Those who love Buntport Theater Company know that this group of five writer-producers tends to seize on intriguing small facts with unseemly relish and pick away at them until they’ve either disappeared altogether or dissolved into laughter. Recently, performers Erin Rollman, Brian Colonna, Erki Edborg and Hannah Duggan, along with offstage impresario SamAnTha Schmitz, discovered that mice sing. And they do: The males sing sweetly birdlike songs to court the females, though the pitch is too high for humans to hear.

Singing mice aren’t at the core of the company’s latest offering, Universe 92, but the mysteries of animal behavior and cognition are, and there is a bit of song. The company has created a large Rat, excellently played by Colonna, who lounges in a hammock and now and then bursts — hoarsely and not at all sweetly — into outdated pop songs. Using a microphone.ADVERTISING

Colonna’s Rat is contained within walls painstakingly made of cut-out cardboard pieces. He’s a lab rat, all on his own and under study. He talks, sometimes makes a clicking-chucking sound. The three other actors are the lab assistants who take care of Rat and test him in various ways — though not in some of the ways you’d expect. They don’t open his head to insert wires into his brain or test his response to GMOs. Mostly, they give him objects and ask him to rate these with either stars or the kinds of faces you get on a pain scale. Rat isn’t very interested in their work. His ratings are tossed off contemptuously or simply not forthcoming. The objects include the microphone — which he loves — as well as a brush he uses to groom his own belly, a bunch of celery (which he rates a complete bust), a turkey knife, and an object that’s a major success, which everyone seems to see as essentially alive: the Roomba. Because if you’re examining the essentially unfathomable boundaries between animals and humans, why not contemplate the meaning of artificial intelligence in robotic objects, too?

We know the Buntporters have their own relationship with inanimate objects. If you can turn Laertes into a Teddy Ruxpin bear and Ophelia into a goldfish in Something Is Rotten, your version of Hamlet, your sense of the difference between animate and inanimate is so weird that of course you can get a roomful of people fixated on a zooming, glitching, bustling little Roomba.

While I can swallow the idea of a giant talking rat, and know that rats are commonly used in experiments because of the similarities between their brains and ours, I don’t understand why Rat is being asked his opinion on things you’d find on Amazon or Facebook ads or popping up in marketing e-mails. There’s a lot of talk about the commodification of all our tastes, wants, ideas and peccadilloes, which are monitored, stored, sold and used to assess everything from who’s most likely to vote in an election to who is searching for sandals right now. But does anyone want to know if their toothbrush would appeal to a rat?

The three researchers are very different in their approach, and — since all of the Buntporters are wonderful performers — they’re each uniquely fascinating. Dr. Lorelei MacGuire (Rollman) is all business. She wants data, data and more data, and she’s deeply opposed to empathetic human-rat interaction, which can mess up the figures. She’s not a true scientist, though, because she has no intellectual curiosity. She doesn’t care what the data actually reveal, just wants them sent to the people who slice, dice and monetize them. Pamela Hamilton (Duggan) has a bit of an inferiority complex because, unlike the other two, she has no doctorate. While she does seem to possess a certain sense of wonder, it’s not about science, and her impulsive and very funny questioning tends to annoy MacGuire and Dr. Frank Calhan, played by Erik Edborg. Calhan is the researcher with soul, a lonely, baffled man who longs to connect with Rat in some way. But if you’re hoping one of those wonderful, off-kilter relationships will develop — the kind that shows up on videos where a cat and an owl play together or creatures emerge from the depths of the sea to nuzzle a woman lying on the beach, you’re not going to get it. Rat is not only surly, but very literal-minded. Except when it comes to Roombas.

There’s lots of food for thought beneath the fizzy pleasures of this show: about science and the virtues of using observation and inference as well as straight-up numbers; the ethics of experimenting on sentient beings; the desire most of us feel to understand animals and all the myths and stories that desire generates. Perhaps central is the paradox of rats themselves, those despised, supposedly filthy creatures that, as people with pet rats will tell you, are in fact smart, interesting and affectionate.

Universe 92 might be even more interesting if Buntport had looked deeper into these things, and into what numerous studies are telling us about creatures we think we understand though they occupy entirely different sensory-psychic-neurological worlds. We now know that rats seem to laugh when they’re tickled. Even stranger, they can be taught to play hide-and-seek with scientists — not for food or to avoid electric shocks, but apparently for the sheer joy of play.  A stronger examination of such intriguing facts could add significance to this intelligent and entertaining production.

Juliet Wittman September 30, 2019 Westword

There’s no point trying to make linear or literal sense of Buntport Theater’s latest offering, Coyote. Badger. Rattlesnake. While that’s true of many of the troupe’s plays, this one skitters even more blithely than usual into absurdist territory and beyond into the ether.

The action takes place in and around a museum diorama featuring the landscape of North America’s Great Plains. Dead center on the set is a large, flat, square picture; on the floor in front of it are puzzle pieces of the same terrain, holding dry grass, rocks and pebbles, along with a rearing rattlesnake and a badger. The badger’s name is Mitchell. The coyote, Cecily, isn’t immediately in evidence, though she shows up later. Sort of.

Glenn and Carroll, played by Brian Colonna and Hannah Duggan, respectively, are in charge of maintaining the exhibit. They have feelings about the taxidermied wildlife, as well as philosophical thoughts about the nature of reality, the way we live in reality and the ways we mimic it. They deplore the fact that nature and animal life are reduced to dioramas like the one they’re working on, with labels and notes that don’t begin to convey the wonder and complexity of the real thing — though I don’t think either of them would use the words “wonder” and “complexity.” They don’t necessarily agree on any of those concepts, and they disagree particularly over anything that smacks of anthropomorphism. Because the badger and the coyote hunt together, Glenn thinks of them as “buddies.” Carroll rebukes him for that word, though her own feelings about Cecily are strong and complex.

Erin Rollman and Erik Edborg are the stagehands: Not museum employees, but Buntport’s stagehands, which means they occupy a different reality entirely from that of Glenn and Carroll. They put pieces of the exhibit in place, sometimes messing things up, and they, too, are engaged in philosophical argument.

Watching, I couldn’t help comparing the Buntporters’ eccentric, sometimes blade-sharp humor with other recent and less successful attempts at comedy where you could see the actors working for their laughs. The four performers here are at the top of their game, functioning brilliantly as an ensemble, and also — and I think this is crucial — never trying to be funny because they’re so immersed in the (unreal) reality of the events they’re living through.

At the beginning of the play, for example, Carroll is very angry. She believes Glenn brought in the bagel from which rose an insect infestation that destroyed much of Cecily’s face. Duggan has proved many times that she’s a genius at every kind of rage: repressed or volcanic, sullen or explosive, but this role allows her greater range than she’s had before. The character is not just terrifying, she’s also vulnerable and complicated; she feels the crazy things she feels very deeply, and there are hints now and then of a passionate empathy — if not for actual humans, then at least for the mummified animals of the diorama. Colonna’s Glenn isn’t cowed, however. His responses are perfect, whether he’s wry, puzzled, momentarily defensive, tuned out or, in a fantastical re-enactment, describing the sad death of Mitchell the badger. Rollman and Edborg hold their own, even though they’re working in half-darkness a lot of the time. Rollman bustles around and uses bits of scientific knowledge to boss Edborg and put him down while he, tall, quiet and kindly, holds the moral high ground.

For this production, the Buntport five (the fifth is SamAnTha Schmitz, who helps create the plays and takes care of tech during performances) worked with an outside artist, playwright Ellen K. Graham. I’ve seen absurdism in Graham’s previous work, though perhaps nothing quite as fanciful as this, and I tried to recognize her influence here, to figure out if there was some difference with Coyote. Badger. Rattlesnake. from Buntport’s usual tone and focus. I thought I sensed a bit more briskness and sharpness to the dialogue, perhaps less repetition — a kind of whizzing quality — but all of that can also be seen as Buntportian. It would have been so much fun to be a fly on the wall and watch these astonishing talents lay out their collective vision and somehow fuse it. But as it is, just sitting in the audience for this hilarious, ridiculous and brilliant piece of theater is enough.

Juliet Wittman, December 4, 2018, Westword

The five Buntport artists often create a full theater work based on a single eccentric premise: One of them saw Tommy Lee Jones standing in line for the Santa Fe Opera’s La Bohème some years back, and from that sighting emerged Tommy Lee Jones Goes to the Opera Alone, starring a giant puppet figure of the actor. When the group learned that famed scientist Nicola Tesla had been in love with a white pigeon, a kind of hybrid, multimedia play was born, though it enjoyed only a single showing. The gift of a slab of artificial ice gave Buntporters the cue for Kafka on Ice, a biographical piece that incorporated incidents from the author’s Metamorphosis and was performed on skates. But the idea that sparked the current offering, The Book Handlers, seemed on first thought particularly narrow. The Buntporters had encountered a satirical essay by an Irish writer, Brian O’Nolan, in which he proposed a service for rich people: handlers who would mess up the unread books on their shelves to make them look thoroughly perused. From this thread, the actor-writers have spun a glittering web of humor, wit and insight.

Start with the set, which looks like a life-sized Rube Goldberg contraption except for the fifty or so framed pictures — all shapes and sizes — of the same flower all over the walls. I really don’t know what these pictures signify, but I’m sure it’s something interesting, and they do keep Erin Rollman’s Linda busy painting at home and dusting at work. And who knows why the four handlers have set up this complex system of ropes, slides, platforms, racks, dangling buckets and levers to perform their work. Apparently you don’t just employ a little water to dampen a book properly, you don a clumsy wading suit and descend into a water-filled tub. Once there, you choose between complete immersion and flicking water drops onto the pages. While one of the handlers is doing this, the others are scuffing, dog-earing, scribbling notes into margins and, with much brow-furrowed effort, coming up with inscriptions. The period seems to be the 1940s to early ’50s, given Hannah Duggan’s flat little green hat and short white jacket as Connie Diane, and frequent mentions of the Andrews Sisters’ “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” though, Erik Edborg’s John looks rather Victorian. At any rate, time is fluid here, and Susan Sontag gets name-dropped before the evening is over.

The Book Handlers works on many levels. In some ways, the play itself becomes a book — maybe one of those marvelous intricate pop-up books that intrigued us as children. “Dog-ear this moment,” we’re instructed at one point. It also often becomes self-referential, with an actor addressing us directly to deliver a footnote or critique the script we’re hearing. Sometimes Duggan or Rollman will comment on her own character in the third person. Connie Diane doesn’t read much, but she proposes tackling Alfred P. Sloan’s autobiography and writing a memoir about the experience of reading it. The evening tends to evoke the idea of Russian stacked dolls and includes images within images like the intricate folds of a brain. Brian Colonna’s Jard — the only serious reader in the group — discovers O’Nolan’s essay and tells the others about it. This makes them all uneasy. Does it mean their job is satiric rather than real? Eventually, we get a swift exegesis of everything we’ve heard and seen that puts text, footnotes, phrases and key words together in a clear outline. Well, momentarily clear, because trying to recall it later, I found the outline dissolving in a silvery haze.