More frivolity onstage occurs during the 90 minutes of Kafka on Ice than Franz Kafka probably saw in his entire life.

The socially maladjusted Kafka comes in for Buntport treatment in an original show that weaves together Kafka’s life; his most famous story, The Metamorphosis; and an ice capades show.

If this isn’t the highest of Buntport’s achievements, it’s because the themes of the play never quite mesh with its presentation, delightful though it may be. Company members awkwardly, often hilariously, skate their way across a green synthetic rink without ever drawing parallel between the ice and the wintry discontent of much of the author’s life.

As Kafka, Gary Culig tamps down his often manic, childlike persona to capture the internalized, sickly and emotionally thwarted man who died at 30 of tuberculosis with relatively little fame. It took his longtime friend, Max Brod (Brian Colonna) – who overrode Kafka’s last wishes and published him posthumously – to turn a man into an adjective for a world filled with threatening, anonymous forces.

The play opens with the Czech author bent over his writing table under a bare bulb with the piped-in disconcerting sound of a pen scratching (a sound that, in one of the play’s most clever developments, later resembles that of a fidgeting insect).

There are scenes throughout that bring new levels of invention to Buntport’s repertoire. Kafka’s first sexual experience is dramatized as a silent film, complete with flickering lights, title cards and Erin Rollman clumsily skating in for romance.

Less original, but fun to watch, is the representation of the academic debate over just what kind of insect Gregor Samsa becomes in The Metamorphosis, a beetle or a roach. A microphone drops from the ceiling and a boxing match ensues as Colonna and Evan Weissman, insulated by huge foam insect costumes, battle it out until they fall on their backs.

Because he died so young, Kafka’s life was told by others. Buntport gives too much time to the opportunistic diarist who sold his memories of Kafka, and never quite draws the connection between the writer’s overbearing father and his writing. And while we see a series of failed love affairs – mostly with women played by Hannah Duggan – we don’t get much insight into why Kafka was so isolated.

In fact, here the highest peaks are themselves isolated moments, as when Kafka’s letters are projected into luminous swirling script around the theater, or the ridiculous ice pas de deux in which Culig skates in his oxfords. A death scene in which Kafka sings like Angel in Rent just seals the case: Buntport has a lot more fun with his life than he did.

-Lisa Bornstein, October 22, 2004, Rocky Mountain News

Buntport brilliant in reprise of ‘2 in 1’

You Buntport-come-latelies will want to hie yourselves over to Lipan Street and see how it all began, as the seven-person collective resurrects its second show. With the two one-acts that make up 2 in 1, Buntport reveals that its group’s amazingly cohesive aesthetic emerged full-force, like Venus from the half-shell, wearing a Groucho mask.

The two works together also demonstrate the breadth of Buntport’s abilities, from wry ’30s charm to a postmodern spoof that provokes such deep guffaws smokers may want to take precautions.

In . . . and this is my significant bother, the short stories of James Thurber are adapted into vignettes drawn with the light touch of one of the author’s own New Yorker cartoons. Each one tackles the foibles of marriage from its own angle, with the actors in superb period performance.

Brian Colonna personifies the meek, retiring and henpecked husband. He preens with macho pride after swatting a spider, then cowers from a bat. In another story, after falling in love with his secretary, he informs his wife of his plans to kill her, his voice squeaking like a bad hinge. Then he capitulates as the wife dictates exactly how and when the murder will occur.

Erin Rollman’s Betty Boop eyes and Clara Bow lips are a fast-track back to the ’30s, as is a falsetto voice that cries out screwball. In a scene where others voice their thoughts, both she and Colonna perfectly embody the facial tics of a busy brain.

Hannah Duggan, frequently severe or frumpy here, can browbeat without being hateful, and Erik Edborg turns the leading-man image on its ear.

It’s a journey back in time from Thurber to Beowulf, but Act II’s Word-Horde is hilarity of the postmodern variety. Using words in the most ingenious ways as costumes, props and set, they offer up a Cliff’s Notes version of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem that has been the downfall of many a high school freshman.

Not an opportunity for humor has been missed here, but none of it is superfluous or comes at the expense of the actual tale of Beowulf. Massive sections are dramatized in summary (don’t miss the human boat or bloody attack on Grendel), followed by pithy “commentary,” aided by a checklist of themes and symbols.

It’s not imperative that you have read Beowulf; it’s only necessary that you have attended school to appreciate the sublime humor of the piece.

Offstage, the four actors are supplemented by Matt Petraglia, Samantha Schmitz and Evan Weissman. In this seemingly anarchic environment, a solid company has emerged that devises the most brilliant of visual and sonic effects, always remembering that theater should enlist multiple senses.

-Lisa Bornstein, April 30, 2004, Rocky Mountain News

In some ways, sketch comedy seems a step down for Buntport Theater, a group that has been developing original, comic, full-length works since its inception.

It’s also a skill they’ve never explored in Denver, and one which in most ways comes naturally to this group of seven inventors.

With its first sketch comedy show, Idiot Box, Buntport takes a tired premise and even a few hackneyed sketch formats and still creates something hilarious and clever, as if talent will overcome even the group’s worst impulses.

For structure, Idiot Box posits that tiny fairies inside every television are acting out the shows we choose to watch. One hour they’re in a soap opera, the next a cooking show. A channel surfer can exhaust them.

Those fairies, played by Buntport’s five actors, mostly serve for transitions. Otherwise, Buntport has borrowed the format of SCTV, creating a variety of sketches all derived from various TV shows.

And so we inherit the game show parody and the cooking show parody, frayed staples of sketch comedy. And in Buntport’s hands, even these can be amusing (well, not the cooking show, which is basically a single Stalin joke).

These creative powers instinctively know that there’s no such thing as a too-short sketch. They know that fully developed characters make every joke hit harder. And they know that delays kill comedy.

There’s also an adventure show, Tyler and Shane’s Outback Exploration, in which Edborg and Evan Weissman demonstrate that not all Aussies are brave and blustery.Among their pierced targets are the TV show 5-O and the Fuzz, in which two cops (Hannah Duggan and Erik Edborg) are shocked when suspects lie to them; their world is one bound by an honor code.

On public access, a school bully (Brian Colonna, cast against type and rising to the occasion) hosts his own talk show, falls for a victim and delivers a wallop of a surprise ending.

Erin Rollman proves once again her gift for standing on the border of creepy and taking the plunge. Her dating show contestant is a disturbingly deluded geek. But her Stacy Petrovsky, the capitalist Girl Scout, is a transcendent character given a return performance. This time, instead of selling cookies, she’s commandeering the TV news with an invented board game (Monopoly mixed with Risk: capitalism plus world domination) and tormenting her Brownie brother (Colonna).

Offstage, the performers owe all to troupe members Matt Petraglia and Samantha Schmitz, who somehow keep the manic show moving at a fluid pace. Full costume changes and proficient sound effects happen with the ease if not the budget of shows with far larger staffs.

By the time the cast resurfaces in fairy gear (technicolor Lycra bodysuits) to sing a Doris Day song, they’ve long ago won us over. And they know enough to take their bows while we’re still madly in love.

-Lisa Bornstein, December 19, 2003, Rocky Mountain News

In its version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, the six-member troupe twists a tragic tale of revenge and deceit into a manic, melodramatic musical, filled with oodles of fake blood, clever pop-song covers and abundant sarcasm.The Bard is never boring in the hands of the capable Buntport Theater clan.

It’s far from the traditional Titus but tons more fun.

Buntport presents the play as a band of roving performers (known as the Van-O-Players), harking back to the vagabond troupes who traveled the countryside in Shakespeare’s day. The Van-O-Players carry props, costumes, a musician and a player piano in their dilapidated but colorful vehicle — the essentials for making light of one of the Bard’s least-liked works.

Because they’re few in number, each player takes on multiple roles, transitioning from character to character by donning a fake beard, cowboy hat or other silly prop. The group’s musician (the multitalented Muni Kulasinghe) plays such a vast array of characters that he pastes strips of paper to his chest to indicate which personality he’s portraying at any given time. He also tracks the play’s mounting death toll on a small black chalkboard.

The Van-O-Players present an abbreviated adaptation of Titus but stick somewhat closely to the play’s plotline, which details the downfall of a Roman general in a Melrose Place-type fashion.

The Buntport tribe (made up of Brian Colonna, Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman and their offstage counterparts Matt Petraglia and Samantha Schmitz) have a grand time poking fun at this poorly constructed play.

The groups shrewdly sprinkle songs throughout the scenes to highlight the absurdity of specific characters and situations. The new emperor, for example, celebrates his ascension with ragtime playing in the background, his loyal subjects dancing around him sporting toothy smiles and jazz hands.

A plotting lover sings about seeking revenge for his sweetheart over a cover of ABBA’s Fernando, chatting up murderers while doing the cha-cha.

Even versions of Bobby Darrin’s Beyond the Sea and Britney Spears’ Oops I Did it Again make appearances.

The props also provide comic relief. Two characters are portrayed by hand puppets; one is made of a rusty gas can, and the other is an old car radio with a shoeshine brush serving as a spiky hair covered head.

Blood is bountiful, pouring like a river out of the performer’s guts, mouths, hands, etc. By the end of the play, the actors could easily double as extras for the next Scream sequel.

And the show has a surprisingly high production value, considering that the troupe’s psychedelic van is the set. With scenes painted on its sides, the vehicle serves as a grand palace one minute, a lush, green forest the next.

But gimmicks aside, what makes this spoof succeed is the cast’s commitment. The performers are consistently solid, from Rollman as the devilishly delightful Queen Tamora (who punctuates nearly every scene with a wicked laugh) to Kulasinghe, who sprints between characters with Michael Lewis like speed.

But hurry if you want to see the Bard’s bloodiest play performed Buntport Theater style. The show, postponed by two weeks because of Colonna’s emergency appendectomy, will end its run Sunday.

-Erika Gonzalez, May 17, 2002, Rocky Mountain News

Apparently, Rudolph is a bit of a prima donna, a quality that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the other reindeer.

That and other secrets are exposed in Buntport Theater’s Donner: A Documentary, helpfully subtitled with “about the reindeer . . . not the Party.” Not a film but a stage play, Donner mocks the conventions of PBS talking-head documentaries as well as presenting a slightly sordid reindeer Behind the Music.

A collaborative company, Buntport consists of six principals who create the shows. Hannah Duggan, Brian Colonna, Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman also perform, while Samantha Schmitz and Matt Petraglia work offstage. For the lead in Donner, Buntport has brought in another talented actor, Muni Kulasinghe, who, even with a blackened nose, lights the path of the show.

We first meet Donner sitting in his low-rent apartment building, communicated by projections on three large screens. Smoking, lisping, a little dorky, Donner is clearly no Santa’s golden boy, and his resentment for Rudolph quickly shines through — why should that reindeer’s deformity lead to fame? “He had a discolored nose. I have a lazy eye,” Donner points out.

The play begins in January of 1999, and takes us through the year up to Christmas (presumably, the “film” spent another year in post-production). We meet those who surround Donner: his flying partner, the rage-filled Blitzen (a very funny Colonna); Santa and his sewer-mouth wife (Edborg and Duggan); Donner’s third-grade teacher, a frosty Junker (Rollman), and the preening, gone Hollywood Rudolph (Edborg). All are hysterical; the only extraneous character is a reindeer expert (Duggan) who reappears delivering bland facts.

Frustrated with his lack of glory, Donner quits North Pole Industries and looks for a new career. He applies for jobs in law firms and at Kinko’s (where Duggan, as the store manager, is entranced by the video crew), but no one wants to hire a guy with antlers. Even a high school won’t hire him as mascot unless he wears their reindeer head.

Scattered throughout this trifle are moments of radiance. Rollman gives her reindeer physical attributes that distinguish them, one pawing the ground nervously, the other jerking her head. Slides of Donner’s baby pictures splash on the screens, hysterical visions of a little boy with a black nose and antlers. Santa makes Donner change his name from the original Donder because “They thought it sounded too ethnic.”

And at the head of it all is Donner, a sad schlump of a deer with an inflated sense of his own destiny.

-Lisa Bornstein, December 7, 2001, Rocky Mountain News

Buntport Theatre takes its style of transformative theater to a deeper level with Ward No. 6, an adaptation of the Anton Chekhov novella.

As in Buntport’s earlier plays, no prop or set piece exists without purpose. Here, though, the performers themselves are transformed, slipping in and out of, and even sharing, multiple roles.

In a dark, untended mental hospital, patients languish under the inattentive care of a smug doctor. The patients include both the insane and the merely difficult, and none have a chance of release.

Always visually interesting, Ward No. 6 skates over some of Chekhov’s themes.  Ivan bores his friend with political furies before he is committed, but there’s no further discussion of the possibility of political imprisonment. And while the hospital is unpleasant, it’s not quite a prison, a connection Chekhov draws early with the description, “a desolate, Godforsaken look which is only found in our prison and hospital buildings.”

The seven members of Buntport — Samantha Schmitz, Brian Colonna, Erin Rollman, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg and Matthew Petraglia — wrote the play, and all but Schmitz and Petraglia perform in it. Colonna alone sticks to a single role, that of the doctor who eventually despairs at the empty repetition of his life and the hypocrisy of his work. Amazingly, the constant switching of characters among the other three actors never confuses as they deftly keep the audience up to speed.

As with Buntport’s other works, Ward No. 6 provides constant visual interest. A corner of the warehouse theater is used as the stage, constructed of wooden pallets for an off-kilter floor. Plaster casts, rows of books and furniture hang on ropes attached to pulleys and are lowered or raised as the scenes dictate. Visual effects expressing the story’s themes would have made the evening truly transforming.

-Lisa Bornstein, August 10, 2001, Rocky Mountain News

Scientists have long known that cockroaches would survive a nuclear war. They didn’t warn us about Hall and Oates.

A mix tape and a Scrabble game survive the apocalypse in Fin, the latest original comedy by Buntport Theater Company. Imagine: eternity with nine E’s but only one K, and an endlessly revolving soundtrack of George Michael, Louis Prima and, worst of all, REM’s It’s the End of the World As We Know It.

“If I’d known it was gonna be the Post-Apocalyptic Tape instead of Smooth Driving 3, I wouldn’t have put it in,” explains Dob (Brian Colonna), one of three survivors.

Dob is eager to continue the human race (or at least try), but his female companions have other plans. Mae (Hannah Duggan) spends the early part of the play in biohazard overalls, breathing through a mask and using a tube to speak. To Edie (Erin Rollman), that tube isn’t for talkin’, it’s for hittin’ — dressed in punk-rock combat gear, she’s itching to take on any alien comers.

The six-member theater group (the three actors plus Matt Petraglia, Samantha Schmitz and Erik Edborg) develops its plays together, and like earlier works Quixote and 2 in 1, Fin (French for “end”) is laced with hilariously observed details.

Many of the jokes bounce off the mix tape and Scrabble game. Others come from the flights of fancy that occur when the world has ended, it’s days later, and everyone is really bored. At one point,  Edie (given a riotous angry bluster by Rollman) poses the essential mystery of Murder, She Wrote (and it isn’t that a person under 60 had seen the show). Angela Lansbury, she decides, was the arch villain. “Everywhere she went, people were murdered! EVERYWHERE SHE WENT!”

The members of Buntport seem to have angular minds, zigging where another person would take a gentle curve. But the many funny moments they create lack a structure to hold them together. Unlike other Buntport pieces, Fin lacks a plot, or even a central thread, to force the play to cohere. Blackouts after each joke make it feel more like sketch comedy. It’s terribly funny, but Fin needs a stronger story to carry us through the end.

-Lisa Bornstein, June 13, 2001, Rocky Mountain News

One year ago, Buntport Theater showed its promise with Quixote, a satire of academia. Now the group delivers with 2 in 1, a sublime combination of one-acts developed by Buntport’s six members that provokes so much laughter it leaves cheeks aching.

The first act, . . . and this is my significant bother, contains adaptations of nine short stories by James Thurber, all dealing with marriage. The stories are presented in ’40s period dress and a dazzling variety of styles. The sole set piece, a raked bed, is transformed into sofa, car and other guises on which these goofy adults play out their foibles. After killing a spider for his wife, a man (Brian Colonna) cowers in bed, terrorized by a bat. A Brooklyn couple (Colonna and Hannah Duggan) fantasizes confrontations carried out by alter egos (Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman) standing behind the bed. In the most adventurous piece, a story is read over the sound system as lights come up for glimpses of the silent characters depicted. The scene plays out like a fotonovela, frozen images that pop out of the dark and burn into the retina.

The four actors (assisted offstage by company members Matt Petraglia and Samantha Schmitz) create wonderful, New Yorker-type cartoon characters, and their four disparate physical types complement the portrayals. Colonna’s old-fashioned, large-size facial expressions are both sweet and laughable, particularly when he plays a meek little man trying to woo his wife into the cellar so he can kill her. Edborg, tall and blond, gets the flummoxed leading man roles. Rollman has a pointed little face and takes on a breathy, slight lisp, while Duggan defies matronly harridan stereotypes even as she celebrates them.

Inconceivably, things get even better with the second act, Word-Horde, a dramatization of the study guide (that is, CliffsNotes) to Beowulf. A voiceover announces that the production is “intended as a supplementary aid to serious audience members. It is not a substitute for the text itself or a dramatic re-enactment of the text.” So don’t think you can get out of seeing the Olde English version.

Wearing laborers’ jumpsuits with prop-laden tool belts, the four actors do hilarious quickie performances of sections of the text, then run back through them for the commentary.  Their props are made entirely of computer printouts covered in the name of the object they represent. So a paper crown has the word crown printed in gold, dozens of times. When Grendel loses an arm, streamers fly out with the word blood printed in red. This isn’t just silly; it’s a great wink at postmodernism, textual analysis and symbolism — as well as a cheap prop. The book’s dragon is a magnificent paper puppet with moving arm and tongue and a tail that wraps around the back of the stage.

The production never misses an opportunity for a joke, whether it’s grafting Dawson’s Creek star Joshua Jackson onto a Beowulf family tree or explaining why dead royalty was buried with jewel-studded armor. He needs things for the afterlife: “The implication, therefore, is that there are a lot of expensive costume parties in heaven.”

Both halves of 2 in 1 reveal a theater company absolutely sure of its mission and the path toward accomplishing it. New works, developed in collaboration and presented with startling innovation, are an exhilarating gift for theater lovers.

-Lisa Bornstein, March 23, 2001, Rocky Mountain News