Buntport Theater

Season 1

Two people wearing clothes that look Shakespearean, but are made from jeans, are holding hands and skipping in front of a van painted like a forest. There is a plastic owl on the van's side mirror.

Rocky Mountain New- The Bard lightens up in Buntport’s ‘Titus’

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

Five people are draped on and around a painted van. They all wear makeshift Shakespearean clothing. In front is a smiling man with his hands out. The hood of the van has a large smiling portrait of him. One smiling man is draped across the hood. Sitting on top of the van are three more people holding a banner that says “van-o-players”.

Denver Post- A bloody tragedy turns into a hoot: Buntport’s ‘Titus’ a biting parody

(*Revised from published version with permission*)

“Titus Andronicus” has long been regarded as Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy. Who knew it could also be his funniest comedy?

Buntport Theatre spoofs the Bard with the intelligent and endlessly inventive send-up “Titus Andronicus! The Musical.” The body count (kept on a chalkboard scorecard) tops out at 35 (seven times the number of people in the cast), but the only tragedy here is that the smartypants at the Buntport were forced to shorten their run to just two weekends. Brian Colonna, who plays Titus, underwent an emergency appendectomy just before the April 25 opening, delaying things by two weeks. But he’s back in full flourish, and he’s got scads of killings to make up for in a very short period of time.

The revenge tragedy “Titus” is Shakespeare’s most lampoonable work, but the key to spoofing it successfully is to stay firmly rooted in the text. Several other companies around town are currently taking liberties with Shakespearean models, but none comes close to the level of smart humor and biting parody that Buntport achieves. The Bug, for example, is presenting “Comedy of Errors,” but in acknowledgement of its difficult material, it ill-advisedly goes for broad, desperate stabs at humor that are accomplished only when its actors leap desperately out of character, or bulldoze the fourth wall. It comes across like children’s theater.

The mad geniuses at the Buntport, who adapted and directed the material as a collective, take a more sophisticated yet still-bawdy approach to “Titus,” with brilliant sight gags, silly songs and masterful prop work that has fun with the material while staying true to its lusty spirit. While the Bug’s cast doesn’t even seem to much like the material it is working with, the young Buntport players love theirs so fully they could eat it for lunch like a Chiron pie.

After I saw Buntport’s romp and stomp, I checked out Julie Taymor’s beautifully violent film starring Anthony Hopkins. The approaches could not be more different, but they have two things in common: They are both at times side-splittingly funny, and they both illuminate the text for the audience, the benchmark against which any Shakespearean production is judged.

Titus is a Roman general who has lost 22 sons in battle and upon his return offers the son of the imprisoned Goth queen Tamora as a ritual sacrifice. Titus defers the throne to Saturninus, who promptly weds the revenge-minded Tamora. Her sons rape Titus’ daughter Lavinia, and chop off her hands and tongue. They also murder Saturninus’ brother and frame two of Titus’ surviving sons. When offered his sons’ lives in exchange for a hand, Titus gladly lops his off, but in return is delivered only his sons’ heads. Thought delirious with madness, Titus fashions a tasty revenge: He kills Tamora’s sons Chiron and Demetrius and bakes them into meat pies that Tamora unknowingly eats with ketchup and mustard before meeting her own doom.

The collective has proudly chopped about 50 percent of the text, but still, how to keep the epic straight with a cast of five? The cast has fashioned an inspired cheat sheet. A large board shows the painted faces of all five actors in a row. Below each face are the names of the characters that actor portrays. Each name is accompanied by a pull-string lightbulb that Muni Kulasinghe flicks on and off at breakneck speed. So if you ever get confused, you can instantly see which character each actor is portraying. It’s a hoot to watch.

Buntport presents “Titus” in its otherwise empty warehouse space with only a Club Wagon van for a set. And when that van is a rockin’, someone comes a choppin’.

Colonna is P.S. McGoldstien, leader of the denim-based Van O’ Players minstrels. The van is painted on three sides to represent different settings, and the hole in the roof serves nicely as the pit where Lavinia’s lover meets his doom, complete with blood-smeared windows.

Another hollowed window serves as the opening for some puppet theater scenes that Taymor would love. Erik Edborg is a great puppeteer who plays the brothers Chiron and Demetrius as a ripped-out car radio and a gas can. When they get baked into singing meat pies, the gas spout (snout?) sticks out of the crust. Trust me: It’s funnier than it may sound.

The sight gags are nonstop: In the original, Tamora’s infidelity with Aaron is revealed when she delivers a black baby. Here her baby sports a tiny Chef Boy-ar-dee mustache that matches Aaron’s (Hannah Duggan). When Titus sacrifices his hand, it is smashed off in the van door. When a sword is drawn, it’s an oil dipstick.

And about that music. It’s ridiculous and bossa-nova saucy, like the play itself. It parodies the Carpenters (“Close to You”), the jazz standard “Beyond the Sea,” even Bon Jovi’s awful “Living on a Prayer.”

Just go see it. But if you don’t like it, and your heart grows full with the thirst for revenge, please forget that you heard about it from me.

-John Moore, May 15, 2002, Denver Post

Close-up of a man with large sideburns. He is bug-eyed and grimacing. In the background, out of focus, in the front of a yellow van.

Colorado Daily- Buntport makes laughingstock of Bard with tuneful “Titus Andronicus! The Musical”

Take some Shakespeare. Turn it upside down, inside out, slap it around, shake it like an unopened can of paint, hang it on the wall and make fun of its mamma.

That’s the approach Buntport Theater takes to what it calls “the Bard’s bloodiest play,” “Titus Andronicus.” What results is a crass, sardonic, no-holds-barred gorefest (stuffed with toe-tapping musical numbers) that is one of the funniest experiences you are likely to have on what the evening’s host refers to as “a flight on that big bird called theatre – with an R, E, of course.”

The show takes place in Buntport’s bare-walled performance space, occupied only by a massive Club Wagon XLT van which serves as the surprisingly versatile set, a player piano and tape deck, and a light-bulb-studded tote board, the last of which helps us keep track of who’s playing whom in each scene.  A drop-dead-funny cast of five, who present themselves as the traveling “Professor P.S. McGoldstien Van-O-Players,” portray the near-infinitude of characters in “Titus.” They aid their cause with the help of a stripped-down text crammed with cheesy gags, clever no-budget costumes and props, and a flock of quick-change costume pieces that help to keep the players straight – barely.

A summary of the play’s gruesome and complex plot, thought to be Shakespeare’s first effort at tragedy, would eat up too much space. Besides, Buntport’s hilarious program captures its absurdities nicely. Its mélange of high-flown eloquence, revenge, murder, rape, insanity, dismemberment, and cannibalism has rendered it unproduceable by all but the hardiest and most grimly insightful of directors. Of course, this makes it perfect fodder for parody.

Each performer takes on a handful of roles with relish – and a great deal of ketchup, which is splattered about profusely as the bloodshed swells (updated as expirations progress on a handy “Death Toll” chalkboard). Brian Colonna, a bundle of energy despite undergoing an emergency appendectomy only days before the opening, sets the tone with joyful, manic bombast as Titus, and with wimpy delicacy as the hapless suitor Bassanius. Erik Edborg scores as a wheezy emperor, Titus’ wistfully dense would-be-hero son Lucius, and as the voices and hands powering the evil brothers Chiron and Demetrius, who are puppets incarnated from a car radio and a gas can, respectively.

Droll Erin Rollman handles her manifold acting duties with style and wit, especially as Titus’s befuddled brother Marcus, and as Titus’s nemesis, the Goth queen Tamora. Hannah Duggan is brilliantly funny, doubling as the evil Aaron the Moor, complete with Snidely Whiplash moustache, and as Titus’s doomed daughter Lavinia, who, lopped of tongue and hands, she still gamely serves as a mute and melancholy Ann Miller. Tasteless? Sure. Funny? You bet.

A new and welcome Buntport participant is gangly Muni Kulasinghe, who runs the musical portion of the show and fills in as any number of incidental characters whose demise is imminent. His profusion of idiotic impersonations adds immeasurably to the show’s bounty of belly laughs. Classical music lovers will find his baleful plucking of the “Dies Irae” on mandolin a howl. Kudos also to the troupe’s often-overlooked backstage members, Matt Petraglia and SamAnTha Schmitz, who keep the comic havoc flowing.

“Titus” gleefully mocks the Bard and all who have made him into the playhouse’s sacred beast. In an area where “serious,” big-budget productions draw crowds and media attention, Buntport proves that entertaining theater (or theatre) can be composed of nothing more than a minimum of stage effects, a powerful collection of talent, and an abundance of imagination. “Titus – The Musical” deserves packed houses for the remainder of its run.

-Brad Weismann, May 14, 2002, Colorado Daily

A man, with antlers and a deer nose, sits with Einstein pondering space and time.

Rocky Mountain News- Show about reindeer flies

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

A baby, with antlers and black deer nose, sits in a highchair with a cup of tea.

Donner: a documentary

MEMOIRS OF THE FIFTH REINDEER

A documentary-style dark comedy about the reindeer Donner (neé Donder) and his battle with the corporate world of North Pole Inc.

(more…)

Colorado Daily- Donner: a documentary

 Glancing at the title “Donner: a documentary,” people invariably arrive at the same conclusion: Why would I see a play about cannibalism and despair?

Fortunately, the title refers to the reindeer and not the Party. This Donner, one of the lesser-known members of the reindeer team that pulls Santa’s sleigh, is the subject of an inventive comedy by the Buntport Theater Company about the increasing dissatisfaction of life on the corporate dole.

Documentarian Oscar Trebold presents a year in the life of Donner, a disgruntled reindeer/everyman played by Muni Kulasinghe. Donner decides that working for North Pole Inc., which owns the entitlements to Christmas, is too taxing. Striking out on his own, the camera captures his plight in a series of still life photographs projected upon three screens that make up the setting of the play.

About the only things that set Donner apart from humans are his antlers, round nose and hooves. As the play progresses, it becomes hilariously clear that Donner represents anyone who has ever tried to beat the system. His coworkers are a cross section of Generation X culture. Blitzer is a stoner whose breakup with Cupid is the only source of bad humor, and Vixen is an exotic dancer between seasons.

Comet is a trust fund reindeer, and Dasher and Dancer play in a rock band. But they have all bought into the team environment fostered by the corporation, even though they only receive a strange Christmas card with St. Patrick’s Day overtones and a visor hat from the corporation for pulling the sleigh all over the Christian world.

Rudolph, played by Erik Edborg, is a prima donna that has shaped his own legendary status. Donner is quick to point out that no one called the egocentric Rudolph names, and he was always welcome to play in their reindeer games.

The herd mentality of reindeer is strikingly similar to American life, and that makes this play more than just an irreverent comedy. Donner wants nothing more to do with the herd. After officially resigning from his job, he attempts to create his own holiday by pitching a spin-off of Christmas to another corporation. But North Pole Inc. has blacklisted him from the holiday market, and Donner doesn’t have any saleable skills. Donner spirals down into the lowest denominator of employment — telemarketer.

“Donner: a documentary” is a timely comedy about the changing shape of Christmas into consumer-driven propaganda. Santa’s whirlwind present-delivering tour was once a mystical story, and children wondered just how he managed to visit everyone in one night. Now, television commercials frequently show elves working in a corporate or industrial environment, the most recent by Fedex. Certainly, the myth of Christmas has changed to mirror our consumer culture. After watching this play, it becomes more apparent that the change is also mirroring the truth.

-Robin Johnson, December 4, 2001, Colorado Daily

A man behind bars reaches through them dejected.

Boulder Weekly- Magnificently mad

“When he talks you recognize in him the lunatic and the man.” -Anton Pavlovich Chechov, Ward #6

In 1892, Anton Chekhov’s fictional narrative, Ward #6, cracked open the relationship between a doctor and an asylum patient in a dysfunctional hospital in 19th-century, provincial Russia. This year, three years after its birth as a company, the Buntport Theater Company has brought Chekhov’s work to life in a clever adaptation of the story for the stage.

From the moment that the production begins in total darkness, two things in particular stand out in this adaptation. The first is that the company (wisely) decides to stay close to the original text of the narrative, creatively using passages and dialogue as the basis for their script. The second is that the adaptation is forged from a collaborative process. The casting has virtually nothing to do with age or gender; rather, it relies on the sheer skill of the four actors to deliver a rotating cast of characters with no help from essentially uniform costuming. The cast tries on characters like clothes, and like clothes some of the characters are better worn by a particular actor. It is an experiment that allows the audience a glimpse into the process, and it’s one of the features of Ward #6 which keeps it vital. However, by the end of the production, I had hoped to see the cast settle into the parts which they play particularly well, most notably actress Erin Rollman as Ivan Dmitritch, the passionate and tortured patient who captures the interest of his disassociated doctor, Andrey Yefimitch. Instead, the musical chairs of character swapping continues throughout the production-understandably in some cases since ten characters are played by four actors/actresses-which is something of a distraction in the otherwise gripping conclusion.

The staging and set of Ward #6 are beautifully done in their simplicity and surprising functionality. Resembling a suspended shipwreck, every prop, from chairs to plaster casts of partial human forms, hangs on a system of pulleys above a stage of ascending pallets, planks and grates. The cast never leaves the stage, but uses effective, though not technically superior, lighting, and tremendous body language to indicate their stage presence. The set, staging and the unusual casting of Ward #6 work compellingly toward the single goal of slowly undressing Chekhov’s narrative to reveal its tragic and moving themes.

The crux of the story rests in the juxtaposition between Ivan, the intelligent, compassionate and mad patient, and Andrey, his detached and listless doctor. Andrey believes in suffering, dismissing its gravity in favor of a longing for an intellectualism, casually saying to his tortured patient: “Pain is a vivid idea of pain.” Andrey seeks, more than anything, a brotherhood of the intellect, which he ironically finds in Ivan. Ivan finds himself into the madhouse through an overactive intellect, a paranoia of the mind that leads him to fear uncontrollably for the loss of his “freedom and honor.” He is a man who passionately loves the world but is trapped in his own mind, and Andrey is a man who lives in the world and longs to inhabit the intellect. One of the highlights of the production comes with the formation of a brotherhood between the two men-the very brotherhood that Andrey seeks. It appears as a slice of continuity marked by a clarity and vibrancy of the intellectual tete-à-tete between these two men in the otherwise jarring and discontinuous world of Ward #6. The short sequence of scenes drips with delicious irony and complex emotional and intellectual contention, and the production would have benefited by prolonging it, both in their development and eventual deconstruction.

The world you step into when you visit Buntport’s adaptation of Ward #6 absorbs you instantly. In the intimate setting, its figures and faces communicate the subtlest of humor in an otherwise bleak world. They entreat you to look on the interior suffering of man, and they do so for the most part successfully. Only a few wearisome moments live in this production, and despite some of the awkwardness caused by a few of its transitions, Ward #6 sets its standards high, and lives up to them in a poignantly entertaining stage drama.

-Loren Drummond, August 16, 2001, The Boulder Weekly

 

A man sits dejected peeling a potato. Behind him books hang from pieces of rope. Two women stand beside him dressed in rags and wearing cuffs made of plaster.

GoGo Mag- Chekh Mate @ Ward #6

Buntport Theater Company opened its new theatre a few months ago to the applause of nearly everyone who has ever seen one of their productions. The company, known for its multi-level wit and intelligently written comedic productions, has chosen to break new ground in the new space by staging its adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Ward #6.

The new ground is serious drama, and although the group has always shown a subdued affinity for the genre, this play represents an evolution of sorts for Buntport. Chekhov’s Ward #6 explores the stoicism of the human psyche through warped lenses. Buntport extracts Chekhov’s twisted circularity from the piece and successfully shifts it into three dimensions. The effect is both stunning and numbing. Perfect, really, considering the nature of the work.

Chekhov was profound, and so is the Buntport version of Ward # 6. The organization of the play is intensely anonymous, with cast members flowing from one role to another, embodying the one collective psyche that rests at the center of Ward #6.

Acting is superbly sublime, and compliments the work rather than trying to overwhelm it. Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman become one singular character going through differentiated movements, speaking with different voices, acting out different life passages, but always with one unified presence.

Drifting between the ward, and life in the town outside the ward, Buntport underscores Chekhov’s theme that we “know nothing of life, but are only theoretically acquainted with reality.” The townsfolk all seem like larvae in different stages of development, all destined to follow their primary instinct to crawl away from the light. It is the psychotic wretches, however, who reveal the deepest understanding of human life.

The ward is clearly the larger prison of reticent philosophers, while the human psyche creates cages far more incipient than any philosophy can explain. The Stoic’s pursuit of “True Happiness” falls to the Doctor, as he endeavors to inoculate himself against all human sensitivities. He believes “joy and suffering are passing,” and it is the disembowelment of this character that drives the work and the play.

Aside from phenomenal scripting and acting, the Buntport group has put together perhaps its most intriguing set. Walls of books, casts of various molds we allow ourselves to fill, barred windows we could walk around, but choose to hide behind all become part of the pathological motion of the play. Like some cobweb strewn cellar, the stage displays the contents of the human mind and the elements to which Chekhov alluded in Ward #6. And everything hangs in the balance. The elements of the set– representations of society’s teachings, barriers and molds– are all suspended from the ceiling by ropes just waiting to be manipulated by the cast, or the script, or the breeze. The effect represents both a grand design and an accident waiting to reveal itself. This is an immensely well planned and well executed set that resonates perfectly with the work.

There is little in life more disturbing or deeply moving than a well-crafted piece of experimental theater. The genre was meant to explore and expose, and Buntport has succeeded on both counts. The group has earned the right to claim outstanding artistic vision with the production of this piece of experimental drama. I strongly recommend this play.

-Cilicia Yakhlef, August 16-29, 2001, Go-Go Magazine

A woman bent over in supplication and wearing a plaster cast begs for money.

Denver Post- ‘Ward’ rattles cellbars. Madman, Inmate, Doctor link darkly

Theater by nature is a collaborative process. But the concept carries extra luster when the final product is as imaginative and ensemble-oriented as Buntport Theater’s provocative adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s story “Ward #6.”

Set in a decrepit 19th-century Russian lunatic asylum, the central confrontation is between a so called madman and the doctor assigned to the ward. Ivan, the articulate inmate, has an intelligence exceeded only by his persecution complex. Andrey, a complacent physician who considers Ivan the only man worth talking to in the entire town, enrages his patient by speaking dispassionately about rising above suffering before heading off to his soothing book-lined study.

One is up to his rope restraints in brute reality. The other is tethered to an increasingly numbing intellectual retreat. Political tyranny, detached philosophy and the unfathomable purpose of human suffering swirl together as the pair’s relationship takes a darkly ironic detour.

While the tale – which also has its lighter moments – won’t be everyone’s glass of vodka, those who like challenging theater will find the show stimulating.

Buntport’s six members create, direct, act and design the shows. Here, Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman perform. Matt Petraglia and SamAnTha Schmitz handle off-stage duties, providing effects such as mournful notes that sound like a bereaved cello.

The troupe performs in a newly converted industrial space that perfectly suits its style. Backed by rough gray walls and exposed pipes, angled wood pallets suggest makeshift beds. Overhead, ropes and pulleys dangle like menacing vines sprouting unconventional props.

Voices echo out of the darkness as the inmates, clad in shapeless pajamas, enter their dismal abode. Objects descend with the flick of a rope, as one patient is symbolically immobilized with a pair of plaster trousers, while another sports a castlike arm piece, the better to beg for kopecks and attention.

All the actors play several roles, frequently trading off portraying the same character – less confusing than it sounds, thanks to fluid staging and well-delineated interpretations.

Duggan’s Nikita, the vicious guard, glowers and slaps a cloth-wrapped club. Rollman’s Ivan grasps the ropes and circles like a captive animal. Edborg, playing a barber, bellows in, snapping rusty shears as he savors his authority.

And bearing out Chekhov’s point that we can be imprisoned in various ways, Colonna’s Andrey, awash in futility and boredom, retreats to his study, a clever affair of cord and book covers that descends like the bars of a cell.

-Dianne Zuckerman, August 15, 2001, Denver Post