Buntport Theater

A trapdoor has been cut into a giant bed. A woman is coming out of the trap door and seems to be waving at the camera.

Go Go Mag- 2 in one

Aw … isn’t it cute? Look at those fingers, look at those wiggly little toes! And that … claw … and my, look at that big tail! There’s a new member of Denver’s theatre family and the relatives are going to be really proud of this one all right. Bouncing baby Buntport arrived at the Phoenix March 15, and the fact that it has six heads is a good thing, folks. Really it is. You see, as emerging theatre companies go, six stable, gifted, collaborative artists is more than enough. Especially when they write their own material and throw all known boundaries and paradigms aside.

They played to a large house at the Phoenix, and although that in itself is good news, the better news is that Buntport has just leased permanent space. The group is in the process of creating a black box stage that will be opening soon.

The sooner the better, I might add. Buntport stages original creations, thematically rooted in literary classics. The work, though, is stretched so far beyond the veil of the canon as to give rise to something completely different, yet recognizable–and glitteringly funny.

2 in 1 pits James Thurber against … that unknown guy or priest or, well, whoever wrote Beowulf. During the first act (nine quickies based on Thurber short stories), I was convinced Thurber was going to win the day. I mean we are talking Thurber here, and Act I does start out with two men and two women in bed and all. The audience was laughing right off the bat– that’s the first story, see– “Mr. Monroe vs. The Bat.”  Well, anyway, by the time the bat bit was done, all the finite details of the piece came winging through the theatre. And even though Thurber was one of the finest word surgeons ever, Buntport had sewn in enough comedy to keep the audience in stitches.

The entire retinue of nine scenes was outstanding, both literarily and comically speaking. Act I managed to promote a profound appreciation for Thurber’s work and words, while at the same time, spotlighting Buntport’s creatively comic ever-sharpening edge. Highlights, in fact, were many. But particularly impressive was the dual tandem acting scene in “Helpful Hints and the Hoveys.” The absolute knock-out bit of Act I, though, was “The Evening’s at Seven,” a play in which only one phrase is uttered on stage, but which is an enchantingly poignant, expertly executed piece of experimental theater. The piece is not so overcast and dark as to make the mood heavy, but provides a perfect dose of dramatic relief.

And then there’s Act II, “Word-Horde,” a dramatization of the study guide to Beowulf. Now, even though I’d pit Thurber’s brains against Beowulf’s brawn any day, I gotta tell you, the big dummy won the stage, though more to the credit of the Buntport group than the work. Hand-woven paper claws, fantastic timing and dialogue, and nifty movement between the reenactment and the CliffsNotes team had the audience entirely jovial and begging for more, to the degree that when the evening finally ended, no one would leave. That’s right, we witnessed a play about Beowulf, and we so much wanted more that we clung to our seats for a while when it was over. I’ve actually read Beowulf folks, and all I can tell you is that it’s not the kind of read you go in for a second time. To have a staged event based upon Beowulf which leaves the audience practically crying for more is nothing short of miraculous.

Now, I’m a big fan of comedy, but often I find it artistically lacking. Not so with 2 in 1. The Buntport team understands subtle nuance, timing, background setting and set design. They also understand when to break scenes, when to cull the laughter and when to turn it on. And, best of all they understand dramatic action. This, friends means that Buntport is presenting not just comedy, but High Comedy. You know, something along the lines of Shakespeare’s comedies, complete with wit, charm, laughs, intelligence, rhythm, discernible meter, fully developed characters and so on. Additionally, the work is experimental and fresh as a crocus in February, making for great theatre and even better comedy.

-Cilicia Yakhlef, March 29 – April 11, 2001, Go-Go Magazine

A screaming person is wearing a crown made of paper that has the word water printed all over it. On top of that crown is an origami boat made of paper that has the word boat printed all over it.

Rocky mountain news- Buntport’s one-acts are a hoot

One year ago, Buntport Theater showed its promise with Quixote, a satire of academia. Now the group delivers with 2 in 1, a sublime combination of one-acts developed by Buntport’s six members that provokes so much laughter it leaves cheeks aching.

The first act, . . . and this is my significant bother, contains adaptations of nine short stories by James Thurber, all dealing with marriage. The stories are presented in ’40s period dress and a dazzling variety of styles. The sole set piece, a raked bed, is transformed into sofa, car and other guises on which these goofy adults play out their foibles. After killing a spider for his wife, a man (Brian Colonna) cowers in bed, terrorized by a bat. A Brooklyn couple (Colonna and Hannah Duggan) fantasizes confrontations carried out by alter egos (Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman) standing behind the bed. In the most adventurous piece, a story is read over the sound system as lights come up for glimpses of the silent characters depicted. The scene plays out like a fotonovela, frozen images that pop out of the dark and burn into the retina.

The four actors (assisted offstage by company members Matt Petraglia and Samantha Schmitz) create wonderful, New Yorker-type cartoon characters, and their four disparate physical types complement the portrayals. Colonna’s old-fashioned, large-size facial expressions are both sweet and laughable, particularly when he plays a meek little man trying to woo his wife into the cellar so he can kill her. Edborg, tall and blond, gets the flummoxed leading man roles. Rollman has a pointed little face and takes on a breathy, slight lisp, while Duggan defies matronly harridan stereotypes even as she celebrates them.

Inconceivably, things get even better with the second act, Word-Horde, a dramatization of the study guide (that is, CliffsNotes) to Beowulf. A voiceover announces that the production is “intended as a supplementary aid to serious audience members. It is not a substitute for the text itself or a dramatic re-enactment of the text.” So don’t think you can get out of seeing the Olde English version.

Wearing laborers’ jumpsuits with prop-laden tool belts, the four actors do hilarious quickie performances of sections of the text, then run back through them for the commentary.  Their props are made entirely of computer printouts covered in the name of the object they represent. So a paper crown has the word crown printed in gold, dozens of times. When Grendel loses an arm, streamers fly out with the word blood printed in red. This isn’t just silly; it’s a great wink at postmodernism, textual analysis and symbolism — as well as a cheap prop. The book’s dragon is a magnificent paper puppet with moving arm and tongue and a tail that wraps around the back of the stage.

The production never misses an opportunity for a joke, whether it’s grafting Dawson’s Creek star Joshua Jackson onto a Beowulf family tree or explaining why dead royalty was buried with jewel-studded armor. He needs things for the afterlife: “The implication, therefore, is that there are a lot of expensive costume parties in heaven.”

Both halves of 2 in 1 reveal a theater company absolutely sure of its mission and the path toward accomplishing it. New works, developed in collaboration and presented with startling innovation, are an exhilarating gift for theater lovers.

-Lisa Bornstein, March 23, 2001, Rocky Mountain News

 

A man is pictured standing behind the headboard of a large bed. The man has positioned himself with hands and head pushed through openings in the headboard to make it seem like he’s been locked in a stockade.

Gazette- ‘Significant Bother’ Portrays Misery of Marriage in Charmings Vignettes

As a rule, plays usually begin about the time the characters enter the stage. But little about Buntport Theater’s elegant and hilarious “…and this is my significant bother” goes according to the rules. Before the show starts, the four members of the troupe are peacefully snuggled together like spoons in the bed that’s the show’s main prop; at the start of the show, they all arise and exit.

This is only the first charming touch in the group’s nimble theatrical adaptation of eight tales by James Thurber, which I recommend unreservedly to anyone who’s still alert by the 11 p.m. starting time. Perhaps nobody has made unhappy American married life quite so funny as Thurber, and these multiple visions of wedded hell make for a delightful hour of comic vignettes.

The Denver-based group, whose name comes from a mangling of “Kennebuckport,” was formed in 1996. Its members, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Erin Rollman, and Brian Colonna – three former Colorado College students and a current one – are fine character actors all, and as a group, their timing is nearly perfect. In this, their second production, they made me impatient to see their third.

Broadly speaking, it’s not difficult to turn Thurber’s prose into theater; but Buntport Theater deserves praise for turning it into such good theater. The most imaginative adaptations are “Helpful Hints and the Hoveys,” in which Edborg and Rollman, standing behind the bed, portray the refined self-images of the dozing Colonna and Duggan, and “The Evening’s at Seven,” the show’s one poignant moment, which is presented as a series of momentary tableaux while Rollman speaks the text offstage.

Colonna is especially good as the hapless Mr. Monroe, who vanquishes a spider but finds himself overmatched by a bat; as Mr. Hovey, attempting to take a magazine’s advice of “cutting down on the intensity of your thoughts a half-hour before retiring”; and as Mr. Preeble sweetly saying to his wife, “Dear, let’s go down to the cellar!”

The rubber-faced Duggan shows off her terrific fidgeting skills while waiting for her husband to finish eating in the venomous “A Couple of Hamburgers.” As Mrs. Preeble, she’s perhaps the most efficient of Thurber’s cruelly efficient women – directing her husband on how best to do away with her. “Any other husband would have buried his wife in the summer!”, she complains.

As the husband in “A Couple of Hamburgers,” Edborg irritates his wife on as many levels as possible. And he gets perhaps the evening’s biggest laugh as Mr. Bidwell, speaking in his own defense.

Rollman may show the greatest range, from the demure wife in “The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery,” to the shrill Mrs. Bidwell, telling the judge that “the bond that had held us together snapped rather more easily than I’d thought possible,” to the coldly confidant Mrs. Monroe.

Technically, the show comes from the “three planks and a passion” school: a bed that turns into the front seat of a car or the door to the cellar; the sound of bat wings zooming around the room; and some effective Thurber-era popular music.

But in this production the low-tech is a plus, not a minus, as it focuses our attention more closely on the acting and, especially, on Thurber’s inexhaustible imaginative vision of married life, depicted through characters who are endearingly stoic in the face of their absurd situations.

-Mark Arnest, circa 2001, Colorado Springs’ Gazette

A ragged looking group of men in women dressed entirely in black, and covered in chalk dust, stand in front of a giant rolling chalkboard. On the upper lefthand corner of the chalkboard, the word Quixote is written.

Colorado Springs Independent- Sally Forth: Don Quixote de la chalkboard

Too often, too easily, necessity gets a bad rap as the unwed mother of invention. Especially in the world of the theater, spare, minimal and experimental are heard as code words for low-budget, under-prepared and poorly conceived theater. Do not make the mistake of confusing that kind of theater with the exemplary work coming out of Buntporte [sic] Theater.

Buntporte [sic] has remounted their original work Quixote, performed at Smokebrush and at Colorado College last spring and summer, for an enthralling new production at The Denver Civic Theatre. It seems unfathomable that a play based on Cervantes’ literary tome, claiming to be a satire of academia, could end up being a play whose star is its set and its “special effects,” especially considering the company’s challenge of staging the piece entirely with no props or set pieces other than chalk, chalkboards and erasers.

Nevertheless, the Quixote‘s innovative incorporation of simple set pieces is every bit as boggling as the fully functioning helicopters, underground water ways and suspended mansions of recent mega-musicals. Even the black-clad cast of Quixote frequently become animated chalk boards, incorporating themselves into impromptu sketches and making canvases out of their entire bodies.

Among the simpler effects created with three identical, rolling blackboards is the feat of linking the boards to make chugging cars of a passenger train; flipping the board on its axis, perpendicular to its normal state, and using it as a counter; or standing it on its end to make a revolving door. More advanced techniques include lining up the boards beside each other and setting them all spinning on their axis to create the effect of a windmill for Don Quixote and his fatty squire Sancho to attack. The three boards are lined up so they are parallel to the floor and touching each other, and are then undulated with an actor at either end to create the effect of a rolling sea. A landscape scene, drawn on a board is slowly moved past actors, seated as though in a car, to give the illusion of the car’s movement past the countryside. And using the board as a partial screen, action is suggested by pairs of legs seen interacting beneath the board, heads popping out above it and various body parts humorously reaching out from either side.

The use of props is equally inventive.  The actors use a stick of chalk as a cigarette in one scene, complete with a pair of actors clapping erasers together to depict the smoke. In another scene, a fight ends with a character’s teeth being knocked out as broken bits of chalk tumble out of his mouth. Smaller, handheld chalkboards become masks, one with a hastily drawn eye and nose serving to disguise a character. The fluidity of a chalk-based set also enables the quick-draw creation of an island on the black floor of the stage, populated with equally quick fish sketches.

The Denver Civic Theatre has long been used for one company or another to indulge their experimental vision at spare rates in front of a minimal audience. Too often, however, these untested ideas wallow in dark, belabored interpretations that construct an impenetrable wall of obfuscation between artist and audience. Buntporte [sic] bucks tradition by infusing their production with the upbeat energy so often missing from experimental theater, filling the stage not only with a vibrant volley of ideas but with a stream of fast-paced, carefully choreographed action. The production is funnier, more creative and more sophisticated than one has the right to expect from such a young company satirizing the previously limited target of academia. The trump card is the versatile ensemble cast, a seasoned troupe who never relent in their mission to captivate the audience.

Equally appealing to audiences looking for literary allusions as well as Laurel and Hardy references, Quixote is well worth the trip to Denver. See it and delight in the continued success of this Springs-born company.

-Owen Perkins, Colorado Springs’ Independent

Two large, rolling chalkboards have been pushed together. A man and a woman peek out from the middle of the two chalkboards in profile. The man and the woman wear chalkboard masks that make their noses seem large and fanciful. Another man with a large goatee stands on the far left. He leans in to lovingly draw a heart on one of the chalkboards.

Rocky Mountain News- Technique Fascinates in ‘Quixote’

Buntport Theater, a group of Colorado College graduates, recently relocated to Denver. Its first show here, Quixote, reveals a great deal of promise for the young group.

An original work, Quixote is billed as a satire on academia in which a professor (Erik Edborg) is limited to teaching only Cervantes’ book and, as a result, goes on a quixotic quest with his student Chip (Brian Colonna). The satire aspect often falls flat, neither sharp enough nor consistent.  But conveyances that transport the premise are often exhilarating, a blend of commedia dell’arte, vaudeville, cartoon violence and slapstick.

The five members of the troupe (Hannah Duggan, Matt Petraglia and Erin Rollman play hilariously confused academicians) are aided in their impossible dream by nothing more than sticks of chalk, easel blackboards, erasers and black clothing that quickly becomes chalk-smeared. The chalk, blackboards and erasers play more roles than the actors, from horizontal blackboards serving as a sea-tossed ship to a shattered piece of chalk serving as knocked out teeth. When one actor smokes a piece of chalk, two others clap erasers to provide smoke. The chalkboards are also used for some well-executed comic-book-style illustration. At the play’s beginning, an intricate drawing of a bored class is extended into the real plane by the actors’ limbs: A hand is raised above the drawn arm; another reaches around the board to take notes on a two-dimensional pad.

The story is less involving than the technique, but this short bit of whimsy should serve as a harbinger of invention to come.

-Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News

Winnepeg Fringe Fest- Quixote

The common blackboard gets a chance to live up to its potential as an artistic canvas in the hands of Denver’s Buntport Theater CO. You’ll be absolutely charmed by their clever use of chalk and erasers in this tribute to the quirks and quixotics of academia, scandalous student/prof romance and the strange power of the intellect to hold on to realties that exist only on the edge of a writing utensil.

-John Scoles, The Winnipeg Sun

This play is performed by a 5 actor troupe from Colorado. This is the story of Don Quixote told in the context of a road trip to Spain using University bureaucrats, an eccentric professor, and a student who challenges the professor to bring life to the story rather than bringing the story to life. The story is advanced using 3 mobile chalk boards, chalk, and erasers as the set. These props are put to creative and clever use that is Fringe at its best. The acting is solid, the plot is funny and even gives insight into the original story by Cervantes. Definitely can recommend that you see this. Oh, and the plot is not at all difficult to follow, despite what one print reviewer may say.

– Joe Carney, UMFM

 Simple yet brilliant. Quixote is the story of a university teacher who wants to show 1 of his students that the classic novel Don Quixote is still relevant today. Three committee members at the University want to prevent this brainwashing at all costs. Most of the humour in this play comes from the meetings between these 2 parties. Perhaps the best part of this show is the way the group utilized props. The props consist of chalk, erasers, chairs and three chalkboards. The chalkboards are used for a door, table, classroom of students, windows, sleeping quarters, train and boats. Both the professor and student come to a realization at the end, which are satisfying. The only downer – a couple of the fight scenes were a little overdone. This is the first Fringe Festival for the Denver based Buntport Theatre Company and the first time they’ve come to Canada. We only hope they will come back in the future.

– Justin Olynyk, UMFM

Makes me want to read the book. This fast moving play about a deranged literature prof and his less than faithful servant moves at lightning speed. Stalked in their travels by members of the Committee, the relentless pair survive many adventures. Incredibly clever use of revolving blackboards make this play a study in props. Fun to see.

-Terry Tully, The Jenny Revue

Great show! The movement and imagination in this show is brilliant and magical. The audience is held captive by the creativity of this show. It’s a lot of fun. Catch it before it’s gone.

-Noel Williams (Hfob ‘N’ Ffos), The Jenny Revue

A trapdoor has been cut into a giant bed. A woman is coming out of the trap door and seems to be waving at the camera.

Independent- Domestic Blisters: Thurber stories a hit

One of the freshest productions to grace local stages this season comes from a new adaptation of some half-century-old stories, celebrating the distinctive humor in the pages of James Thurber’s short fiction. Buntport Theater has adapted nine Thurber stories focusing on the quest for matrimonial bliss, staging the production in the intimate confines of the Smokebrush Cabaret.

The play is performed by a four-member ensemble who brilliantly capture the characteristic quality of Thurber’s atmospheric comic scenes, mostly from the ’30s and ’40s.

Brian Colona stands out for his chameleon-like movement from role to role, including domestic victims such as title characters in “Mr. Monroe vs. The Bat,” “Helpful Hints and the Hoveys” and “Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife.” Colona draws on a wealth of facial expressions to transport us from one convincing character to another, moving from a milquetoast husband who earns accolades for killing spiders to a brusque man dreaming of ways to improve his wife in a scene reminiscent of Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners.

Hanna Duggan gives memorable performances bringing Thurber women to life in scenes like “A Couple of Hamburgers” and “The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery.” The former features spousal tension talk in its highest incarnation, playing off Erik Edborg as the two search for a suitably cute roadside diner. Duggan demonstrates remarkable fluency in her expressive body language, and she can control a scene with the pinpoint piercing of her glare. Edborg also shines in an innovative scene called “The Evening’s at Seven,” in which the story is told through a dozen freeze-frame images accompanied by narration, giving the impression of an old-fashioned story told through photographs. Erin Rollman completes the self-directed ensemble with elastic performances throughout the evening, delivering textured interpretations five minutes at a time.

Another noteworthy innovation is the central set piece, a raked bed that can be morphed into the inside or outside of a car, a city street, a courtroom and the basement (complete with trapdoor) of the Preble home. The hour-long show has an 11 p.m. curtain to accommodate Smokebrush’s mainstage production and makes a perfect nightcap of creative comedy.

-Owen Perkins, circa 1999, Colorado Springs’ Independent