3 out of 4 stars

There’s a wily conceit running through “Coyote. Badger. Rattlesnake”– Buntport Theater’s entertaining original production. Cecily the coyote — one third of a museum diorama’s fauna trio — has been sent out for a makeover. Some pests scavenged her and her return, while vital, is not clearly imminent.

Glenn and Carroll work side by side in the diorama, which is also getting a revamp. They craft fake grasses, create a protruding rock formation that adds dimension to the museum display, and arrange the aforementioned badger and rattler in their ersatz habitat.

Theirs is not the most collegial of partnerships. Hannah Duggan and Brian Colonna portray the bickering coworkers. Carroll’s wound a bit tight. She’s prone to anxious huffing (“Cecily is missing a good portion of her face!”) and loud disquisitions on taxidermy, for instance. Glenn’s genial if a little lax on details. Was his snack the invitation nibbling vermin needed to enter the diorama?

Created in collaboration with local playwright Ellen K. Graham, “Coyote. Badger. Rattlesnake” is composed of 14 seriocomic vignettes separated by 14 pauses, a dimming of the lights and minuscule set changes. The turning down of the lights is part of the show’s genius. It adds emphasis to Glenn’s or Carroll’s final word or gesture — be it absurd, ruminative or both. If you are gleaning a “Godot” vibe in the set-up, that’s likely OK.

During those breaks, two workers arrive in the not-quite-darkness to add tile-size chunks of set to the floor in front of the diorama’s beckoning backdrop of mountains and sky, prairie grasses and scrub. (Company member Erik Edborg is responsible for the lovely canvas that hangs from the rafters.)

Played by Erin Rollman and Edborg, the duo appear in the show’s credits as “Stagehands.” Consider this further evidence of Buntport’s rather meta-antics. Yes, they’re stagehands. They’re also characters in a play about the staging of the “fake-real.” Stealthily, they add props, rearrange them or accidentally tip something over and rush off. Like Glenn and Carroll, they chat and disagree. Over the course of the play (there is no intermission), their interstitial philosophizing demands more and more of the audience’s attention.

Wit, deft timing and twists — physical and linguistic — are signature stuff at Buntport. “Coyote. Badger. Rattlesnake” has an abundance. It also has a few choice things to say  — or at least I was vaguely aware it did — about “real fakeness” and “fake realness” as the show’s program teasingly puts it.

So, a word about the audience. The ensemble composed of the four performers and company mainstay SamAnTha Schmitz is in its 19th year and has garnered a deserved and appreciative following. Almost as soon as Colonna and Duggan arrived on stage opening night, they were met with titters and guffaws, which continued to punctuate not only the amusing riffs but at times the more thoughtful interludes. I’m not one to judge people for their pleasures, but I couldn’t help but wonder if this made newcomers to Buntport feel like they weren’t quite in on a joke. The ensemble’s agile wit is often outright funny. Just as often, there’s something more nuanced at play in their askew vision of things. The balance in “Coyote. Badger. Rattlesnake” proved slightly elusive.

It would be churlish to complain about Buntport’s steadfast craft and reliable cleverness. Their work is oh-so-canny — with the occasional burst of brilliance. And this show is swift and entertaining. I’d just hate to see the company trapped in a lovely diorama of its own making.

Lisa Kennedy, December 6, 2018 The Denver Post

There’s high-brow, middle-brow and low. And then there’s the often arched-brow shenanigans of Buntport.

In its latest, “Edgar Allan Poe Is Dead and So Is My Cat,” the wiseacre (emphasis on “wise”) company of five mines a testy brother-sister relationship for laughs more than literary insights. That’s intentional, though, at their finest, they deliver both. But if you’re looking for a larky amusement, seek no further.

Things open on a funeral for a feline friend in Baltimore. In front of a brick facade, on a downward sloping lawn is a tiny rectangular hole, a mound of dirt nearby.

A man stands clad in a brown turtleneck, handsome dress shoes and colorful, rather tight boxer briefs. The pattern on them is the Baltimore Ravens logo. That port city is where the poet (and, for that matter, the cat) of the title met their ends. The oddly clad man’s discarded suit rests on a pile of leaves. He purchased his suit — or as he intones with “get it? get it?” glee throughout the play, “another man’s suit” — at a thrift store.

The show’s program IDs this fellow, played with over-enunciating pleasure by Brian Colonna, as “That One Guy.” You don’t have long to wonder why. He’s that guy who repeats facts and factoids, that guy whose obsessive interests and hardly original insights demand constant affirmation.

Hannah Duggan plays His Sister, the bereaved. She’s not happy that her brother keeps trying to turn the burial into a rite. He even invited His Best Friend (Erik Edborg) to the under-attended non-ceremony.

That One Guy’s penchant for the pedantic isn’t the only thing exasperating his sister. He’s 40, and lives in her basement where he hosts a “Poedcast” on all things Edgar Allan Poe.

In addition to That Guy’s broadsides about Baltimore’s hardly native but very much adopted son, we learn facts about Tolstoy and a tidbit about a toymaker who presented Louis XIV with a particularly inventive mechanical toy.

The set is modest and effective. From the start, the latticed garden-level windows draw interest. The costumes — from the boxer briefs so tight they fit like a codpiece to the convincingly alive Suit to His Sister’s grey hoodie to the assorted Poe-related T-shirts — are humorous in their own right.

Buntport has never feared traversing the space between silly and absurd. For instance, the sister’s brick home has no stairs, a head-scratcher that makes for some fine slapstick exits.

Then there’s the matter of the suit. Redolent of Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman — but so much kinder, gentler, erudite — the suit is voiced by Erin Rollman.

There are moments when “Edgar Allan Poe” resembles an “SNL” — or more brainy Monty Python — sketch, but Buntport is always able to sustain its idea-buttressed lunacy. The troupe — with ace SamAnTha Schmitz behind-the-scenes — consistently works through its heady humor with hearty compassion. In fact, it aimed to deliver a decidedly not-Poe-like romp because there’s more than enough darkness out there.

The writing is often swift, the actor’s delivery even swifter. As the beleaguered Best Friend, Erik Ekborg captures the weird competitive need embedded in the notion of “best friend.” Like That Guy, he tries too avidly.

Early in the 90-minute show, the Suit remarks on its own presence: “it was always going to be awkward … but I hope it was a little magical, I mean at least when I first got up. Or if not magical, I’d settle for surprising.” It was surprising — and magical.

3 stars

–Lisa Kennedy November 2, 2017, Denver Post

Amid the mess that is “The Crud” shine some gems of insight. Which is apt, since Buntport Theater’s latest, ambitious and absurdist performance piece takes on the stuff that humans keep — or, rather, shunt off to a storage unit we may or may not visit.

Last October, Buntport announced it was going to purchase a storage unit at an auction. “Yeah, like ‘Storage Wars,’ ” stated a later press release.

In that release, the company went on to lay out the artistic/philosophical parameters for its endeavor. “(W)e said that whatever we found in the locker would inspire our next play. We all knew that we didn’t intend to write a play about the original owner of the contents, but that this collection ― curated by a stranger ― would be a jumping-off point.”

I share some of the reasoning behind the entertaining albeit uneven show because it speaks to the personality of this always imaginative outfit. Because the Buntport troupe — Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, Brian Colonna and SamAnTha Schmitz (offstage) — most often operates in the  “meta” sphere. Cogitate about, chuckle at and wrestle with human complexity is what the gang of five co-creators does with consistent and edgy aplomb.

And so “The Crud” finds three fanciful denizens of a pile of stuff contemplating … well, that’s the tricky part. Let’s say boredom, attachment, the waxing and waning value of “junk” for their owners. 

Interceding from time to time is a white-clad fellow with a white plume atop his head. Portrayed by Edborg, the character “I Have No Name” is there to help Bearly Bear, Dear Dear and Broken Baby Doll Detective (and, more important, the audience) formulate questions about memory and forgetting, hoarding and letting go.

Off to one side of the stage is a pile of stuff that includes furniture, an old stereo receiver, clothes, a shoe here and there. It’s a “bunch of who-needs-it against a background of the same,” says I Have No Name  at one point. making the comparison of the pile’s contents to those of our fading memory.

Behind a gauzy scrim on the other side of the stage is a white wall. Because the scrim acts as a screen for “surveillance” projections, the show’s visual field can be layered, disorienting or both.

The costumes, too, are bizarro. A pony head with antlers sits atop Dear Deer’s head. A wee toy man with no arms rests on Broken Baby Doll Detective’s shoulder. When introducing a hunch, the ultra-specific private eye (Colonna) presses “play’ on an old-style tape recorder. Out comes a sobering tune to loopy noirish effect.  As for the kindly if dim Bearly Bear, Hannah Duggan makes a heckuva entrance (not to be spoiled here). Her pelt is made up of (mostly) stuffed animals sewn together.

Forget her moniker: Dear Deer (Rollman) isn’t very gentle. Aggravated by boredom is more like it. She does not respond favorably to Barely Bear’s sweet invitation to “go lick some batteries.” The only cure to her ennui: raspberry jelly, of which there’s a scant supply.

If “The Crud” sounds rather mad, it is.

The show has wit. When Bearly Bear gets hit with a wave of nausea, the audience guffawed. Some ender lines of dialog stick. For instance, “Let’s all hate each other is not as fun as it sounds.” And the repeated gesture of the characters greeting anxiety with “arms-open” is touching for its topsy-turvy vulnerability. As always, each cast member injects his or her performance with idiosyncratic verve.

What “The Crud” doesn’t have — and I want to say “yet,” because I can see how this show could become special in a future iteration — are some moments of empty space and quiet. Like the mix of treasures and rubbish Buntport purchased, the show’s ideas are strewn throughout the 75-minute piece.

The closest the “The Crud” comes to much-needed pauses are the interventions of Edborg’s character and the brief, repeated refrain “time passes.” It does, quite swiftly.

While a great deal of the clutter and breakneck pacing is intentional, the show would benefit from some deep breathes. Throw open that roll-up storage unit door! Let some air in!

Lisa Kennedy, May 24, 2017 Denver Post

Oh ye citizens of area metropoles, it is time to get your Greek on. And two creatively robust theater companies are here to help.

The Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company and Denver’s Buntport have torn down the fourth wall to engage audiences with a tale of humans and gods. One utilizes the poetics of disaster and melancholy. The other plies mirth and throws one hell of an unreal supper party. Each boasts the fine services of a local acting luminary.

That Boulder’s “An Iliad” has timeless lessons is not exactly edifying news. Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s terse adaptation of Homer’s epic wrestles with the human tendency toward endless — and, in the case of the Greek-Trojan conflict — vain warfare.

Yet there’s great news to be had in the production, directed by Stephen Weitz. Chris Kendall’s performance as The Poet in this one-man show is awe-provoking.

The Poet arrives to the set carrying a rucksack of clinking bottles, tequila and whiskey. Sometimes he can be fuzzy on the names of the warriors — and the wars. Then again, his account isn’t limited to the bloody goings-on in Troy. At one point, a misremembered battle leads him to a foggy litany of wars. “The Punic War … The Fall of Rome …The War of the Roses … The Pequot War … The Mormon War … The Six Day War … The Troubles … Vietnam … Syria” all get a shout-out. (Ron Mueller’s  set hints at the ruins of recently bombed-out towns as well as ancient dusty plains.) It is a feat and a burden to recount so much blood-letting, so much loss, so much hubris. Of course, he self-medicates.

The Poet’s recitation delivers the big names. There’s Achilles and Hector, Agamemnon and Paris. But he also sings of  “the fighters of Coronea,” who man the ships in the bay outside Troy. “An Iliad” puts contemporary audiences in uncomfortable company. Such was the playwrights’ purpose in 2012, when  the play premiered at the New York Theatre Workshop. (It won an Obie.)

When his memory slips, it bolsters the lessons of the play. “The point is,” The Poet continues, “on all these ships were boys from every small town in Ohio, from farmlands, from fishing villages.”

With graying hair and grizzled beard and eyes searingly focused on distant but riling memories, Kendall grabs hold of The Poet’s epic lament and never lets go. This is a performance of pause and vigor, hush and heat, not be missed but to be thrilled and chastened by.

*****

A different myth is getting a witty once-over in Buntport’s original one-act play, “The Zeus Problem.” What a dandy, a strutter, a bully Zeus is. What relish Jim Hunt takes in embodying that trespassing, traipsing, charismatic god.

A table — a really long one — is set for an odd, bickering dinner party. On one end sits Henry David Thoreau (Brian Colonna), hunched over a manuscript. He’s adapting “Prometheus Bound.” On the other end, Prometheus (Erik Edborg), Eagle (Hannah Duggan) and Io (Erin Rollman) huddle together. Zeus, being Zeus, takes any position he pleases.

How did this collection of guests come to be? Well, getting at that is the pleasing task of this comedy. Zeus has some very different ideas about Prometheus’ never-ending end. You may recall that the Titan’s punishment for giving humans fire found him chained to a rock, an eagle feasting on his liver. Duggan’s cranky Eagle would peck hard at the notion of “feasting.” Also up for debate: How did Io, the mortal daughter of Inachus, come to be a cow? Was it Zeus hiding her from his wife, Hera, or Hera herself? Or was there some other, darker cause?

The delightfully weird animal costumes for Io and the Eagle are themselves worth a night out. And the two characters chime in with critiques — smart and silly — on the sexual politics of the whole enterprise, often rendering “The Zeus Problem” utterly playful and pointed.

Did I mention the table is long? It’s long enough to become a runaway when Zeus feels the urge to vamp, to vogue, to shake his groove thang and pantomime the hurling of lightning bolts.

“An Iliad” and “The Zeus Problem” encourage us to slip into joy and sorrow, hilarity and ache.  They represent a fine kind of escapism. One dons the mask of tragedy, the other comedy. And when those masks slide away, it is ourselves that we  see.

Lisa Kennedy, February 16, 2017 Denver Post

Erin Rollman is stunning in Buntport’s “The Rembrandt Room”

But, as any good storyteller knows, the bored-looking guard standing beside the painting has a tale at least as interesting as the Greek myth represented on the hallowed canvas.There’s something antiseptic about a windowless gallery housing priceless treasures. The Old Masters are to be worshipped. Paintings in museums are to be revered. Art is untouchable.

On a blank stage save for an over-sized Rembrandt, we encounter a museum guard. She is detatched, with an itchy collar, bland blazer and comfortable shoes, most often called upon to direct visitors to the rest room. Occasionally she asks them to step back from the paintings and refrain from flash photography. Turns out she is a highly opinionated tour guide to matters of art history and feminism. She also guards a rich personal history.

The Buntport tricksters offer their first one-woman show, “The Rembrandt Room,” capitalizing on the sly talents of Erin Rollman. The play fully draws the audience into the painting in question. Literally and metaphorically, we sit in the dark waiting for light. Beams of light accentuate the action onstage, just as Rembrandt, master of shadow and light, directs our gaze to certain movements and actions within the painting of Danaë.

The renowned painting is a life-sized depiction of the character Danaë from Greek mythology, the guard informs us. The painting hangs in Russia’s Hermitage Museum, where the action is set.

The canvas has a loaded history: it was famously attacked in 1985 by an insane visitor who threw acid on it and cut it with a knife. The restoration took years.

Personal restoration is a slow process, too. But as the guard relates her personal despair, triumphs and oddball observations, we come to see her as she sees the Rembrandt: both are masterpieces and survivors. Both deserve scrutiny and appreciation.

Danaë is depicted as welcoming Zeus, who, according to myth, entered her locked chamber and impregnated her in the form of a shower of gold. Danaë gave birth to Perseus as a result and it didn’t end well: Danaë’s father, the King, had a premonition that he would be killed by a son born to Danaë.

The backstory is equally intriguing: Although the artist’s wife was the original model for Danaë, Rembrandt later changed the figure’s face to that of his mistress. As if that factoid isn’t enough to launch a play.

There’s more.

With detours through Catherine the Great, pregnancy issues, rape and the artist’s self-portrait within the painting, posed peeking around a curtain, the guard slowly reveals herself.

She has a way of touching our most human aspects as she peppers us with questions:

Calamaties befall folks all the time, as predicted in ancient myth, right?

Rollman, a co-founder of Buntport, is riveting throughout, taking us on a wild ride through her character’s tragi-comic aspects. She voyages from asexual and inconspicuous part of the background, to fully sexualized reflection of the nude in the painting (is she nude or naked? It’s a point we’re encouraged to contemplate). She convincingly ranges from hilarious to poignant and reaches depths you don’t see coming.

The interplay of Greek myth, a woman’s emotional rehabilitation and the restoration of a damaged canvas successfully echo and ignite in the 90-minute dark comedy. “The Rembrandt Room” is worth a visit ‐ just remember, no flash photography.

-Joanne Ostrow, April 8, 2016, Denver Post

From Greek myth to bathroom mirror, Buntport’s dark comedy “10 Myths”
reflects on bodies, love, loss and humanityBuntport Theater prides itself on experimental undertakings and its latest, “10 Myths on the Proper Application of Beauty Products,” the first full-length show of its 15th season, manages to hold our attention while stretching the bounds of conventional theater.

“10 Myths” is an oddly satisfying dark comedy, a meditation on bodies, humanity, love and loss.

This is an impressionistic story of corporeal selves, identity and flossing. Even if you are not in need of a makeup tutorial, there are life lessons to be learned. The bathroom mirror, truth-teller and judge of time and gravity, is the centerpiece and a key character. As the set is constructed, the back of the (imaginary) looking glass is to the audience; we become the mirror. We observe as a disparate cluster of characters pile into the bathroom, peer straight ahead and pluck, brush, fluff, tweeze and otherwise attend to their physical selves. It’s crowded, this bathroom, with six actors sharing space, not to mention a three-member band, already playing as the show begins. In the bathtub.

Consider the deeper meaning of morning ablutions: the judgments, the changing selves that peer back, the gender expectations and physical relationships that are apparent there, not to mention a chin hair or smudged mascara, in a tight space dedicated to all manner of bodily functions.

The porcelain throne is just part of the altar to the impermanent human vessel.

Part of the genius of “10 Myths” is the spare set. The play takes place in the small, minimally designed john at center stage, flanked by large black spaces: a video recorder on a tripod on one side, where a slow-motion disrobing takes place repeatedly, and a TV monitor on the other, where slow-moving housemates pick at casseroles and watch the video. Expensive set design wouldn’t tell the story any better.

The videos capture the nightly undressing of Sam (Diana Dresser), a process which she has obsessively labeled and archived for posterity. Sam is a short-timer, or may already have passed; the chronology is intentionally confusing. But we do know that people bring casseroles to comfort those who’ve suffered a loss. Sam is soulfully merged with Herman, and as a he-she combo they practice being physically glommed onto each other as well, in intricately choreographed togetherness. Erik Edborg is riveting as Herman, a gender-bending, leotard-wearing gentle soul. Dresser is a sprite (a water nymph?), landing her comic one-liners. They both let melancholy seep through the humor.

Housemates Jenny (Hannah Duggan) and one-armed Jolene (Erin Rollman) are a witty, verbally adept couple considering having a baby, while Edward (Michael Morgan) is stuck cleaning and the Narrator (Brian Colonna) serves to reign in the sometimes wandering story. Morgan is elastic as the deeply neurotic Edward, physically compounding each line reading. Colonna provides a baseline, the most buttoned-down character despite his flamboyant scarf and eye makeup.

Don’t try to label any of them; these characters resist defining.

The show is an adaptation/rearrangement of local author Miriam Suzanne’s novel “Riding SideSaddle,” which was printed on 250 interchangeable index cards, meant to be shuffled as an “open source” text. It too is more Rorschach test than linear story.

Suzanne sprinkles Greek myth into the mix (notably Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, who merge as one being of two sexes), along with a theoretical “God of Hygiene,” further blurring categories.

The band, Teacup Gorilla, underscores emotions and lines; the effect is appropriately wry.

“We’re not talking about death here, we’re talking about bodies,” Sam says. As the mirror knows, you don’t get one without the other.

-Joanne Ostrow, March, 7, 2016 Denver Post

The Buntport Theater Company’s erudite cut-ups are at it again. And nearly at their best with their latest, collaboratively wrought play, “Naughty Bits,” running through Oct. 4.

Aided by an Art Historian, a Romance Novelist and a well-to-do couple straight out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, this nimble comedy ponders bodies and their parts, gender and class, and, most pointedly, the disappearance of a certain appendage from the Lansdowne Herakles.

That’s Hercules to you.

For more than a century, the Roman homage to the Greek hero resided at the Lansdowne House in London. In 1951, J. Paul Getty bought the stone demigod — lion skin hanging by his side, club resting on his shoulder. It holds a prominent place at the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif.

You’ll learn much of this as the play’s distinct characters begin to inch toward one another across eras.

The laughs can be brainy and broad, physically deft and metaphysically agile. Think Lucille Ball by way of Jacques Derrida — after a chocolate edible.

Wait, did the Romance Novelist just mention Marcel Duchamp? Of course she did.

Erin Rollman and Brian Colonna are terrific as Jenny and Harry, the 1920s couple, more insouciant and frisky than roaring.

As the Art Historian, Erik Edborg allows his hands to flit and his voice to flutter as he projects slides of the sculpture in question.

“He’s got magnetism, even for marble,” he says nervously.

Hannah Duggan’s turn as the Romance Novelist on a writing vacation — and often on the phone to her editor — hits heady and populist notes.

About the company’s fifth member: SamAnTha Schmitz. Much like the Herakles’ missing part — the cause of so much contemplation — her absence is potent.

Operating lights and sound, she cues actors and audience to shifts in time and mood. We have her to thank as the action nails an absurdly touching (and groping) vibe, reminiscent of Studio 54 during its heyday.

-Lisa Kennedy, September 27, 2014, Denver Post