Buntport Theater

Reviews

Four motley people squeeze their faces into the frame. Behind them is a road sign for Guaranty Bank

Colorado Drama- Peggy Jo and the Desolate Nothing

The bearded bank robber in the cowboy hat was a pro. He would walk calmly into a bank, hand the teller a note, wait for his bag to be filled from the cash drawer, walk out, and disappear, without ever brandishing a weapon. For years, the FBI couldn’t track him down. Then, one day, “Cowboy Bob,” as the agents called him, changed his modus operandi and, lo and behold, he turned out to be a she.

So goes the true story of Peggy Jo Tallas, a polite, fun-loving dame from the suburbs of Dallas, who spent much of her adult life working odd jobs and taking care of her mother, who suffered from a degenerative bone disease. When Peggy Jo got caught the first time, none of her family or friends could believe she was robbing banks.

In its 35th original production in 13 years, Buntport Theater Company, in conjunction with Square Product Theatre, pulls another wild hare out of their collective magicians’ hats, splitting the different faces of Peggy Jo between Emily K. Harrision, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, and Brian Colonna, while Erik Edborg weighs in as FBI Agent Steve Powell, Peggy Jo’s relentless, but good-natured, pursuer.

Like a Greek drama performed in masks with a time-lapse twist, each of the faces of Peggy Jo represents a different moment in her journey, with Harrison, Duggan, and Rollman as her 40, 50, and 60 something year-old self, and Colonna as her Cowboy Bob alter ego; yet, they are all there at once, in the present; and like the Greeks, we know what’s going to happen, yet that does not diminish the humor or the catharsis.

The Buntporters and Harrison, each in their own inimitable fashion, bring out the weird convolutions of Peggy Jo’s mind, which she insisted, not without good reason, were normal. I mean, lots of people have watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid multiple times, and some of them have even read Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind. That one such person would take these artistic achievements to heart and put his or her life on the line for such a way of being is to be expected, isn’t it?

Taken together, the performances define a fascinating woman who understood what it was to live and not let the banksters get in the way of having a good time.

-Bob Bows, June 5, 2014, ColoradoDrama.com

Two people in matching outfits stand next to a pile of money. One holds a small wooden duck, the other has bright red powder covering her face and shirt. In the background, on a painted road, is the insides of an RV sitting on a platform with wheels.

Westword- Peggy Jo and the Desolate Nothing is nothing much

Peggy Jo Tallas was an outwardly conventional, quiet-spoken Texas woman who, after a mildly adventurous youth, lived with her mother for many years. Starting at the age of forty, she also robbed banks – perhaps because she was bored, perhaps because she was seeking a fuller and more interesting life, perhaps because she just needed some cash. Although she never scored a huge amount of money, she was extremely competent at her job. Her robberies were accomplished swiftly, bloodlessly, and with a minimum of fuss. And she so successfully disguised herself as a man that for a long time, FBI agents – perhaps aided by the kind of masculine myopia that believes no woman could possibly accomplish anything as tough as a bank robbery – were looking for a culprit they dubbed Cowboy Bob.

It’s an intriguing story with several questions at its core: Who was Peggy Jo Tallas, and why did she do what she did? And, by extension, what do her activities say about the culture she lived in? In taking on these questions with Peggy Jo, Buntport Theater Company partnered for Peggy Jo and the Desolate Nothing with Boulder’s Square Product Theatre and its director, Emily K. Harrison.

Buntport has divided the role of Peggy Jo four ways. All three of the women play her – Harrison at the age of forty, and Hannah Duggan and Erin Rollman at sixty, when Tallas’s career came to an end; they play a handful of ancillary characters, too. Brian Colonna also plays Tallas at forty – or, rather, her alter-ego, Cowboy Bob. None of the portrayals is particularly specific, nor do the actors seem to represent different facets of Tallas’s personality so that when you take all of their efforts together it adds up to some kind of whole. Which means you leave with no more understanding of this woman than you had on first taking your seat. Throughout, Erik Edborg plays patient, baffled FBI agent Steve Powell.

Metaphor is good and repetition a time-honored theatrical device, but these things don’t substitute for action and character. The actors have seized on pieces of Peggy Jo’s biography that might explain something about her psyche or universalize her story. Phrases from Ferlinghetti recur – “slippery gibbets,” “carnivorous cocks,” “false windmills and demented roosters” – all because Tallas once visited San Francisco and gave Ferlinghetti’s work to a friend. Tallas also liked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the featured song from that movie, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” plays again and again until its bouncy rhythms become vaguely threatening. But it doesn’t help anything that after a while you know exactly what you’ll hear if anyone on stage touches the radio knob.

There are several comments about narrative and myth-making: “All storytelling is selective, Steve” and “We’re creating a mythology based on bits and pieces.” But there is no myth about Peggy Jo Tallas to be debunked, filled out, simplified or complexified, because few people know enough about her to have a story in mind. What this blended company needed to do was create that story. Or – had the crew wanted to go further – create and then deconstruct it.

What’s odd is how understated Tallas’s robberies seem to have been, particularly in comparison with highly romanticized movies like Butch Cassidy or Bonnie and Clyde, which is also mentioned here. There’s no sex or romance, no great gouts of blood, no missing millions or decades-long disappearances to exotic lands – just a vague dream about a beach in Mexico. And, of course, that’s the point. That, and the ennui of Tallas’s long road journeys. The actors try valiantly to insert a sense of existential despair, but it doesn’t mitigate the show’s static feel. Peggy Jo isn’t boring, but it isn’t involving, either.

There are moments in which Buntport’s originality and eccentricity come through, though, and some performances that work, including Colonna playing it humorously straight as Cowboy Bob and Edborg’s low-key Agent Powell. Duggan’s very presence communicates a comic sense of existential worry mixed with slight annoyance, and one of the evening’s high points is her passionate assertion that since baby ducks imprint on the first moving creature they see, the pull-toy duck she takes everywhere “knows it’s human. It knows I’m its momma.”

This company is always worth watching. But by the end of Peggy Jo, you’re left with pretty much nothing. And not even a desolate nothing at that.

-Juliet Wittman, June 5, 2014, Westword

A man with a fake beard and sunglasses holds piles of cash. Behind him two people sit in an RV without walls. Next to them stands an FBI officer holding some files.

ARTICLE Denver Post- “Peggy Jo and the Desolate Nothing,” tale of a cross-dressing bank robber Buntport and Square Product Theater team up to tell tale of Peggy Jo Tal

Buntport theater company is no stranger to the inventive. If you’re not familiar with the Denver-based group’s original shows, here’s a taste.

“Tommy Lee Jones Goes to the Opera Alone” was a riff on celebrity done with life-size puppets. The musical “Sweet Tooth” told of an exacting aesthete who would not leave her home — nope, not even for an agonizing tooth ache — because she could not control the look of the world. “Jugged Rabbit Stew” featured an embittered and talented magician’s rabbit.

As for Square Product Theatre, Boulder’s edgiest troupe’s most recent show — “5 Lesbians Eating Quiche,” written by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood — was set in 1956 midst the Susan B. Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein.

For four weekends, the companies have joined forces to consider the tale of cross-dressing bank robber Peggy Jo Tallas, as only two of the area’s most creatively headstrong theater groups might in “Peggy Jo and the Desolate Nothing.” (May 30-June 21.)

The poetic, melancholy title came by way of Square Product’s Emily Harrison. “She thinks about America a lot (in this case the American Dream) and it just came to her…” Buntport’s Brian Colonna says. “I guess, she’s good like that.”

Trying to keep her daughter connected to her Lone Star State roots, Harrison’s mother gave her a subscription to “Texas Monthly,” an award-garnering mag.

In his 2005 article, “The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob,” Skip Hollandsworth recounts the story of Tallas, by most accounts a kind-hearted woman who took care of her ailing mother and also had a successful and wild ride as a bank robber.

“But Peggy Jo didn’t just rob a bank,” writes Hollandsworth. “According to the FBI, she was one of the most unusual bank robbers of her generation, a modern-day Bonnie without a Clyde who always worked alone…. She was also a master of disguise, her cross-dressing outfits so carefully designed that law enforcement officials, studying bank surveillance tapes, had no idea they were chasing a woman.”

If Hollandsworth’s byline rings a bell it might be because he also penned Texas Monthy’s “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas,” about a kindly mortician and the widow he befriended, then shot. The yarn became the basis for the Richard Linklater’s 2012 dramedy “Bernie,” starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine.

Harrison, who teaches theater at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was working toward her MFA at Savannah College of Art & Design in Georgia when Tallas had her showdown with the FBI and police.

“I remembered the story from Texas Monthly and pitched it to Buntport, and they were interested.” says Harrison.

“Basically that magazine story is the primary source for the show,” says Colonna.

When it comes to collaboration, “Peggy Jo” isn’t Buntport’s or Square Product’s first rodeo.

“We do it all the time,” said Harrison, sitting in the bungalow that houses Buntport’s costumes and props.

Square Product’s regional premiere of Johnna Adams’ drama about a child’s suicide, “Gidion’s Knot,” was done in association with Goddess Here Productions.

Both Buntport musicals relied on the equally ambitious skills of lyricist/composer Adam Stone, whose own company, Screw Tooth, is now housed at Buntport’s space.

In addition to working with Stone, Buntport has established ties to the Denver Art Museum. They recently did “Captured in Film,” a delightfully playful one-off show done with the Augustana Arts that combined lush orchestration with performance and a silent movie comedy.

Tag-teaming a production keeps the company composed of Colorado College friends engaged, says Colonna. “For us it’s a way to keep the ensemble fresh and challenge yourself. You get another opinion. You get a different point of view.”

It will be intriguing to see what Buntport and Square Product make of Peggy Jo’s saga of wildness and sorrow. After all, even when productions have been slightly off the mark, the shows remains stubbornly vivid, engaged, and intellectually fearless.

-Lisa Kennedy, May 29, 2014, Denver Post

A large rabbit wearing a ratty robe and bunny slippers slumps in a lazy boy recliner. The floor is covered in newspaper.

Westword- Jugged Rabbit Stew is a hare-raising experience

Last produced four years ago, Jugged Rabbit Stew is one of Buntport’s best shows, a startling and peculiar mix of comedy, sadness, magic, craziness and erudition that only this troupe could produce. And this revival brings back Evan Weissman, a longtime member who left – sort of – a while back to create a political organization called Warm Cookies of the Revolution. “The plan would be if there are any remounts, we’ll try to have me involved as long as that’s possible,” he says. “It’s not like a clean break; I’m still around all the time, but I’m not working on the next show. I won’t write for that or be in it. It’s kind of like breaking away from family – even if you want to, you can’t. And I don’t want to.”

As for Warm Cookies, it’s “a civic health club,” he explains. “You go to a gym for physical health or church for spiritual health. This is a place to exercise your civic health, to discuss vital issues in a fun way. I think Buntport is a part of that. We’re trying to engage people; theater and art does that. But with Warm Cookies, it’s a little less abstract, and I’m interested in trying it out right now because I feel we’re on the precipice and need to push back pretty hard to create the world we want.”

Buntport has created quite a world in Jugged Rabbit Stew. Weissman plays Alec, the Amazing and All-Powerful, an impotent magician with rock-star delusions who can’t actually can’t perform a single trick without the help of the real creator of magic – Snowball, a scruffy, mean-spirited rabbit currently on strike. Snowball (Erik Edborg) spends his time stealing objects that have no meaning for him but whose loss will upset their rightful owners: a video of a student’s high-school graduation, for instance. He lives in a strange, bare place with an array of stolen objects suspended from the ceiling, a wall covered with overlapping newspapers, and several televisions on which he watches home movies – video of rabbits, that is. In addition to the inanimate objects he’s filched, he has stolen the legs of Marla, the magician’s assistant (Hannah Duggan), replacing them with the overall-clad limbs of a workman so that she can no longer dance. Also missing is Alec’s right Arm (played by Brian Colonna) which, detached from its owner, now wanders the world on its own. Snowball’s kleptomania has reached such dangerous levels that among his acquisitions is a cheerful young Woman (Erin Rollman) he spotted in the audience, fell in love with and spirited away to his lair.

Weissman says he’s glad he returned for this play “because it gives us the opportunity to be really silly and have a few genuine moments. And every actor wants to be a rock star, and this is my opportunity to fake that.” He likes the segment when the Arm falls in love and sings a duet (composed, like all the scintillating songs in the show, by Adam Stone). “That’s pretty great,” Weissman says, “the idea that this disembodied thing has thoughts and feelings of its own and a sense of fate and love. And I like the concluding bit when my arm gets put back on me, which is sad for Arm and his love, but kind of magical.”

All the action revolves around Snowball, who – despite his depradations on their persons – is profoundly loved by both Marla and Alec. He’s as complex a character as a man in a scruffy white bunny suit can be – constantly vengeful, but also terrified by the threat implied in the play’s title. While Arm, having found his love, proudly assumes the role of hero in an old-style Western, Snowball ponders his fate as tragic hero, and Woman prattles chirpily about Aristotelian heroes, Byronic heroes and anti-heroes. Each member of Buntport brings a unique and specific quality to the stage; Weissman has often been, paradoxically, both the most sincere and the nuttiest. It’s a delight to watch his Alec, dauntless and cheerful despite the missing arm, prancing around in yellow shoes and singing his heart out about “That Special Hare.”

“It feels great to be on stage with each other,” he says. “We have a common aesthetic; we think the same things are funny. We’ve worked together so long, there’s something seamless about it.”

-Juliet Wittman, February 27, 2014, Westword

A man in a brightly colored suit stands talking. One of his arms appears to be separated from his body and is putting a toy gun in his pocket. Seated in the background, a woman dressed as a magician’s assistant but wearing mechanics pants looks unimpressed.

Denver Post- Buntport Theater’s Jugged Rabbit Stew, a bit overcooked but tasty

The Buntport Theater ensemble members are among the smartest folk in the room. No, not in some superior and arch way. Instead, the inventive group – now in its 13 season – engages the lunacy of the world, literature and theater from an often absurdist, very meta remove. There’s a generous humility to their twisted undertakings.

There are hits. There are moments ever so slightly off the mark. There is never a shortage of ideas.

Through the next two weekends, Buntport revisits its 2010 “Jugged Rabbit Stew.”

The tale about an angry, brooding bunny named Snowball was their second musical undertaken with composer/lyricist Adam Stone.

“Jugged Rabbit Stew” is at times a little chewy, a bit overcooked, but there are many moments of earned pathos, dark humor and jagged music.

When we first meet Snowball, he’s in a foul mood and a dirtier bathrobe. Actor Erik Edborg does edgy work encased in the grungy bunny costume. Think the Grinch, only more self-aware and meaner.

His deep funk has put the kibosh on Alec the Amazing and All Powerful and assistant Mystical Marla’s magic act.

Evan Weissman portrays the hapless magician. How out of sorts? Let’s just say that Brian Colonna is amusing as Arm.

Pilfered goods hang from the rafters of the captivating and eerie set. An Electrolux, panty hose, an umbrella, Victrola phonograph and Woman.

Erin Rollman spends the play on a chair suspended in air. Her character Woman hasn’t fallen down a rabbit hole, exactly, more like a hovel. And yet, she’s full of sweet wonder at her good fortune. Before being added to Snowball’s cache, she was a fan, an avid audience member.

By the way, there is a reason a tattered copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” also hangs from the rafters. Our hero – who is not, we repeat, not a hare – will get his full measure.

Will we learn what makes him ticked off?

Sure he’s astoundingly flawed. But is he also tragic?

-Lisa Kennedy, February 21, 2014, Denver Post

A large rabbit wearing a ratty robe and bunny slippers squats on a floor covered with newspapers. The rabbit holds a microphone and sings.

Lowry News- Jugged Rabbit Stew

Theatre of the Absurd is alive and well at Buntport where the talented, clever cast and crew have revived their original production, Jugged Rabbit Stew. As created and performed by actors Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, Eric Weissman, and Brian Colonna along with their talented crew, this musical comedy has all the elements of true absurdity theatre. The characters are caught in a hopeless situation where they engage in dialogue filled with cliches, wordplay and nonsense. The cast sings and clowns getting the audience to laugh as the meaninglessness of the human condition and man’s animal nature and cruelty are exposed.

Snowball, played by Erik Edborg, is a rabbit with magical powers. Not a kindly “Harvey”, this rabbit is in an alcoholic slump that is wreaking havoc on the magician Alec, the Amazing, and Mystical Maria, his assistant. They both struggle with certain physical changes Snowball has perpetrated upon them. Nevertheless, they continue to love him and try to bring him back to sobriety and to make him become the sort of rabbit they want him to be. Snowball, increasing fearful of entrapment and death, circumvents their attempts to change him. He focusses on his collection, an odd assortment of items that he has “gathered” from others in an effort to make their former owners unhappy. Among this assemblage of stuff is Woman, artfully performed by Erin Rollman. Suspended above the stage along with the other items in the collection, Woman sits in a chair for the entire play. In spite of this limitation Ms. Rollman skillfully creates a complex character. She ultimately becomes the agent of change that Alec and Maria have been seeking.

Hannah Duggan and Evan Weissman are very funny as Mystical Maria and Alec. Brian Colonna, as Arm, is so good that one begins to believe that Arm is actually human. Erik Edborg’s costume and his sure acting abilities lend credibility to his role as the tragic hero. The entire cast gave spirited and professional performances. Their singing was flawless – fun to watch and to hear.

The music, while tuneful and even toe tapping, seemed to parody much of the music in the musicals of the last thirty years. Kudos to Adam Stone for mocking the likes of Schonberg, Boublil, and Webber. The theater at 717 Lipan is small and intimate enough that amplification is unnecessary and whenever Mr. Edborg was singing, the amplification was distracting. Snowball either held the microphone too close or was singing too loud. Often it was difficult to understand the words he was singing. Overall the musical was excellent from start to finish.

-Nancy A. Murphy, February 12, 2014, Lowry News

 

A woman with short, choppy hair is cutting onions next to a sink. She wears an apron that says “I'm a good helper” and she looks miserable.

Denver Post- Buntport’s “Electra” chops up onions and Greek tragedy

Buntport’s “Electra Onion Eater” is smart, tight and witty, easily within the reach of people who’ve never studied Sophocles’ “Electra” and enormously rewarding for anyone who tackled classic Greek tragedies in college.

All the action takes place on a stage implicitly divided into a side yard, a kitchen and a middle-class living room. Electra (Erin Rollman) stands at the kitchen sink, chopping onions and weeping as she contemplates her miserable family situation.

The play begins after her mother, Clytemnestra (Hannah Duggan), has murdered her father, Agamemnon (Brian Colonna, offstage), who in turn has dispatched Electra’s sister.

As she waits for her brother Orestes (Erik Edborg) to return home, Electra (wearing an apron announcing “I’m a Good Helper”) dreams of murdering her mother as she makes onion pies as offerings to the gods. Viciously chopping onions, she weeps tears provoked both by her losses and the volatile sulfur compound that her knife releases.

“As with cutting onions, there is more than one way to end a man’s life,” Electra observes with weepy optimism.

In their separate rooms, she and her mother are absorbed by soap operas, occasionally exchanging a few words with their unctuous, platitude-spouting neighbor Bruce (Andrew Horowitz). After one of his particularly egregious generalizations, Electra snaps, “THEY do not say that, Bruce! YOU say it!”

Tension is fraught between Electra and her smug mom. Electra glares daggers at Clytemnestra, who smirks back.

“Do you smell something?” she asks her daughter, and sniffs Electra’s shoulder.

“I do! It’s … party poop!”

Electra seethes, barely reining her homicidal instincts while she awaits Orestes. But a rumor of Orestes’ death sends Electra into despair underscored by her mother’s complacent reaction.

“I’m not going to pretend that this isn’t a mixed blessing,” Clytemnestra says cheerily, swilling another drink.

Anyone who paid attention during World Lit knows that things will not end well for Clytemnestra. Buntport’s reimagining of the story is acutely funny. A cremated cat is involved along with a terminally bad hair day and a dream about a giant killer tree.

“Electra Onion Eater” may be Buntport’s most brilliant revision since its seminal and hilarious “Titus Andronicus! The Musical!” It’s a shame the run ends this weekend because so many Great Courses students would absolutely love it.

-Claire Martin, November 22, 2013, Denver Post

A 1970s family portrait, all in shades of brown and mustard. Everyone smiles are strained. The daughter is separated slightly from the parents.

Our Parker News- Buntport tackles Greek tragedy in oddball style

Inventive Buntport Theater members have again taken a literary classic and skewed it in their own inimitable manner. Perceiving similarities between Sophocles’ Greek tragedies and today’s soap operas, they chose to produce a “modern” version of “Electra” by Sophocles — a violent tale of murder and more murder.

The “Electra Onion Eater” set includes a kitchen, an outside green area with a grave and a den-like space with easy chair and TV.

Electra weeps a great deal in the original as she mourns her late father, Agamemnon, who was killed by his wife, Electra’s mother Clytemnestra, so she could marry Aegisthus.

Buntport’s writing team has Electra (Erin Rollman) constantly chopping onions for pie to ensure copius crying, while evil Clytemnesrtra (Hanna Duggan) watches soaps on a TV in the next room.

Electra longs for her brother Orestes (Erik Edborg) who wanders home from his travels, accompanied by a guy named Bruce (Drew Horwitz).

Characters intersperse lines from the original play with new dialogue and pretty much follow Sophocles’ melodramatic plot, as they watch/listen to the cast of “Search for Tomorrow” (taped by Karen Slack, Michael Morgan, Jessica Roblee and Brian Colonna) — and plot to eliminate Clytemnestra.

There will be blood!

As audiences have come to expect, the production is clever and silly. Leave preconceived expectations at home and come to enjoy the work of a very original theater company. Members have worked together in Denver for more than 10 years since they graduated from Colorado College together, using classics as source material as they write their material — and at times creating new works, including musicals, from scratch.

(I found it useful to look at a summary or two of Sophocles’ original play prior to heading for the theater, just to get the names straight!)

-Sonya Ellingboe, November 20, 2013, Our Parker News

In the center is a miserable-looking woman standing at a sink wearing an “I'm a good helper” apron. To her left, two men stand outside on some astroturf talking. To her right, a woman in a leopard-print caftan sits in a Barca lounger watching TV.

Westword- There’s no deep meaning under the layers of Electra Onion Eater

The best part of Electra Onion Eater, which opens Buntport Theater Company’s thirteenth season, comes at the beginning, when Erin Rollman stages a television show called Cooking With Electra and proves yet again that she’s one of the top comic actresses around. Poor Electra is aiming at Julia Child-style chumminess and cheer, but her output consists solely of onion tarts, and her sorrow is overwhelming. She chops and chops, but her anguish breaks through in great howls. She picks up a vicious-looking cleaver and tries again, uttering a cry of vengeance with each chop — Hah! Hah! Hah! — as the blade comes down rhythmically and you fear for her fingers. Periodically she breaks off for more shrieks and moans, or to calmly explain the biology of tears. The warring expressions on Rollman’s pale face are priceless, and this scene is completely original, howlingly funny, almost frighteningly intense.

Television dominates this original play based on the story of Electra and written by members of Buntport and Drew Horwitz. The action is set in the 1950s, and Electra has a small, clunky television set in her kitchen. When her favorite soap starts, she pauses in her endless chopping and leans in to watch. In the living room, her mother, Clytemnestra, played by Hannah Duggan, is ensconced in a cozy chair in front of another television. You can hear the soap they’re both watching. It’s the work of musician/sound artist Adam Stone and concerns a doctor, the blind patient to whom he wishes to donate his corneas in an operation he’ll carry out himself, and an obsessive, stalking lover — and in a twisted way, it shows that the melodramatic imaginings of classical Greek tragedy are still with us today…or our view today of the ’50s. These moments when they’re absorbed in the same program represent the only time that Electra and Clytemnestra are remotely in sync with one another. We’ve seen some intense theatrical mother-daughter pairings recently, but this is the most intense yet: These women hate each other with a black-hearted, icy fury.

Electra plans to kill her mother because Clytemnestra is responsible for the death of her father, Agamemnon, and, like Gertrude in Hamlet, is now happily cohabiting with the man who helped in the deed, Aegisthus. The murder was motivated by Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia — Clytemnestra’s other daughter and Electra’s sister — to appease the gods and cause them to smile on his military ventures. Electra is hoping her long-lost brother, Orestes, played by Erik Edborg, will return to help in her task of vengeance. Why the onion pie? Because sometimes even the most dedicated heroine of a Greek tragedy needs a little help in summoning the endless supply of tears she’s required to shed.

Agamemnon is buried in what looks like a narrow alley behind the kitchen, and Orestes does indeed come back — wearing a snappy cordovan leather jacket that matches his orange-brown shoes and accompanied by a friend named Bruce (Horwitz) — to venerate the grave. He knows Electra is longing to see him, but he won’t reveal himself to her just yet. His plan involves spreading fake news about his own death to lull Clytemnestra into a false sense of security. Then — presumably because he’s unaware of the existence of that lethal cleaver — he’ll kill her with Bruce’s pocket knife. So Electra and Clytemnestra fight. Bruce and Orestes plot. Offerings, mostly of tufts of hair, are made on the grave. In moments of deep joy or sorrow, the protagonists sing commercial jingles.

Electra Onion Eater showcases, once again, the comic inventiveness of the Buntport troupe, but the rest of the play doesn’t live up to the inspired lunacy of the beginning. Peeling off the layers of this Onion may be entertaining, but reveals no deep meaning.

-Juliet Wittman, November 14, 2013, Westword

A man sits in a Barca lounger with a 1970s crocheted throw over the back. A woman with big hair stands behind him, rubbing his shoulders. Above them is a lamp. In the background is a wall with three sections: the living room, kitchen, and outside.

Marlowe’s Musings- Electra Onion Eater

Buntport Theatre is a gift of the gods! Their lampooning of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy “Electra” is a delectable ambrosia.

“Electra Onion Eater” proves once again that the demigods over at Buntport have the recipe for turning the most tragic tale into an evening of theatre that’s an Olympian laugh riot! Anyone who saw their send-up of Shakespeare’s “Titus” knows that.

The genius of this troupe is that they are able to sublimate ego (Really? I know!) and collaborate in the writing and directing in order to bring forth shows that are somehow sublimely smart and sensationally silly.

This one is sort of a tragedy of the geeks that gives us a mash-up of contemporary sit com and advert jingle while providing a nudge and a wink to the mask which uneasy wears the frown.

Hannah Duggan is the magnificently breezy and carefree matriarch, Clytemenestra. Erin Rollman is her hysterical (and hysterically funny) daughter Electra who, continues to grieve for her dead daddy Agamemnon by cryin’ like a rat eatin’ onions. Erik Edborg is Orestes, Elektra’s long lost bro.

In this glimpse into the dirty laundry of one of the original dysfunctional families of Greek theatre the Buntport crew has brought in guest artist Andrew Horwitz as friend of the fam, Brucey-Goosey.

Even if you have never heard of Sophocles’ “Electra” … No Worries! The show’s so tight you get it all right from the start.

This show comes with the highest of recommendations from this reviewer’s desk.

— David Marlowe, November 8, 2013, Blogspot.com