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

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