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Close-up of a man with large sideburns. He is bug-eyed and grimacing. In the background, out of focus, in the front of a yellow van.

Colorado Daily- Buntport makes laughingstock of Bard with tuneful “Titus Andronicus! The Musical”

Take some Shakespeare. Turn it upside down, inside out, slap it around, shake it like an unopened can of paint, hang it on the wall and make fun of its mamma.

That’s the approach Buntport Theater takes to what it calls “the Bard’s bloodiest play,” “Titus Andronicus.” What results is a crass, sardonic, no-holds-barred gorefest (stuffed with toe-tapping musical numbers) that is one of the funniest experiences you are likely to have on what the evening’s host refers to as “a flight on that big bird called theatre – with an R, E, of course.”

The show takes place in Buntport’s bare-walled performance space, occupied only by a massive Club Wagon XLT van which serves as the surprisingly versatile set, a player piano and tape deck, and a light-bulb-studded tote board, the last of which helps us keep track of who’s playing whom in each scene. A drop-dead-funny cast of five, who present themselves as the traveling “Professor P.S. McGoldstien Van-O-Players,” portray the near-infinitude of characters in “Titus.” They aid their cause with the help of a stripped-down text crammed with cheesy gags, clever no-budget costumes and props, and a flock of quick-change costume pieces that help to keep the players straight – barely.

A summary of the play’s gruesome and complex plot, thought to be Shakespeare’s first effort at tragedy, would eat up too much space. Besides, Buntport’s hilarious program captures its absurdities nicely. Its mélange of high-flown eloquence, revenge, murder, rape, insanity, dismemberment, and cannibalism has rendered it unproduceable by all but the hardiest and most grimly insightful of directors. Of course, this makes it perfect fodder for parody.

Each performer takes on a handful of roles with relish – and a great deal of ketchup, which is splattered about profusely as the bloodshed swells (updated as expirations progress on a handy “Death Toll” chalkboard). Brian Colonna, a bundle of energy despite undergoing an emergency appendectomy only days before the opening, sets the tone with joyful, manic bombast as Titus, and with wimpy delicacy as the hapless suitor Bassanius. Erik Edborg scores as a wheezy emperor, Titus’ wistfully dense would-be-hero son Lucius, and as the voices and hands powering the evil brothers Chiron and Demetrius, who are puppets incarnated from a car radio and a gas can, respectively.

Droll Erin Rollman handles her manifold acting duties with style and wit, especially as Titus’s befuddled brother Marcus, and as Titus’s nemesis, the Goth queen Tamora. Hannah Duggan is brilliantly funny, doubling as the evil Aaron the Moor, complete with Snidely Whiplash moustache, and as Titus’s doomed daughter Lavinia, who, lopped of tongue and hands, she still gamely serves as a mute and melancholy Ann Miller. Tasteless? Sure. Funny? You bet.

A new and welcome Buntport participant is gangly Muni Kulasinghe, who runs the musical portion of the show and fills in as any number of incidental characters whose demise is imminent. His profusion of idiotic impersonations adds immeasurably to the show’s bounty of belly laughs. Classical music lovers will find his baleful plucking of the “Dies Irae” on mandolin a howl. Kudos also to the troupe’s often-overlooked backstage members, Matt Petraglia and SamAnTha Schmitz, who keep the comic havoc flowing.

“Titus” gleefully mocks the Bard and all who have made him into the playhouse’s sacred beast. In an area where “serious,” big-budget productions draw crowds and media attention, Buntport proves that entertaining theater (or theatre) can be composed of nothing more than a minimum of stage effects, a powerful collection of talent, and an abundance of imagination. “Titus – The Musical” deserves packed houses for the remainder of its run.

-Brad Weismann, May 14, 2002, Colorado Daily

A man, with antlers and a deer nose, sits with Einstein pondering space and time.

Rocky Mountain News- Show about reindeer flies

Apparently, Rudolph is a bit of a prima donna, a quality that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the other reindeer.

That and other secrets are exposed in Buntport Theater’s Donner: A Documentary, helpfully subtitled with “about the reindeer . . . not the Party.” Not a film but a stage play, Donner mocks the conventions of PBS talking-head documentaries as well as presenting a slightly sordid reindeer Behind the Music.

A collaborative company, Buntport consists of six principals who create the shows. Hannah Duggan, Brian Colonna, Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman also perform, while Samantha Schmitz and Matt Petraglia work offstage. For the lead in Donner, Buntport has brought in another talented actor, Muni Kulasinghe, who, even with a blackened nose, lights the path of the show.

We first meet Donner sitting in his low-rent apartment building, communicated by projections on three large screens. Smoking, lisping, a little dorky, Donner is clearly no Santa’s golden boy, and his resentment for Rudolph quickly shines through — why should that reindeer’s deformity lead to fame? “He had a discolored nose. I have a lazy eye,” Donner points out.

The play begins in January of 1999, and takes us through the year up to Christmas (presumably, the “film” spent another year in post-production). We meet those who surround Donner: his flying partner, the rage-filled Blitzen (a very funny Colonna); Santa and his sewer-mouth wife (Edborg and Duggan); Donner’s third-grade teacher, a frosty Junker (Rollman), and the preening, gone Hollywood Rudolph (Edborg). All are hysterical; the only extraneous character is a reindeer expert (Duggan) who reappears delivering bland facts.

Frustrated with his lack of glory, Donner quits North Pole Industries and looks for a new career. He applies for jobs in law firms and at Kinko’s (where Duggan, as the store manager, is entranced by the video crew), but no one wants to hire a guy with antlers. Even a high school won’t hire him as mascot unless he wears their reindeer head.

Scattered throughout this trifle are moments of radiance. Rollman gives her reindeer physical attributes that distinguish them, one pawing the ground nervously, the other jerking her head. Slides of Donner’s baby pictures splash on the screens, hysterical visions of a little boy with a black nose and antlers. Santa makes Donner change his name from the original Donder because “They thought it sounded too ethnic.”

And at the head of it all is Donner, a sad schlump of a deer with an inflated sense of his own destiny.

-Lisa Bornstein, December 7, 2001, Rocky Mountain News

Colorado Daily- Donner: a documentary

Glancing at the title “Donner: a documentary,” people invariably arrive at the same conclusion: Why would I see a play about cannibalism and despair?

Fortunately, the title refers to the reindeer and not the Party. This Donner, one of the lesser-known members of the reindeer team that pulls Santa’s sleigh, is the subject of an inventive comedy by the Buntport Theater Company about the increasing dissatisfaction of life on the corporate dole.

Documentarian Oscar Trebold presents a year in the life of Donner, a disgruntled reindeer/everyman played by Muni Kulasinghe. Donner decides that working for North Pole Inc., which owns the entitlements to Christmas, is too taxing. Striking out on his own, the camera captures his plight in a series of still life photographs projected upon three screens that make up the setting of the play.

About the only things that set Donner apart from humans are his antlers, round nose and hooves. As the play progresses, it becomes hilariously clear that Donner represents anyone who has ever tried to beat the system. His coworkers are a cross section of Generation X culture. Blitzer is a stoner whose breakup with Cupid is the only source of bad humor, and Vixen is an exotic dancer between seasons.

Comet is a trust fund reindeer, and Dasher and Dancer play in a rock band. But they have all bought into the team environment fostered by the corporation, even though they only receive a strange Christmas card with St. Patrick’s Day overtones and a visor hat from the corporation for pulling the sleigh all over the Christian world.

Rudolph, played by Erik Edborg, is a prima donna that has shaped his own legendary status. Donner is quick to point out that no one called the egocentric Rudolph names, and he was always welcome to play in their reindeer games.

The herd mentality of reindeer is strikingly similar to American life, and that makes this play more than just an irreverent comedy. Donner wants nothing more to do with the herd. After officially resigning from his job, he attempts to create his own holiday by pitching a spin-off of Christmas to another corporation. But North Pole Inc. has blacklisted him from the holiday market, and Donner doesn’t have any saleable skills. Donner spirals down into the lowest denominator of employment — telemarketer.

“Donner: a documentary” is a timely comedy about the changing shape of Christmas into consumer-driven propaganda. Santa’s whirlwind present-delivering tour was once a mystical story, and children wondered just how he managed to visit everyone in one night. Now, television commercials frequently show elves working in a corporate or industrial environment, the most recent by Fedex. Certainly, the myth of Christmas has changed to mirror our consumer culture. After watching this play, it becomes more apparent that the change is also mirroring the truth.

-Robin Johnson, December 4, 2001, Colorado Daily

A man behind bars reaches through them dejected.

Boulder Weekly- Magnificently mad

“When he talks you recognize in him the lunatic and the man.” -Anton Pavlovich Chechov, Ward #6

In 1892, Anton Chekhov’s fictional narrative, Ward #6, cracked open the relationship between a doctor and an asylum patient in a dysfunctional hospital in 19th-century, provincial Russia. This year, three years after its birth as a company, the Buntport Theater Company has brought Chekhov’s work to life in a clever adaptation of the story for the stage.

From the moment that the production begins in total darkness, two things in particular stand out in this adaptation. The first is that the company (wisely) decides to stay close to the original text of the narrative, creatively using passages and dialogue as the basis for their script. The second is that the adaptation is forged from a collaborative process. The casting has virtually nothing to do with age or gender; rather, it relies on the sheer skill of the four actors to deliver a rotating cast of characters with no help from essentially uniform costuming. The cast tries on characters like clothes, and like clothes some of the characters are better worn by a particular actor. It is an experiment that allows the audience a glimpse into the process, and it’s one of the features of Ward #6 which keeps it vital. However, by the end of the production, I had hoped to see the cast settle into the parts which they play particularly well, most notably actress Erin Rollman as Ivan Dmitritch, the passionate and tortured patient who captures the interest of his disassociated doctor, Andrey Yefimitch. Instead, the musical chairs of character swapping continues throughout the production-understandably in some cases since ten characters are played by four actors/actresses-which is something of a distraction in the otherwise gripping conclusion.

The staging and set of Ward #6 are beautifully done in their simplicity and surprising functionality. Resembling a suspended shipwreck, every prop, from chairs to plaster casts of partial human forms, hangs on a system of pulleys above a stage of ascending pallets, planks and grates. The cast never leaves the stage, but uses effective, though not technically superior, lighting, and tremendous body language to indicate their stage presence. The set, staging and the unusual casting of Ward #6 work compellingly toward the single goal of slowly undressing Chekhov’s narrative to reveal its tragic and moving themes.

The crux of the story rests in the juxtaposition between Ivan, the intelligent, compassionate and mad patient, and Andrey, his detached and listless doctor. Andrey believes in suffering, dismissing its gravity in favor of a longing for an intellectualism, casually saying to his tortured patient: “Pain is a vivid idea of pain.” Andrey seeks, more than anything, a brotherhood of the intellect, which he ironically finds in Ivan. Ivan finds himself into the madhouse through an overactive intellect, a paranoia of the mind that leads him to fear uncontrollably for the loss of his “freedom and honor.” He is a man who passionately loves the world but is trapped in his own mind, and Andrey is a man who lives in the world and longs to inhabit the intellect. One of the highlights of the production comes with the formation of a brotherhood between the two men-the very brotherhood that Andrey seeks. It appears as a slice of continuity marked by a clarity and vibrancy of the intellectual tete-à-tete between these two men in the otherwise jarring and discontinuous world of Ward #6. The short sequence of scenes drips with delicious irony and complex emotional and intellectual contention, and the production would have benefited by prolonging it, both in their development and eventual deconstruction.

The world you step into when you visit Buntport’s adaptation of Ward #6 absorbs you instantly. In the intimate setting, its figures and faces communicate the subtlest of humor in an otherwise bleak world. They entreat you to look on the interior suffering of man, and they do so for the most part successfully. Only a few wearisome moments live in this production, and despite some of the awkwardness caused by a few of its transitions, Ward #6 sets its standards high, and lives up to them in a poignantly entertaining stage drama.

-Loren Drummond, August 16, 2001, The Boulder Weekly

A man sits dejected peeling a potato. Behind him books hang from pieces of rope. Two women stand beside him dressed in rags and wearing cuffs made of plaster.

GoGo Mag- Chekh Mate @ Ward #6

Buntport Theater Company opened its new theatre a few months ago to the applause of nearly everyone who has ever seen one of their productions. The company, known for its multi-level wit and intelligently written comedic productions, has chosen to break new ground in the new space by staging its adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Ward #6.

The new ground is serious drama, and although the group has always shown a subdued affinity for the genre, this play represents an evolution of sorts for Buntport. Chekhov’s Ward #6 explores the stoicism of the human psyche through warped lenses. Buntport extracts Chekhov’s twisted circularity from the piece and successfully shifts it into three dimensions. The effect is both stunning and numbing. Perfect, really, considering the nature of the work.

Chekhov was profound, and so is the Buntport version of Ward # 6. The organization of the play is intensely anonymous, with cast members flowing from one role to another, embodying the one collective psyche that rests at the center of Ward #6.

Acting is superbly sublime, and compliments the work rather than trying to overwhelm it. Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman become one singular character going through differentiated movements, speaking with different voices, acting out different life passages, but always with one unified presence.

Drifting between the ward, and life in the town outside the ward, Buntport underscores Chekhov’s theme that we “know nothing of life, but are only theoretically acquainted with reality.” The townsfolk all seem like larvae in different stages of development, all destined to follow their primary instinct to crawl away from the light. It is the psychotic wretches, however, who reveal the deepest understanding of human life.

The ward is clearly the larger prison of reticent philosophers, while the human psyche creates cages far more incipient than any philosophy can explain. The Stoic’s pursuit of “True Happiness” falls to the Doctor, as he endeavors to inoculate himself against all human sensitivities. He believes “joy and suffering are passing,” and it is the disembowelment of this character that drives the work and the play.

Aside from phenomenal scripting and acting, the Buntport group has put together perhaps its most intriguing set. Walls of books, casts of various molds we allow ourselves to fill, barred windows we could walk around, but choose to hide behind all become part of the pathological motion of the play. Like some cobweb strewn cellar, the stage displays the contents of the human mind and the elements to which Chekhov alluded in Ward #6. And everything hangs in the balance. The elements of the set– representations of society’s teachings, barriers and molds– are all suspended from the ceiling by ropes just waiting to be manipulated by the cast, or the script, or the breeze. The effect represents both a grand design and an accident waiting to reveal itself. This is an immensely well planned and well executed set that resonates perfectly with the work.

There is little in life more disturbing or deeply moving than a well-crafted piece of experimental theater. The genre was meant to explore and expose, and Buntport has succeeded on both counts. The group has earned the right to claim outstanding artistic vision with the production of this piece of experimental drama. I strongly recommend this play.

-Cilicia Yakhlef, August 16-29, 2001, Go-Go Magazine

A woman bent over in supplication and wearing a plaster cast begs for money.

Denver Post- ‘Ward’ rattles cellbars. Madman, Inmate, Doctor link darkly

Theater by nature is a collaborative process. But the concept carries extra luster when the final product is as imaginative and ensemble-oriented as Buntport Theater’s provocative adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s story “Ward #6.”

Set in a decrepit 19th-century Russian lunatic asylum, the central confrontation is between a so called madman and the doctor assigned to the ward. Ivan, the articulate inmate, has an intelligence exceeded only by his persecution complex. Andrey, a complacent physician who considers Ivan the only man worth talking to in the entire town, enrages his patient by speaking dispassionately about rising above suffering before heading off to his soothing book-lined study.

One is up to his rope restraints in brute reality. The other is tethered to an increasingly numbing intellectual retreat. Political tyranny, detached philosophy and the unfathomable purpose of human suffering swirl together as the pair’s relationship takes a darkly ironic detour.

While the tale – which also has its lighter moments – won’t be everyone’s glass of vodka, those who like challenging theater will find the show stimulating.

Buntport’s six members create, direct, act and design the shows. Here, Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman perform. Matt Petraglia and SamAnTha Schmitz handle off-stage duties, providing effects such as mournful notes that sound like a bereaved cello.

The troupe performs in a newly converted industrial space that perfectly suits its style. Backed by rough gray walls and exposed pipes, angled wood pallets suggest makeshift beds. Overhead, ropes and pulleys dangle like menacing vines sprouting unconventional props.

Voices echo out of the darkness as the inmates, clad in shapeless pajamas, enter their dismal abode. Objects descend with the flick of a rope, as one patient is symbolically immobilized with a pair of plaster trousers, while another sports a castlike arm piece, the better to beg for kopecks and attention.

All the actors play several roles, frequently trading off portraying the same character – less confusing than it sounds, thanks to fluid staging and well-delineated interpretations.

Duggan’s Nikita, the vicious guard, glowers and slaps a cloth-wrapped club. Rollman’s Ivan grasps the ropes and circles like a captive animal. Edborg, playing a barber, bellows in, snapping rusty shears as he savors his authority.

And bearing out Chekhov’s point that we can be imprisoned in various ways, Colonna’s Andrey, awash in futility and boredom, retreats to his study, a clever affair of cord and book covers that descends like the bars of a cell.

-Dianne Zuckerman, August 15, 2001, Denver Post

Close up of a man seated and peeling potatoes. Behind him books are suspended in the air with ropes.

Rocky Mountain News- Multiple roles transform performers in Chekov adaptation

Buntport Theatre takes its style of transformative theater to a deeper level with Ward No. 6, an adaptation of the Anton Chekhov novella.

As in Buntport’s earlier plays, no prop or set piece exists without purpose. Here, though, the performers themselves are transformed, slipping in and out of, and even sharing, multiple roles.

In a dark, untended mental hospital, patients languish under the inattentive care of a smug doctor. The patients include both the insane and the merely difficult, and none have a chance of release.

Always visually interesting, Ward No. 6 skates over some of Chekhov’s themes. Ivan bores his friend with political furies before he is committed, but there’s no further discussion of the possibility of political imprisonment. And while the hospital is unpleasant, it’s not quite a prison, a connection Chekhov draws early with the description, “a desolate, Godforsaken look which is only found in our prison and hospital buildings.”

The seven members of Buntport — Samantha Schmitz, Brian Colonna, Erin Rollman, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg and Matthew Petraglia — wrote the play, and all but Schmitz and Petraglia perform in it. Colonna alone sticks to a single role, that of the doctor who eventually despairs at the empty repetition of his life and the hypocrisy of his work. Amazingly, the constant switching of characters among the other three actors never confuses as they deftly keep the audience up to speed.

As with Buntport’s other works, Ward No. 6 provides constant visual interest. A corner of the warehouse theater is used as the stage, constructed of wooden pallets for an off-kilter floor. Plaster casts, rows of books and furniture hang on ropes attached to pulleys and are lowered or raised as the scenes dictate. Visual effects expressing the story’s themes would have made the evening truly transforming.

-Lisa Bornstein, August 10, 2001, Rocky Mountain News

A man and a woman stand above a seated man pushing on his neck with a plaster baton.

Colorado Daily- Illuminated Chekov

There’s a new little warehouse down by the railroad tracks in Denver’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, tucked among ramshackle houses, junkyards, and vacant lots. Inside it, a sextet of theatrical inventors is busy experimenting. They are the founders/members of the Buntport Theater Company, and their fifth (and first non-comic) production is a unique, intelligent adaptation of Anton Chekov’s 1892 short story, “Ward 6.”

Buntport was founded three years ago, when the six were fellow students at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Their shows to date consist of clever adaptations of literary works, and one original piece, the post-apocalyptic comedy “FIN.” Together, the group forms a complete production team, developing all their material collaboratively and dividing all the on-, off- and backstage work among themselves. Their fresh, imaginative approach to live performance is a welcome relief from standard theatrical fare.

The setting is 1880’s Russia — a small, squalid lunatic asylum near an isolated provincial town, 150 miles from the nearest railway station. The plot is deceptively simple – the presiding doctor, Andrey Yefimitch, begins to find the inmates more congenial than the townspeople, gradually slides into an apathetic madness himself, is committed to his own brutally indifferent institution, and dies. Yet within these confines Chekov explores a multitude of themes – consensual reality’s insubstantial boundaries, society’s inertia and indifference, the vanity and self-deception of intellect. With good reason, Buntport found the story an excellent candidate for dramatization.

The lights rise on a gray concrete corner of the theater space, littered with weathered platforms and strung with an assortment of ropes, from which all the show’s set, prop, and costume pieces are suspended. The effect is stark and claustrophobic. The performers wear shapeless, interchangeable gray outfits. Occasionally, pungent and plaintive sound cues punctuate the action. With the performances, these elements make up a smoothly integrated, accomplished production that fearlessly delves into complex, challenging subject matter far beyond the scope of most regional theaters.

One actor, Brian Colonna, convincingly portrays the unfortunate doctor with a wan look and passive air that steadily increases as the play progresses, sometimes unfortunately reducing him to inaudibility. The other three, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, and Erin Rollman, each take turns playing each of the nine supporting roles. This simultaneously allows them to add their individual inflections to a cumulative characterization, and defuses the audience’s normal identification of actor with role. The playgoer must work hard, devoting complete attention to the proceedings, or risk hopeless confusion — not a bad thing at all.

The play moves along in an unbroken series of scenes, conducted at a deliberate, subdued pace. The adaptation, of necessity, pares away much of Chekov’s rich, illuminating detail but succeeds on its own terms, bringing many of the story’s compelling points into view. There are suggestions that this interpretation wants to indict society and its institutions for hastening the doctor’s doom, but Chekov clearly plants the seeds of Andrey Yefimitch’s downfall within himself, detailing his crippling weaknesses of character, and his snobbish self-absorption, from story’s beginning.

At times, even though the story is inescapably gloomy, the production veers dangerously close to the suffocating air of deadly earnestness comic performers assume when they want to be “serious” onstage. Fortunately, the adroit minds of Buntport avoid this fate by immersing themselves in the execution of this difficult tour de force. Lovers of stark beauty and bold stagecraft will enjoy “Ward 6”, and should look forward to Buntport’s future adventures.

-Brad Weismann, August 10, 2001, Colorado Daily

Boulder Daily Camera- Chekhov’s hospital drama exposes politics of confinement

Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wasn’t the wimp most theatergoers think he was. Judging by Buntport Theater’s gutsy adaptation of Chekhov’s short story “Ward #6,” the diminutive, bespectacled and tubercular good doctor possessed the poetic lyricism of Dylan Thomas, the incisive social conscience of George Bernard Shaw, the capacity to embrace suffering on a scale to rival Dostoyevsky, the manic paranoia of Kafka and the political rage of Bertolt Brecht. “The Seagull,” “Three Sisters,” “Uncle Vanya,” and “The Cherry Orchard” may be masterpieces of sublime and ironic understatement, but “Ward #6” shows what can happen when a little guy with a sharp pen and a great mind loses his temper.

Set in an appalling asylum in 19th century Russia, “Ward #6” blows the lid off the abuses that result when socialized medicine and prosaic minds resort to confinement as a means to silence dissidents and non-conformists. An intelligent, innocent man (Erik Edborg) adjusts to a life of misery and despair when he is denounced and sentenced to spend the rest of his days in a brutal sanitarium. An idealistic doctor (Brian Colonna) tries to help the inmate transcend his state through intellectual exercise, but finds that he is dragged down to annihilation by grinding, relentless and degrading reality when he too becomes a “patient.”

Buntport Theater is a collaborative, experimental theater company with an exciting and innovative artistic sensibility. The production’s pop sculpture scenery, including props, costume accessories and evocative plaster body casts, are suspended from the ceiling then lowered on pulleys when needed. The stage space, arranged “corner” style in Buntport’s converted warehouse space, is a jumbled conglomeration of pallets, rotting planks, expanded steel grates and manila rope. The barefoot actors wear drab rags. There is no place for comfort or safety in this play.

Four actors, including Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, Edborg and Colonna, play more than 10 roles and frequently exchange characters, though they sometimes stay in one part for extended scenes. They shout and suffer, plead and roar their way through the pessimistic script, which in typical Russian fashion, offers no hope of deliverance from a wretched fate.

The ensemble effectively expresses impotent rage and fearsome fatalism, but the production is so self-consciously stylized it becomes impossible to feel sympathy for individual characters. Like the very system it condemns, the production style dehumanizes the play’s populace, making them little more than nightmarish scarecrows and macabre mouthpieces for Chekhov’s unrestrained outrage.

Buntport Theater, which has mounted primarily original comedies in the past, is a unique creative force in the community, and bears close watching.

-Patrick Dorn, August 9, 2001, Boulder Daily Camera

Three people are posed in outrageous costumes looking up at the camera. One woman wears Mad Max style armor and a camouflage tank top. One woman is dressed in a hazmat suit. The man is dressed in super hero attire.

Rocky Mountain News- In The End “Fin” Finds Laugh

Scientists have long known that cockroaches would survive a nuclear war. They didn’t warn us about Hall and Oates.

A mix tape and a Scrabble game survive the apocalypse in Fin, the latest original comedy by Buntport Theater Company. Imagine: eternity with nine E’s but only one K, and an endlessly revolving soundtrack of George Michael, Louis Prima and, worst of all, REM’s It’s the End of the World As We Know It.

“If I’d known it was gonna be the Post-Apocalyptic Tape instead of Smooth Driving 3, I wouldn’t have put it in,” explains Dob (Brian Colonna), one of three survivors.

Dob is eager to continue the human race (or at least try), but his female companions have other plans. Mae (Hannah Duggan) spends the early part of the play in biohazard overalls, breathing through a mask and using a tube to speak. To Edie (Erin Rollman), that tube isn’t for talkin’, it’s for hittin’ — dressed in punk-rock combat gear, she’s itching to take on any alien comers.

The six-member theater group (the three actors plus Matt Petraglia, Samantha Schmitz and Erik Edborg) develops its plays together, and like earlier works Quixote and 2 in 1, Fin (French for “end”) is laced with hilariously observed details.

Many of the jokes bounce off the mix tape and Scrabble game. Others come from the flights of fancy that occur when the world has ended, it’s days later, and everyone is really bored. At one point, Edie (given a riotous angry bluster by Rollman) poses the essential mystery of Murder, She Wrote (and it isn’t that a person under 60 had seen the show). Angela Lansbury, she decides, was the arch villain. “Everywhere she went, people were murdered! EVERYWHERE SHE WENT!”

The members of Buntport seem to have angular minds, zigging where another person would take a gentle curve. But the many funny moments they create lack a structure to hold them together. Unlike other Buntport pieces, Fin lacks a plot, or even a central thread, to force the play to cohere. Blackouts after each joke make it feel more like sketch comedy. It’s terribly funny, but Fin needs a stronger story to carry us through the end.

-Lisa Bornstein, June 13, 2001, Rocky Mountain News