Buntport Theater

Season 1

Close up of a man seated and peeling potatoes. Behind him books are suspended in the air with ropes.

Rocky Mountain News- Multiple roles transform performers in Chekov adaptation

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

A man and a woman stand above a seated man pushing on his neck with a plaster baton.

Colorado Daily- Illuminated Chekov

There’s a new little warehouse down by the railroad tracks in Denver’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, tucked among ramshackle houses, junkyards, and vacant lots. Inside it, a sextet of theatrical inventors is busy experimenting. They are the founders/members of the Buntport Theater Company, and their fifth (and first non-comic) production is a unique, intelligent adaptation of Anton Chekov’s 1892 short story, “Ward 6.”

Buntport was founded three years ago, when the six were fellow students at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Their shows to date consist of clever adaptations of literary works, and one original piece, the post-apocalyptic comedy “FIN.” Together, the group forms a complete production team, developing all their material collaboratively and dividing all the on-, off- and backstage work among themselves. Their fresh, imaginative approach to live performance is a welcome relief from standard theatrical fare.

The setting is 1880’s Russia — a small, squalid lunatic asylum near an isolated provincial town, 150 miles from the nearest railway station. The plot is deceptively simple – the presiding doctor, Andrey Yefimitch, begins to find the inmates more congenial than the townspeople, gradually slides into an apathetic madness himself, is committed to his own brutally indifferent institution, and dies. Yet within these confines Chekov explores a multitude of themes – consensual reality’s insubstantial boundaries, society’s inertia and indifference, the vanity and self-deception of intellect. With good reason, Buntport found the story an excellent candidate for dramatization.

The lights rise on a gray concrete corner of the theater space, littered with weathered platforms and strung with an assortment of ropes, from which all the show’s set, prop, and costume pieces are suspended. The effect is stark and claustrophobic. The performers wear shapeless, interchangeable gray outfits. Occasionally, pungent and plaintive sound cues punctuate the action. With the performances, these elements make up a smoothly integrated, accomplished production that fearlessly delves into complex, challenging subject matter far beyond the scope of most regional theaters.

One actor, Brian Colonna, convincingly portrays the unfortunate doctor with a wan look and passive air that steadily increases as the play progresses, sometimes unfortunately reducing him to inaudibility. The other three, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, and Erin Rollman, each take turns playing each of the nine supporting roles. This simultaneously allows them to add their individual inflections to a cumulative characterization, and defuses the audience’s normal identification of actor with role. The playgoer must work hard, devoting complete attention to the proceedings, or risk hopeless confusion — not a bad thing at all.

The play moves along in an unbroken series of scenes, conducted at a deliberate, subdued pace. The adaptation, of necessity, pares away much of Chekov’s rich, illuminating detail but succeeds on its own terms, bringing many of the story’s compelling points into view. There are suggestions that this interpretation wants to indict society and its institutions for hastening the doctor’s doom, but Chekov clearly plants the seeds of Andrey Yefimitch’s downfall within himself, detailing his crippling weaknesses of character, and his snobbish self-absorption, from story’s beginning.

At times, even though the story is inescapably gloomy, the production veers dangerously close to the suffocating air of deadly earnestness comic performers assume when they want to be “serious” onstage. Fortunately, the adroit minds of Buntport avoid this fate by immersing themselves in the execution of this difficult tour de force. Lovers of stark beauty and bold stagecraft will enjoy “Ward 6”, and should look forward to Buntport’s future adventures.

-Brad Weismann, August 10, 2001, Colorado Daily

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.

Ward #6

An adaptation of Chekhov’s short story, Ward #6 is a drama about two intersecting lives.

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A man and a woman stand above a seated man pushing on his neck with a plaster baton.

Boulder Daily Camera- Chekhov’s hospital drama exposes politics of confinement

Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wasn’t the wimp most theatergoers think he was. Judging by Buntport Theater’s gutsy adaptation of Chekhov’s short story “Ward #6,” the diminutive, bespectacled and tubercular good doctor possessed the poetic lyricism of Dylan Thomas, the incisive social conscience of George Bernard Shaw, the capacity to embrace suffering on a scale to rival Dostoyevsky, the manic paranoia of Kafka and the political rage of Bertolt Brecht. “The Seagull,” “Three Sisters,” “Uncle Vanya,” and “The Cherry Orchard” may be masterpieces of sublime and ironic understatement, but “Ward #6” shows what can happen when a little guy with a sharp pen and a great mind loses his temper.

Set in an appalling asylum in 19th century Russia, “Ward #6” blows the lid off the abuses that result when socialized medicine and prosaic minds resort to confinement as a means to silence dissidents and non-conformists. An intelligent, innocent man (Erik Edborg) adjusts to a life of misery and despair when he is denounced and sentenced to spend the rest of his days in a brutal sanitarium. An idealistic doctor (Brian Colonna) tries to help the inmate transcend his state through intellectual exercise, but finds that he is dragged down to annihilation by grinding, relentless and degrading reality when he too becomes a “patient.”

Buntport Theater is a collaborative, experimental theater company with an exciting and innovative artistic sensibility. The production’s pop sculpture scenery, including props, costume accessories and evocative plaster body casts, are suspended from the ceiling then lowered on pulleys when needed. The stage space, arranged “corner” style in Buntport’s converted warehouse space, is a jumbled conglomeration of pallets, rotting planks, expanded steel grates and manila rope. The barefoot actors wear drab rags. There is no place for comfort or safety in this play.

Four actors, including Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, Edborg and Colonna, play more than 10 roles and frequently exchange characters, though they sometimes stay in one part for extended scenes. They shout and suffer, plead and roar their way through the pessimistic script, which in typical Russian fashion, offers no hope of deliverance from a wretched fate.

The ensemble effectively expresses impotent rage and fearsome fatalism, but the production is so self-consciously stylized it becomes impossible to feel sympathy for individual characters. Like the very system it condemns, the production style dehumanizes the play’s populace, making them little more than nightmarish scarecrows and macabre mouthpieces for Chekhov’s unrestrained outrage.

Buntport Theater, which has mounted primarily original comedies in the past, is a unique creative force in the community, and bears close watching.

-Patrick Dorn, August 9, 2001, Boulder Daily Camera

Three people are posed in outrageous costumes looking up at the camera. One woman wears Mad Max style armor and a camouflage tank top. One woman is dressed in a hazmat suit. The man is dressed in super hero attire.

Rocky Mountain News- In The End “Fin” Finds Laugh

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

Three people are posed in outrageous costumes looking up at the camera. One woman wears Mad Max style armor and a camouflage tank top. One woman is dressed in a hazmat suit. The man is dressed in super hero attire.

Fin

IT IS THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

The world has been inexplainably destroyed. Three friends are left with only one mix tape, a game of Scrabble™ and each other. (more…)

A trapdoor has been cut into a giant bed. A woman is coming out of the trap door and seems to be waving at the camera.

Go Go Mag- 2 in one

Aw … isn’t it cute? Look at those fingers, look at those wiggly little toes! And that … claw … and my, look at that big tail! There’s a new member of Denver’s theatre family and the relatives are going to be really proud of this one all right. Bouncing baby Buntport arrived at the Phoenix March 15, and the fact that it has six heads is a good thing, folks. Really it is. You see, as emerging theatre companies go, six stable, gifted, collaborative artists is more than enough. Especially when they write their own material and throw all known boundaries and paradigms aside.

They played to a large house at the Phoenix, and although that in itself is good news, the better news is that Buntport has just leased permanent space. The group is in the process of creating a black box stage that will be opening soon.

The sooner the better, I might add. Buntport stages original creations, thematically rooted in literary classics. The work, though, is stretched so far beyond the veil of the canon as to give rise to something completely different, yet recognizable–and glitteringly funny.

2 in 1 pits James Thurber against … that unknown guy or priest or, well, whoever wrote Beowulf. During the first act (nine quickies based on Thurber short stories), I was convinced Thurber was going to win the day. I mean we are talking Thurber here, and Act I does start out with two men and two women in bed and all. The audience was laughing right off the bat– that’s the first story, see– “Mr. Monroe vs. The Bat.”  Well, anyway, by the time the bat bit was done, all the finite details of the piece came winging through the theatre. And even though Thurber was one of the finest word surgeons ever, Buntport had sewn in enough comedy to keep the audience in stitches.

The entire retinue of nine scenes was outstanding, both literarily and comically speaking. Act I managed to promote a profound appreciation for Thurber’s work and words, while at the same time, spotlighting Buntport’s creatively comic ever-sharpening edge. Highlights, in fact, were many. But particularly impressive was the dual tandem acting scene in “Helpful Hints and the Hoveys.” The absolute knock-out bit of Act I, though, was “The Evening’s at Seven,” a play in which only one phrase is uttered on stage, but which is an enchantingly poignant, expertly executed piece of experimental theater. The piece is not so overcast and dark as to make the mood heavy, but provides a perfect dose of dramatic relief.

And then there’s Act II, “Word-Horde,” a dramatization of the study guide to Beowulf. Now, even though I’d pit Thurber’s brains against Beowulf’s brawn any day, I gotta tell you, the big dummy won the stage, though more to the credit of the Buntport group than the work. Hand-woven paper claws, fantastic timing and dialogue, and nifty movement between the reenactment and the CliffsNotes team had the audience entirely jovial and begging for more, to the degree that when the evening finally ended, no one would leave. That’s right, we witnessed a play about Beowulf, and we so much wanted more that we clung to our seats for a while when it was over. I’ve actually read Beowulf folks, and all I can tell you is that it’s not the kind of read you go in for a second time. To have a staged event based upon Beowulf which leaves the audience practically crying for more is nothing short of miraculous.

Now, I’m a big fan of comedy, but often I find it artistically lacking. Not so with 2 in 1. The Buntport team understands subtle nuance, timing, background setting and set design. They also understand when to break scenes, when to cull the laughter and when to turn it on. And, best of all they understand dramatic action. This, friends means that Buntport is presenting not just comedy, but High Comedy. You know, something along the lines of Shakespeare’s comedies, complete with wit, charm, laughs, intelligence, rhythm, discernible meter, fully developed characters and so on. Additionally, the work is experimental and fresh as a crocus in February, making for great theatre and even better comedy.

-Cilicia Yakhlef, March 29 – April 11, 2001, Go-Go Magazine

A screaming person is wearing a crown made of paper that has the word water printed all over it. On top of that crown is an origami boat made of paper that has the word boat printed all over it.

Rocky mountain news- Buntport’s one-acts are a hoot

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

 

A man is pictured standing behind the headboard of a large bed. The man has positioned himself with hands and head pushed through openings in the headboard to make it seem like he’s been locked in a stockade.

Gazette- ‘Significant Bother’ Portrays Misery of Marriage in Charmings Vignettes

As a rule, plays usually begin about the time the characters enter the stage. But little about Buntport Theater’s elegant and hilarious “…and this is my significant bother” goes according to the rules. Before the show starts, the four members of the troupe are peacefully snuggled together like spoons in the bed that’s the show’s main prop; at the start of the show, they all arise and exit.

This is only the first charming touch in the group’s nimble theatrical adaptation of eight tales by James Thurber, which I recommend unreservedly to anyone who’s still alert by the 11 p.m. starting time. Perhaps nobody has made unhappy American married life quite so funny as Thurber, and these multiple visions of wedded hell make for a delightful hour of comic vignettes.

The Denver-based group, whose name comes from a mangling of “Kennebuckport,” was formed in 1996. Its members, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Erin Rollman, and Brian Colonna – three former Colorado College students and a current one – are fine character actors all, and as a group, their timing is nearly perfect. In this, their second production, they made me impatient to see their third.

Broadly speaking, it’s not difficult to turn Thurber’s prose into theater; but Buntport Theater deserves praise for turning it into such good theater. The most imaginative adaptations are “Helpful Hints and the Hoveys,” in which Edborg and Rollman, standing behind the bed, portray the refined self-images of the dozing Colonna and Duggan, and “The Evening’s at Seven,” the show’s one poignant moment, which is presented as a series of momentary tableaux while Rollman speaks the text offstage.

Colonna is especially good as the hapless Mr. Monroe, who vanquishes a spider but finds himself overmatched by a bat; as Mr. Hovey, attempting to take a magazine’s advice of “cutting down on the intensity of your thoughts a half-hour before retiring”; and as Mr. Preeble sweetly saying to his wife, “Dear, let’s go down to the cellar!”

The rubber-faced Duggan shows off her terrific fidgeting skills while waiting for her husband to finish eating in the venomous “A Couple of Hamburgers.” As Mrs. Preeble, she’s perhaps the most efficient of Thurber’s cruelly efficient women – directing her husband on how best to do away with her. “Any other husband would have buried his wife in the summer!”, she complains.

As the husband in “A Couple of Hamburgers,” Edborg irritates his wife on as many levels as possible. And he gets perhaps the evening’s biggest laugh as Mr. Bidwell, speaking in his own defense.

Rollman may show the greatest range, from the demure wife in “The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery,” to the shrill Mrs. Bidwell, telling the judge that “the bond that had held us together snapped rather more easily than I’d thought possible,” to the coldly confidant Mrs. Monroe.

Technically, the show comes from the “three planks and a passion” school: a bed that turns into the front seat of a car or the door to the cellar; the sound of bat wings zooming around the room; and some effective Thurber-era popular music.

But in this production the low-tech is a plus, not a minus, as it focuses our attention more closely on the acting and, especially, on Thurber’s inexhaustible imaginative vision of married life, depicted through characters who are endearingly stoic in the face of their absurd situations.

-Mark Arnest, circa 2001, Colorado Springs’ Gazette