Don’t underestimate the silly.

Done well, silly is of inestimable value (although I will try to estimate it herein). And at the top of their game, nobody does silly like Buntport Theater Company.

Seal. Stamp. Send. Bang. reveals the musical theater talents of the troupe’s five performers, who are a) fair to middling and b) brilliant. As always, they work in collaboration with Samantha Schmitz, who does bang-up technical and design work here.Their 25th original piece (can we just bow down to that achievement for a moment, please?) is, of all things, a musical. A synth-pop, ’80s-inflected, joyous story of lonely lives intersecting via the absurdity of the U.S. Postal Service.

Of course, it doesn’t help to catch the first 30 minutes of American Idol (fixed, I tell you, fixed!) before heading over to the theater. Five minutes and several missed notes in, my brain was showing the hand to Simon Cowell and telling him to stop being so mean. Because, despite the fact that none of these performers are gifted singers – a fact they cop to in the program – all of them have pleasant voices. More important, they know how to put over a song. Because they are, first, actors, and they get that singing a song is telling a story. They get an invaluable boost from Adam Stone, who wrote music and lyrics that are both catchy and clever, acknowledging musical theater conventions (check out that 11 o’clock number at 9:15) but not falling off the cliff of parody as so many recent musicals do.

Erin Rollman’s Susan is a blond-braided mail carrier, licking her wounds from her divorce and oblivious to the besotted Pete (Evan Weissman, who takes on three fully realized roles here), who drops unaddressed postcards into the mail in the hope that she’ll hear his words of love. Seal. Stamp. Send. Bang. is full of loopy interconnections of the Seinfeld sort, as diabetes, postcards and Tennyson crop up in unexpected places. It all plays out on the street of neatly crafted home fronts and Astroturf lawns, where each home spins around to reveal a mail truck, a deathly fluorescent office and home interiors.

Pete, the neighbor, responds to his mail carrier’s presence with the most ludicrous of love songs, singing:
          I know you’re fragile
I’d handle you with care
Package you with peanuts
And bubble wrap your hair
Meanwhile, sad, strange Jason (Erik Edborg) is trapped in the dead-letter office, a soulless room out of Office Space where he spends his days trying to divine the source of dead letters, until a sadistic postal inspector (Brian Colonna, truly maniacal) shows up with questions and an electric-shock dog collar.

When he goes home, he finds his cousin, or sort of his cousin. No one quite knows, as evidenced in a riotously funny patter (edging on rap) song in which the two argue over how they are related. It’s also one of the best-staged songs; I only wish there had been more choreography from this group’s strange collective imagination. As the cousin, Hannah Duggan gets the night’s biggest laughs, beginning with her demented grunts and culminating in an entire song sung from the inside of a cardboard box. The idea that theater has lasted 3,000 years without a cardboard box singing and dancing onstage is criminal at the very least.

There’s no message to take away here. Even the bittersweet is mostly sweet. What you get, though, is a 75-minute, fully realized musical (the score is tracked) – and, for an extra $10, you can take home your own original cast recording.

—Lisa Bornstein, March 6, 2009, IWantMyRocky.com

Other absurdist fare went swimmingly, but this one’s off the deep end

Denver’s Buntport Theater has a well-earned reputation for embracing the absurd, whether it be a satire of space serials (Starship Troy: A Live Sitcom) or live-action comic books.

The company’s penchant for crafting comedy from the unusual continues with Anywhere but Rome, a spoof of Ovid’s epic poem, Metamorphoses.

Yes, that Metamorphoses, a 16,000-line ode to Greek mythology and the human ability to transform.

Ambition is to be applauded in the arts, but this is one case where too much ambition can be thematically oppressive.

The play opens with us meeting the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Erik Edborg) hitchhiking in the modern-day world. (The play takes place in Minnehaha County.) While sticking his thumb out for a ride, he’s trying to remember his poem Metamorphoses, the manuscript of which he burned in a snit after being banned from Rome for offending the emperor.

He carries a large duffle bag from which he extracts his traveling companion, the blind prophet (and a character in his poem) Tiresias (Brian Colonna). Tiresias is more or less the voice of reason, chiding Ovid for his petulance and rash behavior. The duo’s destination is uncertain; it appears to be anywhere but Rome.

Joining them on their journey is Io (Erin Rollman), the mistress that Zeus turned into a cow to thwart the suspicions of his wife, Hera.

Io clumsily staggers about on two legs and fights the itchiness of the “human” dress she’s forced to wear. Her hooves make it hard to physically grasp things. There’s also the child’s Halloween mask she dons to hide her bovine features.

Bizarre? Absolutely, but it gets stranger still.

The trio is eventually picked up by a married couple on their own journey of exile.

Louis (Evan Weissman) is an English teacher. His wife, Carol (Hannah Duggan), is a jovial sort with a big problem: She’s turning into a chicken.

Yep, every day new feathers appear on her legs, and when excited her speech sometimes turns into a squawk.

As the quintet motors down the road, conflicts arise.

Why won’t Ovid admit his love for Io? Why does Louis blame Carol for her poultrification?

And why is it that blind prophet Tiresias can’t see the irony of his fellow travelers, or help Ovid remember the large chunks of the poem in which he appears?

Anywhere but Rome is too clever for its own good by half. If you’ve not read Metamorphoses (and how many of us have?), some of the jokes fall flat.

Its repeated references to mythology can be confusing, and the characters are by design caricatures. A moo-dy cow? A chicken lady who lays eggs? A poet who can’t remember his own lengthy ode to transformation?

The Buntport cast strives to be outrageous, yet the humor is mostly found in the performances, not the material. Edborg’s Ovid is a bundle of creative neuroses.

Rollman valiantly emotes through all that cow makeup. Weissman’s Louis is an excitable cad torn between his love for his wife and his disdain for what she’s become. And Duggan’s Carol is the scene stealer here, as one of those corn-fed Midwesterners who tries to put the best face on all problems.

What to do when things get tense in the car? Pull over and play a game of badminton.

Buntport is a six-person collective that excels at improvisation. Parts of this show hit the mark. More often, though, it’s like sitting through a dissertation with highbrow punch lines

-Mike Person, December 11, 2008, Rocky Mountain News

The word multimedia is overused, basically meaningless and usually a letdown.

So let’s just call Buntport Theater’s new play, Musketeer, multifaceted. Or to streamline things: creative.

The ensemble company, which creates original work, adds to its usual Transformer sets and spot-on costumes a complement of expertly presented, thematically useful video.

As the company has frequently done, it started with a classic work, Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. And if you know the title, you know enough to get by in this time-traveling oddity that takes a few facts and spins them with credulity-defying fiction.

The show opens to the tension-filled instrumentals of Marian the Librarian, and a video of rapid leafings through a book. We’re under a Metro station in Marseilles, where librarian Charlotte (a dogged Erin Rollman) has just discovered that a book has been overdue for 162 years. The book is The Memoirs of Mister d’Artagnan, from which Dumas is said to have cribbed the idea for The Three Musketeers. Charlotte doesn’t care about plagiarism or inspiration. She just doesn’t like scofflaws.

At the same time (and this indeed happened in 2002), the French government has exhumed Dumas’ body to reinter him in the Pantheon in Paris. Three pallbearers dressed as Musketeers accompany the casket through the rolling countryside (portrayed in perfectly timed rolling video): a cheerful tourism official (Hannah Duggan as Aramis, a slightly dour volunteer) and Charlotte’s ex-boyfriend as Athos (Erik Edborg) and an overly confident professional Porthos interpreter (amusingly self-aggrandizing Brian Colonna).

Getting the book back requires a bit of time travel on Charlotte’s part, and she ends up both in the present crawling into Dumas’ coffin (they have a tete-a-tete on screen and stage) and riding with him in the coffin-turned-carriage back in 1844. (Evan Weissman is dapper and flirtatious as the author.)

There are playful bits of comedy tucked in throughout the story, from Colonna routinely unable to replace sword in scabbard to the silent-movie style title cards that remind us “Time and space being of little consequence on an adventure such as this.” Three Stooges swordfighting entertains, and Weissman is given a bit that artfully explains an author’s motivation.

The end, though, fits loosely. It feels as though the company wasn’t quite sure how it wanted to wrap up the tale and was looking for an escape hatch. The gruesome last effect is well done, but doesn’t make much sense, even within the absurd world of the play.

-Lisa Bornstein, August 14, 2008, Rocky Mountain News

It had to happen, eventually, but it still hurts. Buntport Theatre Company, those collaborative creators of eight years’ worth of funny, inventive and zippy new works, has come up with one that sinks rather than sparkles.

Mom never surfaces, but visible in the house are her warring daughters, the extremely pregnant and telenovela-obsessed Colby and the careerist Heather, played by Erin Rollman and Hannah Duggan. Colby’s husband, J.J. (Brian Colonna), is devoting his life to the study of jigsaw puzzles, while their uncle, Eugene (Evan Weissman), struggles for respect from nieces who are older than he is.Things never quite gel in Vote for Uncle Marty, the company’s comedy about a family of five living in an upside-down house, where the ceiling is the floor, the arched doorways provide an impediment to walking and light fixtures protrude from the floor.

Meanwhile, everyone calls their visitor Uncle Marty (Erik Edborg). He’s a stranger who wandered into the house six years ago and has since been Heather’s project as she prepares his campaign for city council. Marty has no reason to run. He has no platform, no desires, no philosophy. But he’s friendly. People like him. And Heather has been coaching Marty on his gestures (Clintonian thumbs) and searching for a meaningless slogan.

The satire is a little too spot-on. Candidates more enamored of process than belief have been mocked before and better.

The writing suffers here, but other Buntport assets continue to shine. Rollman and Weissman in particular display ever more nuanced acting. Her character is infuriatingly passive-aggressive; watch her eat peas for a bit of performance immersion. Weissman is dark and strange here, obsessed that he is the only one troubled by the house’s geographic disorientation.

The house is its own triumph, a full-size first floor that looks as though it could withstand a hurricane.

Vote for Uncle Marty strives to be a comic analogy to our contemporary world. But saying the world is upside-down doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know. It’s not terribly profound, which is OK; but it’s not very funny, either.

-Lisa Bornstein, September 21st, 2007, Rocky Mountain News

Even when they’re telling the sweet, Capra-esque story of a small town, the creators of Buntport Theater sprinkle plenty of oddity on top. The result is Winter in Graupel Bay, a wonderfully strange cluster of characters exhibiting their eccentricities and their humanity.

An original work, Winter in Graupel Bay plays like Our Town with crossed eyes.

Instead of a grounded man, our narrator is a little girl who sees all the transactions of her hometown and brings them to us. Like most Buntport work, the five actors of the troupe play multiple characters. They live their lives on a warehouse-sized set that displays the town interiors like a skeletal dollhouse.

It’s the shortest day of the year in Graupel Bay, but that’s all right – no one has all that much to do. Two middle-aged women, played squeaky-voiced by Erin Rollman and smoky by Hannah Duggan, gossip about the town residents while trying to poison one another. Town drunk Toothy Bill (a just tipsy-enough Erik Edborg) stumbles around delivering editorials on such subjects as raisins (he’s against them, a stance I wholeheartedly support).

Brian Colonna plays the town sad-sack, Andrew Fromer, who can’t find a job, while Evan Weissman is most memorable as the solid yet dreamy Bruce Bentley, trying to conjure a snowfall so he can continue documenting individual flakes.

Humor falls across the town, particularly delivered by Rollman and Duggan. As the little girl, Polly, Duggan corrects the ladies’ gossip: “Mr. Morgan, it’s true, isn’t talking to his wife, but mostly because he lost his voice on Tuesday.” As the bed-bound Lady Fergus, Rollman petulantly and memorably bosses around her patient manservant.

Duggan gives the most wistful performance as the lovelorn Peg, who dreams of Bruce Bentley and being called Margaret. She dreams up a lovely romantic dance number with Bruce, a flight of fancy interspersed with sad and funny bits of realism.

Technically, the show is not showy but well-dreamt. Lighting and direction guide our attentions across the little boxes that make up this tiny, endearing town.

-Lisa Bornstein, December 15, 2006, Rocky Mountain News

It all began with a lost sock at a laundromat in Texas. Eventually, the sock returned, ghostlike, pale and floating.

“Looks it not like my sock? Mark it, Harold. Speak to it,” said the sock’s owner, Julius.

So begins Something Is Rotten, a rendition of Hamlet that is ludicrous even by Buntport Theater standards. And while the company’s creative standards have prevailed in recent serious fare, it’s a joy to see this group of seven return to high comic form.

Julius (Evan Weissman) and Harold (Erik Edborg) have teamed up with a narcoleptic thespian, George (Brian Colonna) after that sock convinces them to stage a production of Hamlet. The problem: Harold and Julius aren’t actors, and George can’t stay awake long enough to make it through his own soliloquies.

The result may be the best bad theater you ever see.

What makes this more than just a parody of bad theater are the carefully drawn characterizations. Some of the funniest moments come in the first 10 minutes, as Julius and Harold awkwardly try to set up their performance. In black pants and a turtleneck, Harold tries – and fails – to be commanding and professional. Both are tense, trying to forge ahead while George lies unconscious on the floor.

In his tassel loafers, tennis socks, fanny pack and shorts, Weissman makes a visual punch line, increased as his character preens in the light of newfound fame.

They forge ahead, trying to present the show while George naps, a show that would be much better, Harold says, “under normal circumstances, which are rare.”

Buntport’s normal ingenuity – supplemented offstage by Samantha Schmitz, Matt Petraglia and Erin Rollman – makes itself evident in this production, where puppetry is extended beyond just a sock puppet as Hamlet’s father. A Teddy Ruxpin doll with pre-recorded tapes plays Polonius; Laertes is a toy truck; Ophelia is a live goldfish. For the two-faced Gertrude and Claudius, Edborg dons a double-sided costume, one half a giant mask of the king that flips over to become Gertrude’s flowing locks while her body spills out of a tiny suitcase.

Colonna fades in and out of narcoleptic attacks to take on the role of Hamlet (it seems this was supposed to be a one-man show), pouring himself into the role until the actor and the character are equally unstrung.

Two-thirds through, the jest loses some momentum, but it’s a brief fade until the show comes bounding back to a bloody finish.

The evening’s frivolity is introduced by Hannah Duggan as Janice Haversham, “local” performer here to prepare us for the tale of Hamlet. With appalling folk songs and the quality of a local public radio personality, she moves from a desperation to be liked to just plain desperation in a well written and performed curtain opener.

-Lisa Bornstein, September 22, 2006, Rocky Mountain News

A Synopsis of Butchery is a production after a con man’s heart, a strange little Victorian knick-knack of a play.

The collaborative Buntport Theater company was considering three play premises when audiences voted on this one, resulting in the story of Eleanor Fletcher Bishop, an obsessed and melodramatic grieving mother with a flair for performance.

Bishop was a real woman. Her son, Washington Irving Bishop, was a popular 19th-century mentalist known to fall spontaneously into a catatonic state. In 1889, he collapsed during one performance and was pronounced dead. An autopsy was quicky performed, and Eleanor Bishop was convinced that it was the autopsy, not the coma, that had killed her son. She spent the rest of her life traveling the country to stir up public sentiment against the doctors involved.

The title of the book she wrote is nearly irresistible: A Mother’s Life Dedicated and an Appeal for Justice to All Brother Masons and the Generous Public – A Synopsis of the Butchery of the Late Sir Washington Irving Bishop (Kamilimilianalani) A Most Worthy Mason of the Thirty-Second Degree, the Mind Reader, and Philanthropist By Eleanor Fletcher Bishop, His Broken-Hearted Mother.

Erin Rollman plays Eleanor with just that mix of fervor, self-absorption and 19th-century style. She treats the audience as her audience, here to listen to her tragic tale and exhortations for justice. In her attempt, she re-creates the death of her son and the trial of the doctors.

Her performance takes place on a wonderful approximation of a Victorian lecture hall, with the Buntport warehouse turned into a tiny, square, dramatically raked proscenium stage. The production is wholly invested in its period details, from the rolling painted scenery to the disturbingly accurate muttonchops on Brian Colonna.

Colonna, Erik Edborg and Evan Weissman play the surrounding characters, including Colonna and Edborg as the doctors and Weissman as the lost son. Colonna presents a smug, beady-eyed M.D. on trial, while Edborg has a delightfully old-fashioned nature about him and Weissman brings forth a judge describing the proceedings in the style of Walter Winchell.

But Eleanor is the center of the piece, just as her son is the center of her world. Her tragic tale is peppered with name-dropping asides and conspiracy theories. Most of all, Rollman brings us into the Victorian lecture as entertainment, where warnings of gore are actually meant to entice and integrity is a fluid concept.

Somewhere in the middle, as the trial is re-enacted, the play begins to stretch its premise, but makes up for it with a head-spinner of an ending. Too bad there’s no show on Sunday – this could be a fine Mother’s Day outing for those with a dark sense of gratitude.

-Lisa Bornstein, May 12, 2006, Rocky Mountain News

Scary on stage is a hard trick to pull off.

It’s more difficult to lose yourself in a room where you know that the actors are actors and that the lights and sound are being manipulated.

Which makes Buntport’s first foray into the realm of terror an impressive undertaking. Because, above all, Horror: The Transformation is scary.

Not in a deep, psychological way, but in the more visceral, trying-to-prepare-yourself-for-the-next jolt manner.

Based on an 18th-century story, The Transformation’s basic story is that of a man who heard voices telling him to kill his family. But the plot is both less thrilling and less involving than the general atmosphere Buntport creates.

From the beginning, all is unsettling. First, there’s the set: a life-size, two-story dollhouse with a cutaway front wall that reveals the family inside. That house contains mysteries, revealed with an impressive showmanship and creativity that shows theater can equal or surpass CGI effects.

The house is furnished, but not quite comfortable. There are signs of life within, but not enough to make it homey. And the dim lights cast on the stage set an audience on edge waiting for the shocks.

Within that house gathers the family: pleasant parents Theodore (Brian Colonna) and Catherine (Erin Rollman), his sister and her brother (Hannah Duggan and Evan Weissman) and Theodore and Catherine’s children, represented by hollow-eyed puppets that are passed off and portrayed by the entire cast.

Enter a mysterious stranger, Carwin (Erik Edborg), a magician who is in fact less threatening than what the house itself contains. Soon Theodore is hearing disembodied voices, leading to the play’s denouement.

It’s not the story; it’s the style. Scenes are punctuated by blackouts that threaten sudden shocks. Walls move and bleed. The family itself comes from no realistic period: they speak in a kind of heightened Edwardian style but dress in a contemporary manner and live in a contemporary home. Between the words are spaces, filled with foreboding.

The story needs some work – some propulsion, and coherency. And the puppets are nifty, but not given as much character as they could be.

Combine those two facets with the atmosphere, though, and The Transformation could be a horror of the best kind.

-Lisa Bornstein, November 25, 2005, Rocky Mountain News