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

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

The title of Buntport Theater Company’s latest – “A Knight to Remember” – is a clever if mildly hazardous title. It teases a smirk at the pun, but also raises expectations of a theatrical experience that aren’t fully met in the company’s final show of the season.

The subtitle of the play is: “My quest to gallantly capture the past by Brian Colonna,” which gives more than a hint at its first-person ambitions. But Buntport being arguably the most inventive ensemble in town means Colonna is not alone on his journey to understand his boyhood.

Hannah Duggan, or “DJ Hannah Duggan,” as she’s credited, operates overhead projectors, lights and sound. She also makes absurd forays into the action.

Erin Rollman joins Colonna “as everyone else,” Though there comes a time when the deft, aware performer bristles cleverly at her place in this recounting of the life of Brian.

“A Knight to Remember” is, in part, about how things capture our imaginations, especially our young, hopeful, heated imaginations. An idea: about chivalry. An accessory: A shiny coat of armor. Another human: in this case, a girl who clasps her hands in the strangest way during one of those class portraits. You know the kind, the one where the teacher stands to the left and there are at least two risers of children, beaming or not.

Like many memory-oriented works, this one moves between details peculiar to the teller (the family trip to Germany, the serious orthodontics, the schoolboy crush) and those that bind us to a moment in time. Here, that would be the ’80s. There’s a funny bit about Colonna hijacking Rollman’s graduation year, because it was just a more interesting year.

Actually, there is a fair amount of onstage bickering about the very undertaking. And it is this notion of an ensemble performing a one-man show that provides the most Buntport-ian “in.” It is the type of meta-playfulness they do so darn well: taking on a simple (sometimes outlandish) idea and exposing layers existential and theatrical.

Alas, quests can be ragtag. (Just ask Don Quixote.) This outing is a bit ragged for a company whose work is more often fluid, funny and taut.

-Lisa Kennedy, April 27, 2013, Denver Post

Yet, I can’t help but celebrate the happy occurrence as being, if not divine, at least cheeky, providence.Granted, the opening of the delirious musical “Sweet Tooth” and the arrival of a newly gussied up Blu-ray of “Sunset Boulevard” to my mailbox are purely coincidental.

Because Buntport Theater’s latest collaboration with composer-lyricist Adam Stone features a character who bears more than a passing resemblance to Gloria Swanson’s in Billy Wilder’s classic. And yes, perhaps there’s a touch, too, of Carol Burnett’s hilarious skit about Norma Desmond.

With her red turban, her vivid red salon and her ready-to-do-whatever-it-takes devotees, George (Erin Rollman) is quite a piece of work. The question that eats at her is: Is she the piece of artwork she desires to be?

You see, George is so bent on curating reality, making it perfect, that she becomes a recluse. She never leaves her home, not even for a medically necessitated emergency.

Instead with game assistance from her loyal servant Hortense (Hannah Duggan) and her sometime paramour and portrait painter Mister (Brian Colonna), she re-creates adventures — from North Pole travel (“baby, it’s cold inside”) to a spelunking foray that plunges the stage and the audience into darkness.

The first musical number “It’s Cold,” finds George decked out in fur — hat, coat, muff — trying her darndest to create a frozen tundra. Hortense mans a fan and splashes her with ice water.

Only George’s attempts are starting to fall short of the aesthetic perfection she hopes for. On top of that, she has a tooth in need of a dentist.

Will a dental emergency nudge our eccentric friend back toward reality or instead provide her an opportunity to achieve her grandest creation? Will Dr. Manette (Erik Edborg) bring a dose of common sense and a shot of Novocaine to the zany proceedings or get drawn into George’s feverish endeavor?

Such is the hilarious set-up of “Sweet Tooth.”

“Sweet Tooth” is Buntport’s third collaboration with talented and evolving composer-lyricist Stone. In their second, 2010’s”Jugged Rabbit Stew,” an angry bunny contemplated his destiny. It won the Ovation Award for best new work that year.

The Buntport collective has made a bold habit of ginning up absurd scenarios that take on quandaries that have been the stuff of philosophical head-scratching for ages. For instance, can a brilliant simulation — a.k.a. “art” — be better than the real thing?

This sounds heavy. Instead, with perfectly timed performances by a remarkably attuned ensemble and rich work from Stone, it’s spry, at times silly and always smart. Consider it intellectual nitrous oxide. It won’t hurt a bit.

-Lisa Kennedy, October 25, 2012, Denver Post

In tale of Mary Shelley, creation and death, gods and monsters take on new meaning.

Anyone with a passing interest in Mary Shelley has heard the story of how the famous Gothic novelist created “Frankenstein” as part of a party-game challenge.

It’s a romantic notion that in 1816, she, her husband Percy, vampire inventor John Polidori and others sat around in a Dorothy Parker-like circle, wittily one-upping one another’s ghost stories.

But that’s not the horror story Buntport Theater is now staging.

Buntport takes a much more surreal and humanistic approach in presenting for the world its own rather strange and compelling new creation: The deliciously titled “My Hideous Progeny.”

The title refers, of course, to the mad doctor of Mary’s imagination who ignited the spark that created life from death. Only here it also refers, much more sadly, to Mary losing four children.

The story opens with a delirious Mary (Erin Rollman, in her most demanding role to date) lying fully clothed in a bathtub filled with ice – her doctor’s advice for how best to recover from a miscarriage. Thinking of those poor dead children as Mary’s true inspiration for the random body parts Victor Frankenstein stitches together to create his misunderstood monster not only sets us on a discombobulating theatrical course, but forces us to reconsider our deeply engrained notions of the famous novel.

This play is a mental sea voyage of its own, and the bathtub, which Rollman never leaves, is the ship the ensemble of six navigates through both literal and figurative icebergs.

This entire tale plays out as a fever dream, and not just Mary’s. The dreamer shifts between heartbroken Mary and her sleepwalking poet husband, who was plagued by laudanum-induced hallucinations of his own.

It’s weird, no doubt; at times it’s as cold (as ice) as its premise. But it’s fantastic and indefinably lovely, as well.

The Buntport team creates all its own work in collaboration. “My Hideous Progeny” launches its 11th season, but is its first new offering in a year. And it makes up for lost time by firing many creative and verbal synapses at us, some that hit the heart directly and others that streak by like shooting stars and land with more nebulous impact.

“My Hideous Progeny” ranks among Buntport’s most melancholy works, earnestly avoiding the ample available satire and ghoulish humor of the genre that, say, Mel Brooks found so irresistible. “Young Frankenstein,” this is not.

This is instead a sincere character study that tells the scandalous love story between Mary and Percy (Brian Colonna), one that was said to drive his first wife to drown herself. Evan Weissman plays the boorishly vain Lord Byron, who concocted the famous “let’s all make monsters” party game, and Hannah Duggan is Mary’s contrastingly quite pregnant stepsister, Claire.

The notion of creation – whether of children or monsters, real or imagined – dominates this sad rumination, which is set against a kind of virtual visual plasma that flows over the clear plastic walls of the set like a Flaming Lips video, occasionally revealing other monsters lurking in the recesses of the Shelleys’ collective brain.

Quick quotes from “Frankenstein” begin each scene as kind of live chapter titles. And as we navigate further inward, “Heart of Darkness”-style, the play becomes a foreboding philosophy on the living dead – and the dead living.

Water is everywhere, from the ice cubes eerily knocking against the walls of Mary’s tub, to Percy’s fatal obsession with it. It’s easy to see how nature’s literal spark of life is supplanted by a more unnatural current in Mary’s famous novel.

This quick, confounding evening centers on the remarkable Rollman, who delivers an open and necessarily restrained portrait of a woman who possessed the literal omnipotence to make life out of death on a page, but not so easily from her womb (though one child survived).

This is a Mary steeped in historical fact – but never brought to life so lovingly and hauntingly before.

-John Moore, September 30, 2011, Denver Post

Even when Buntport repeats itself, it’s the most original theater company in town.

“Kafka on Ice,” first staged in 2004, takes the standard device of a stage biography – and a mighty depressing one at that – and presents it with artistry, intelligence and a wonderful kind of whimsy.

Buntport and Kafka go oddly well together – they’re both known for different kinds of metamorphoses. Kafka is the dour Czech master of despair who in 1912 famously turned a human drone into a big old bedbug – and no one even noticed the difference.

And Buntport, which last week won a 2010 Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, routinely transforms simple objects on a stage in ways that have us watching along like slack-jawed children taking in our first Ice Capades.

The ice has something to do with that. The synthetic ice, that is, that’s been laid down on Buntport’s warehouse floor. Guest artist Josh Hartwell, playing Kafka, is the only actor who does not wear figure skates. Instead he slips, slides and struggles to find his balance while the expert Buntport ensemble, playing all the important people in Kafka’s life, gracefully camel-spin and salchow all around him. A gimmick, to be sure. An absurd juxtaposition. But for a valid creative purpose.

The play opens with a young Kafka writing at his desk, an enhanced audio effect making his scribbling motion sound not unlike a bug scurrying from light.

Soon the figure-skating five dart to and fro at speeds that suggest Kafka is not living in the same rhythm and time as those around him. There’s Hannah Duggan as Kafka’s determined grandfather, schussing across the ice with a burlap sack in his teeth (just to show how tough he was!). Evan Weissman as a parasitic Kafka mentee who would later recycle their talks into a mangled libertarian dogma – for his own (capitalistic) profit. Later, Weissman again as a maid performing a curiously elegant (and risque!) Olympics-style skating routine.

As a doe-eyed Kafka, Hartwell’s portrayal is more Chaplin’s sad clown than an embodiment of the real Kafka. That’s by design, in keeping with a presentational style that figure-eights from vaudeville to slapstick to WWF (there’s an interspecies wrestling match that, well, you’ll just have to see). Hartwell has come to be Denver’s go-to Kafka, having played him in the LIDA Project experimental theater company’s considerably more paranoid and political “Joseph K” in 2009.

“Kafka on Ice” is more personal. It focuses on the writer’s many foiled, failed relationships – from his disapproving parents to the women he kept at a distance, to the opportunistic managers who profited from his words (such as Brian Colonna as best friend and leech Max Brod).

The story plays out with a stream-of-consciousness, dreamlike quality not unlike Kafka’s own works, which blurred the line between the real and the surreal. Comic snippets of “The Metamorphosis” are interspersed, further fogging the line between Kafka and his iconic human vermin, Gregor Samsa.

It’s ridiculous and lovely, while still elucidating the sad and melancholy story of an isolated writer who, ironically, lived one of the world’s most examined and misunderstood lives.

More than that, this musically infused play gleefully, but never too pointedly, raises questions that have been bandied for a century – and gently mocks them. The most absurd: Erik Edborg, as “Lolita” novelist Vladimir Nabokov, debating whether the insect in “The Metamorphosis” is in fact a beetle or a cockroach. As if that matters.

Later, Kafka finds himself sitting in a modern-day American college English class led by an overmatched teacher (a perfect Erin Rollman) hilariously bluffing her way through Kafka’s text with the help of an online lesson plan – and a cheat sheet.

In 2004, I called this scene tangential. But I’ve come to see it as the signature moment in the play. Because the lasting questions from “Kafka on Ice” are really those that tease the fabrications, exaggerations and ridiculous misinterpretations that have followed famous people into the afterlife since the Stone Age. It’s possible, Kafka might say of all this, that a bug is just a bug. In fact, that’s the point.

-John Moore, February 3, 2011, Denver Post

The Buntport Theater ensemble has taken audiences down the rabbit hole before, but never to the nether regions of “Jugged Rabbit Stew,” its wonderfully weird if ideologically troubling new musical, written in collaboration with impressive young pop songwriter Adam Stone.

The premise is precocious: A magician’s rabbit has quit the act because he’s depressed. He’s a guy dressed in a bunny suit, down to his cute little floppy-eared slippers. And he’s named Snowball. Cute, right? But in many ways, this ambitious piece culminating Buntport’s ninth season of all-original works is its most disturbing to date.

Imagine, if you will, a man who’s grown so fatalistic that the only joy he gets in life comes from stealing and hoarding items precious to others. Only he’s a bunny. And not some pwetty widdle wabbit, either; he’s the most surly, hateful hare since “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Think the Grinch meets Harvey. If Pee-wee had a big adventure in a Kafka nightmare, it would be “Jugged Rabbit Stew.”

The setting, based on the newspapers lining the floor, must be Snowball’s cage. The drunken and cantankerous master of this house, free-range yet clearly trapped, wiles away his days watching home movies of his dead rabbit parents. It’s Erik Edborg in a masterful performance that unnervingly parallels his most recent role as a sotted Eugene O’Neill – only here, he occasionally breaks into song.

Suspended in midair are seemingly random objects covered in sheets – a vacuum cleaner, a toaster, a bike … and a woman, sitting patiently in a hanging rocking chair (Erin Rollman). Her unveiling is the first of many signature examples of Buntport’s uncanny presentational creativity. She’s straight out of a Tennessee Williams play – a fangirl who’s deliriously pleased to be held here in ongoing captivity.

A few parameters: Snowball is the actual magician here. His doting human assistants are Alec the Amazing and All-Powerful, and Mystical Marla. And because of Snowball, neither is whole. Snowball failed to make Alec (Evan Weissman) completely disappear, leaving him with a disembodied arm that now has a mind of its own (played by Brian Colonna). Marla (Hannah Duggan) is saddled with “nasty man legs” because, in a fit of spite, Snowball sawed hers off, and replaced them with a mechanic’s.

He’s cruel and dismissive to them, and yet both have a pathological need to be loved by him. But the ones we love are not always kind to us, Alec aptly says. And when these two sing out of their willingness to change themselves, to disappear into a top hat and emerge as something else in order to be loved by Snowball in return, well, this musical transforms from a charmingly elusive menagerie into one that is painfully, identifiably human. We all, after all, want to be wantable. In the the brilliantly titled song, “Take Me, Break Me, Make Me Something More,” Marla sings of needing to be nicer. Alec sings of needing to be meaner. To win the same man’s affection. Who can’t relate?

But Snowball, as the doted-upon often are, is otherwise consumed. He’s convinced himself that his fate is to twirl on a roasting spit, as did his parents before him, a mere ingredient in someone else’s stew.

This heady talk of fate versus self-determination takes us out of the land of Lewis Carroll and into that most classic and human of storytelling genres: We’re in the land of the Greeks. Of Shakespeare. And you know what happens to the tragic hero there. Only in Snowball, we have a tragic hero who isn’t at all heroic.

How this musical handles Snowball’s epiphany will have audiences asking: Is the finale inevitable … or irresponsible? Those paying the most attention might be left shaken, even indignant, by what it seems to be advocating.

It’s certainly impressively staged, if bloated at more than 2 ½ hours. It’s unnervingly well performed – and yes, that takes into account that none of these actors are trained singers. That’s part of their charm.

Stone’s considerable 17-song score (performed to his taped synthesizer accompaniment) is laden with meaningful, soul-searching lyrics that evoke everything from “Sweeney Todd” to “Les Miserables.” They are often performed in the rapid-fire (and sometimes indecipherable) tempo of, say, REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Fine for a rock concert, but not ideal for a musical where we’re hanging on every word.

This is a stew, all right – ideologically, philosophically and musically. And it’s just like Buntport to leave audiences both dazed and amazed.

-John Moore, May 28, 2010, Denver Post