan injects a lightning rod of wicked energy as a woman who revels in knowing her quick one-floor ride is a rude aggravation.

The dialogue is based on a creative-dramatics game called “Radio,” where actors stand side by side, each representing a radio station. Each time the leader turns “the dial,” a new person picks up speaking where the other left off.

But here what we hear are not just randomly improvised thoughts. These are delicately interwoven transitions that flow with the rhythm of the elevator car. The tone grows from inanely comic observations (did you know that Keanu spells “unique” backward … “only wrong”?) to more metaphorical ruminations on the nature of experience to finally, some rather sad realizations about the inadequacies of their lives.

While “Elevator” is a successful experiment, “< (Less Than) Cinderella” is an epic opera of movement. It most obviously draws on the masks, puppetry and spectacle of commedia dell’arte, and the costumes and ritual of Kabuki, but it is above all a nod to silent film clowns such as Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. In 1936, long after the advent of talkies, Chaplin’s classic “Modern Times” included his first spoken words on film a gibberish song meant as a rebuke to talking pictures.

Buntport honors that classic moment by having the narrator (Weissman), Cinderella (a remarkable, impeccable Edborg), her stepsister (Duggan) and stepmother (Rollman) communicate in garble. At Colorado College the Buntporters were schooled in transformational theater by Bulgarians; those Eastern European influences flavor this entire work.

The transformations are lessons in originality: Edborg morphs from ugly Cinderella into a princess, and Weissman from the narrator into the prince.

But how Rollman turns from Cinderella’s mother dying in childbirth into the wicked stepmother right before our eyes is a creative tour-de-force. When she turns her back on the audience, her flip side is the evil one. Rollman wears a mask on the back of her head, and her backward clothes and shoes create the illusion of the front of another person. From then on Rollman walks only backward, which is forward for her new character, complete with behind-the-back hand gestures. Her backward line dance is a memory to treasure.

The Buntport team could not pull this off without the visual and audio support of SamAnTha Schmitz and Matt Petraglia. The latter’s masterful soundtrack includes songs such as Fats Waller’s “Your Feet’s Too Big.” (Guess where that one comes in?)

The miracle of Buntport’s opus is that this is textbook minimalism. With only their imaginations and intellect, they have conjured the illusion of a world far bigger than our comprehension.

-John Moore, September 24, 2003, Denver Post