Buntport Theater

Season 4

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.

Westword- Buntport brushes up on the Bard

I’ve already seen Buntport Theater’s Titus Andronicus: the Musical twice. But with a few honorable exceptions, theater-going has been pretty dismal this fall, so I figure I’m entitled to a little fun.

As we prepare to file in, we see an eccentrically clad woman in the lobby. She’s commenting loudly on the decor, as well as all the newspaper reviews and award plaques pasted on the walls. She does this with such conviction that it’s a few moments before I realize that she’s Buntporter Hannah Duggan, and the play has essentially begun. The conceit is that a wandering troupe of five actors, led by P.S. McGoldstien, is presenting Shakespeare’s bloody and incoherent Titus Andronicus as a musical. There’s lots of plotting here. Saturninus wants to be king, but the people are leaning toward Titus, conqueror of the Goths, who’s just returned to town with four prisoners: Goth queen Tamora and her three sons, one of whom he rapidly executes. Tamora marries Saturninus, and proceeds to plot revenge on Titus — a revenge that includes having her two surviving sons kill Saturninus’s brother, Bassianus, and rape and mutilate Titus’s daughter Lavinia, Bassianus’s love. More plot twists include the framing of Titus’s two innocent boys for murder; Tamora’s affair with the villainous Aaron, which results in an illegitimate baby; Titus’s attempt to save his sons from execution by cutting off his own hand; and a feast during which Tamora is served pies containing the flesh of her own children — that is, the sons who destroyed poor Lavinia.

Buntport actually gets us through the entire plot, and it’s all quite coherent — or at least as coherent as the original. The troupe uses a board with caricatures and lightbulbs to tell us which of the five actors is playing which of the several dozen characters at any given moment. Evan Weissman gets to act essentially the same role every time: “Someone Who Will Probably Die.” There’s also a chalkboard on which the actors keep track of the death toll. The cast makes inventive use of objects and weird scraps of costume, and not all the characters are flesh and blood. One is simply a hat on a stick, and Tamora’s sons are played by a gasoline can and a car radio, complete with ashtray. The scenery consists of a van that is pushed from place to place in the echoing warehouse space by perspiring members of the cast, while McGoldstien exhorts the audience to encourage them. This van has been painted and outfitted to represent different locations: trees on one side for a forest; a table set with plates and other dining accoutrements that pops down when needed. A stuffed owl sometimes perches on the antenna; naked umbrella spokes poke through the roof and open to reveal little green leaves; during one scene, the windows are awash in fake blood. Though I’ve seen all this before, I’m still struck by the ingenuity of the approach, and the jokes are just as funny as ever. I find myself fixing on amusing little things like the blobs of fake blood on Titus’s bare knees, or the watch on the wrist of a severed hand.

In their approach to their roles, the actors have it both ways: They speak and act with complete conviction while also communicating their awareness of the absurdity of the entire situation. They take a few pokes at Shakespeare. “It’s in the text,” one of them says after a particularly ludicrous exchange. “I didn’t make it up.” Brian Colonna is a marvel of energy and good humor as he darts from place to place keeping the entire show together; Erik Edborg manages to be simultaneously puzzled and full of insane energy; Duggan’s silent response to her mutilation at the hands of her rapists — and her tongueless exasperation when her father exhorts her to speak and tell him who they are — is priceless. Erin Rollman brings all her usual assurance to her several roles, and Evan Weissman punctures the action with a series of howlingly funny mini-characterizations.

It’s the Buntporters’ playfulness that makes coming here so pleasurable. Their work contains in abundance what so few productions have these days: exuberance and life. In this, they remind me of Al Brooks’s days at the Changing Scene: Some of the things I saw in that small, colorful space still resonate in my mind, while I couldn’t forget others fast enough. But the unevenness didn’t matter, because the entire place vibrated with energy and surprise.

There are huge differences between Buntport and the old Scene, of course. Al’s take on theater was profoundly idealistic; he believed in the art form’s ability to subvert and in its powers of redemption. He took big risks but could also be downright silly, putting on the work of almost any playwright who requested it, encouraging his dancers to cavort in the mountains naked while he filmed them. I don’t think the Buntporters are motivated by any idea of bettering society or communicating the lofty significance of art. Instead, they keep saying that their goal is to provide cheap, unpretentious entertainment — and this they certainly do.

Sometimes I wish they were more ambitious, interested in deepening and developing their work, since they are quite capable of transcendence. Instead, they seem content to alternate times of wonder and discovery with evenings that are simply amusing, but always — no matter what they’re doing — making us marvel at the good-humored fluidity of their approach and the imagination that lies at the very heart of theater.

They’re saying that this is definitely, positively, absolutely the last Titus Andronicus. I suggest you get over there.

-Juliet Wittman, December 12, 2007, Westword

A man in makeshift Shakespearean clothes looks at a piece of paper through a large magnifying glass. In the glass, his nose and eye are large. A woman is pointing and talking to him.

Denver Post- Yuks and yucks with Bard’s gory “Titus”

Interpreting Shakespeare’s goriest play as a musical comedy is a stretch, even in an era renowned for idiosyncratic Shakespeare stagings in samurai mufti or deep space. Not only do these Colorado College alumni accomplish this admirably, but they manage so successfully that this marks the fourth time that their Buntport Theater company has mounted it.

“People seem to like it,” said Erin Rollman, who plays both Titus’ brother, Marcus, and his nemesis, the vengeful Goth queen Tamora.

Tickets to the current production began selling months ago, when rumors spread that “Titus Andronicus!” would be remounted for the final time. Earlier productions routinely sold out, disappointing latecomers who thought they could show up without reservations. Several book clubs already bought blocks of tickets as an alternative to hosting a holiday party.

“Nothing like baking children into pies for holiday cheer,” observed Brian Colonna, referring to a particularly grisly scene that rigorously interprets the adage about revenge being a dish best served cold.

Turning a Shakespeare tragedy – particularly such a confusing and multiply flawed script that scholars debate whether Shakespeare actually wrote “Titus Andronicus” – into a musical comedy was an enormous leap, particularly for a young company.

The actors who formed Buntport all graduated from Colorado College, an elite liberal arts college that breeds unorthodox intellectuals, between 1998 and 2001. The Buntport crew is so devoutly collaborative that Denver Post critic John Moore once posited that the company “writes, directs, designs, acts, builds and probably showers as one.”

Their hallmark lies in distilling an often familiar story to its utter essence whilst plundering and frolicking with its beloved details, rather like Monty Python’s anarchist grandchildren.

The decision to present “Titus Andronicus” as a musical comedy emerged during a brainstorming session. Someone suggested that it would be funny to have Lavinia – a character whose tongue is cut out early in the play – sing an aria upon being dismembered.

“We were amused and mortified, which pretty much describes the usual audience reaction,” Rollman said.

“But it IS funny. It’s hard not to laugh.”

So they allowed the aria – a Britney Spears parody as vicious as it is visual – to set the show’s tone.

Since 2002, when they debuted their version of what they delightedly call “Shakespeare’s bloodiest play,” Buntport similarly dissected “Hamlet,” “Moby-Dick” “Macbeth” (as “Macblank,” referring to the theatrical superstition that forbids naming the play offstage), and “The Odyssey: A Walking Tour.”

The results are as reachable as they are illuminating, both conceptually and concretely. Those Elizabethan frocks are made from corduroy and denim pants acquired at the ARC thrift store on South Broadway. A car radio/ashtray and a gas can serve as two puppets. A hat on a stick becomes an appreciative listener.

“You end up with integrity when you stage a show you can afford,” Rollman said.

“It doesn’t take a big budget to put on a good show. We wink at the audience. We all know this forest is just a van. So let’s be in cahoots!”

-Claire Martin, December 2, 2007, Denver Post

A man in makeshift Shakespearean clothes looks at a piece of paper through a large magnifying glass. In the glass, his nose and eye are large. A woman is pointing and talking to him.

TheaterMania- Titus Andronicus! The Musical

If your aim is to poke fun at Will Shakespeare, why not start with Titus Andronicus? This early work masks young Will’s yet-to-ripen greenery as a playwright with buckets worth of stage blood, quenching the thirst for carnage that preceded his shift to an emphasis on character. And if a playful swipe at the Bard is on the bill, it helps to have the wit and resourcefulness of Buntport Theater, which in Titus Andronicus! The Musical stabs at the play’s thinly stretched canvass and runs the characters through with makeshift swords in the form of everything from trombones to dipsticks.

The award-winning, Denver-based theater company takes on the guise of a traveling band of thespians, prepared to perform any play wherever they pull up; P.S. McGoldstein carts his five member company and their wares in an old van. “We are few in number, but we are resourceful,” McGoldstein confides to the audience in a huge understatement as the play begins. The actors take on anywhere from three roles each to upwards of a dozen in the case of Evan Weismann, who plays the company musician as well as a parade of characters identified as “Someone Who Will Probably Die.” To help the audience up with the shifts between characters, the players operate a light board with a rendering of each actor and a series of bulbs below each rendering, one for each character they play. Next to this is a chalkboard on which to tally the ever mounting death toll. At times, the lights are flicked on and off as quick as the parries in a sword fight — most notably in a scene during which two of Erik Edborg’s characters, Saturninus and Lucius, engage in mortal combat.

The van is the play’s central set piece, epitomizing Buntport’s knack for turning seemingly insurmountable production challenges into jaw-dropping creativity. As the play-within-the-play commences, the van doors are opened to reveal a backdrop painted across the insides of the doors and a screen that rolls down, blocking the interior of the van and setting the scene with an image of ancient Rome’s famous Eiffel Tower — which, upon discovery, is quickly covered with another pull down screen depicting the more geographically correct Coliseum. The van is used to great comic effect throughout the show — e.g., the carriage rocks when Saturninus and Tamara consummate their marriage in the back of the vehicle. As for depiction of the play’s horribly tragic events, blood spurts out of the roof when a victim is hacked up inside, and the big picture window on the side of the van offers a view of the carnage that occurs after Aaron traps Titus’s sons in the forest.

Then there are the show’s musical moments; the company members perform several production numbers with macabre hilarity. I particularly enjoyed Edborg’s Frankensteinish dance moves as the rhythmically-challenged Saturninus in the opening number — a foreshadowing of the grand finale, when all of the corpses sing and twitch, whether marinating in a pool of their own blood or, in the case of Tamora’s two puppet sons, baked into pies for mother. There’s also a cha-cha version of “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons,” with the newly crowned Saturninus and the captured Goth queen Tamora dancing on the roof of the van before slipping inside for their honeymoon. And there’s a wonderfully romantic “montage” when Lavinia sneaks off to be with Bassianus (Saturninus’ brother). As The Carpenters’ “Close to You” plays on the van stereo, the two fall in love. But then the vengeful Tamora arranges for her sons — the car stereo and the gas can — to kill Bassianus and to maim Lavinia, cutting off her hands and tongue. This doesn’t keep Lavinia from singing an incomprehensible lament as blood drips out of her tongueless mouth. “You see ladies and gentleman, we handle violence with grace and delicacy,” McGoldstein remarks to the audience as his cast slips and splashes across the blood-slick stage, heading toward intermission with a lively hand jive (and paying no heed to the fact that Titus and Lavinia have only one hand to jive with between them).

Buntport’s decision to season this savage play with comedy and music makes for a riveting two hours’ traffic on the stage. For all the jesting and poking, Titus Andronicus! The Musical succeeds in praising Shakespeare, not burying him. The original play isn’t beyond redemption. And though the characters are razor-thin compared to the Bard’s later, fleshed-out figures, Titus himself is a fascinating study for an actor, moving from relentless barbarism to a strangely sympathetic victimization. Add a cha-cha here, an ash-mouthed puppet there, bloody dipsticks everywhere, and you’ve got the raw materials for an inventive, accessible evening of entertainment in the hands of a company firing on all cylinders.

-Owen Perkins, January 25,2005, www.theatermania.com

 

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.

North Denver Tribune- Buntport musically spoofs bard’s bloodiest tragedy

Buntport Theater delivers another original and creative comic gem in their musical send-up of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Buntport dismembers (pun intended) the Bard’s bloodiest and most brutal tragedy, filling the evening with slapstick humor, creative devices to help the audience follow the complex plot, bad puns, cliché musical numbers, and Monty Pythonesque blood and gore.

The production opens with a traveling troupe of actors (the “van-o-players”) that will be performing Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Even a brief summary of the plot would take far too long for this review, and have little value. Suffice to say that Titus is a bloody story of war, deceit, revenge, rape, murder, and limb removal, set against the backdrop ancient Rome. This production may be the most understandable rendition of this play you will every see, using a clever visual device to identify characters and filling gaps with occasional narration.

The seven members of Buntport, Brian Colonna, Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, Evan Weissman, Matt Petraglia, and Samantha Schmitz “adapted, produced, designed, directed, and built” this production as a collaboration. This group has developed an original, integrated piece of comic theatre. While the performances are very good, the careful construction of a complete package, including context, design concept and supporting devices, is excellent. The script itself is funny, but adding in the character identification board, the scenic element of the versatile beat-up old van, the creative puppets, the anachronistic musical numbers, and the eclectic costumes makes the whole exceed the sum of the parts.

As actors, five members of the Buntport ensemble shine as well. All five create multiple unique, recognizable characters, in some cases in rapid succession with only minor costume changes. Hannah Duggan is probably the strongest in the cast, transforming herself from the pathetic Levinia to the delightfully evil Aaron with the application of a fake mustache. As Levinia, after loosing her hands and tongue, she is hilariously ineffective as she tries to communicate what has befallen her and attempts to perform the most basic tasks. Evan Weissman shows amazing versatility, playing many characters, most of them (as aptly described on the character board) “someone who will probably die.” His bizarre facial gymnastics as Aemilius are particularly entertaining.

Ron Wilkenson vamps as the Emperor Saturninus, plays Titus’s son and grandson (both named Lucius), and controls the puppets representing Tamora’s sons Demetrius and Chiron. The choreography of the interaction of the puppets and the live actors on stage is interesting and effective. Brian Colonna opens the evening as the leader of the traveling troupe, and provides an anchor for the show as Titus, as well as covering the emperor’s brother Bassianus. Erin Rollman changes gender frequently, bouncing back and forth between the initially tragic and later cruel Tamora, and Marcus, brother of Titus, giving both characters depth and variety.

One thing that makes this show work so well is the integrated overall visual package. The design concept is reminiscent of Italian Commedia Dell’Arte, updated to modern times. The set has two elements, a character board and a modified old van, set against the backdrop of the exposed empty warehouse that is the Buntport Theater. The character board is a clever and effective device, serving two main purposes. It indicates which characters each actor is playing at any given time, and provides a running death toll, for which this play seems to cry out. Initially, the van seems benign – an offstage space for the performers to transform themselves, and a backdrop. But it is rolled (pushed by human power – by actors, no less) to expose four different sides, with each providing creative and bizarre props and set pieces, all of which nonetheless fit in the context of the overall production. And rounding out the visual impact of the play are the costumes. Difficult to describe, they are patchworks, cut and pieced together thrift store outcasts, fitting perfectly the idea of modern Commedia clowns. These are not circus clowns, but unique characters evoking the many dimensions of comedy.

This show is a hoot. It combines irreverence and skill, originality and tight execution, and cheap sight gags and cleverness. After seeing this show, I actually looked up Titus in my anthology of Shakespeare to check, and found that indeed, all the murder, mayhem, and dismemberment are right there in the script. It is no surprise that “straight” productions of Titus are rare – I can’t imagine a modern theatre company pulling off a sincere production. This is just one more reason to head to Buntport and see this much more entertaining version.

-Craig Williamson, January 20, 2005, North Denver Tribune

Two women clasp hands as they look out, wide-eyed. One of the women wears a fake mustache. Behind them, peaking out of the window of a van that has been painted like a forest, three men are watching.

The Metropolitan- The Buntport Theatre Presents: Titus Andronicus: The Musical!

Imagine, if you will, theatre that blends the irreverent energy of Monty Python and Kids in the Hall, the decorous poetry of Shakespeare, the absurdist zeal of French playwright Eugene Ionesco and the toe-tapping, finger snapping rhythms of your best off-Broadway show. These disparate dramatic elements come together in “Titus Andronicus: The Musical,” a liberal interpretation of Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy currently enjoying a revival at Denver’s Buntport Theatre.

The Denver-based theatre company has devoted itself to pushing the boundaries of comedy and dramatic convention since 1998, with plays and skits that are rooted simultaneously in a highbrow literary tradition and an uninhibited silliness. The Buntport’s productions have incorporated subjects ranging from the angst-ridden German novelist Franz Kafka to the Greek epic poet Homer.

For those who have had an aversion to Shakespeare’s lofty language and long-winded intrigue, the Buntport Theatre’s impertinent spin on one of the Bard’s most melodramatic plots is both refreshing and redemptive. The witty asides, striking sight gags, and brilliant feats of physical comedy breathe life into what is traditionally viewed as Shakespeare’s most unoriginal tragedy. The five players display a consummate energy and enthusiasm as they take on multiple roles and laboriously move their one piece of scenery, a converted Econoline van that serves as the center of action. This creativity and endless innovation render the unlikely parody entirely natural, as if Shakespeare had rewritten the ancient Roman drama specifically as a comedic vehicle.

And, of course, there’s the music. The play’s constant violence and high death toll make the original score all the more inappropriate and effective in its irreverence. In one of the drama’s most traditionally taut and disturbing moments, the title character must have his hand amputated in order to appease the emperor. In the Buntport’s send up, the tension is broken as the characters break into a tweaked version of “Somewhere Beyond the Sea.”

The troupe works out of a transformed warehouse, and the players expertly manipulate the intimate space to engage the audience. The viewers are exhorted to participate by the sheer immediacy of the action. When the music sounds, it is as if one is at a casual concert at a comfortable club. When the pitch of the players’ voices hit their heights, the onlookers are a forcible part of the action by their very proximity. Finally, when the comedy finds its stride, creating a deft balance between the high minded and the profanely wacky, one cannot help but become immersed in the lunacy of it all.

It is in their expert fusion of high drama and sheer silliness, their uncanny ability to reconcile the polar opposites of the stage that the Buntport troupe distinguishes itself as a group of comedians. This subtle and elusive equilibrium is what marks the best comedy and the best comedians. The skill the Buntport players display in walking the line distinguish them not only as local notables, but as comedic performers worthy of national attention.

-Adam H. Goldstein, January 20, 2005, The Metropolitan

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”.

Westword- Bloody Good Fun

Buntport’s Titus Andronicus! The Musical still kills.

Going to the theater alone is depressing, so part of my job as a reviewer involves coaxing, bribing and seducing friends and family members into accompanying me. Over the years, I’ve come to rely on these companions — wise and perspicacious people all — even when their opinions clash with mine. They provide a sorely needed outside perspective, moments of insight, a salutary reminder that not everyone sees the world in the same way that I do.

It takes some thought, figuring out who should be invited to what. So-and-so likes big musicals; someone else is drawn to British comedy; this friend is in love with language; this one admires spectacle. If a friend has seen too many clunkers in a row, I try to sweeten the pot with a production I expect to be excellent (though predicting excellence is harder than you might think). Then again, many of my friends don’t mind a bad show, because we have so much fun slicing and dicing it afterward.

It’s telling that everyone who’s ever accompanied me to Buntport wants to go again. For Titus Andronicus! The Musical — a restaging of the hilarious production the Buntporters mounted a couple of years ago — I invited Linda, who had never before visited this cavernous theater warehouse space on the outskirts of town. Within minutes of our being seated, amid the general cachinnation of the audience, I heard her low, musical peals of laughter. “They’re really clever,” she murmured.

Titus Andronicus is a Shakespeare play so awful that for centuries, many scholars refused to believe that Shakespeare had actually written it. Forced to concede the point, they scrambled for explanations. It was co-written with someone else. It’s not really that bad. It’s a parody.

The plot alone is a howler. It involves the Roman conqueror, Titus, and his captive, Tamora, Queen of the Goths. There are lots of sons — Titus’s, Tamora’s, the sons of Saturninus, himself son of the Emperor. You also get lust, hate, revenge, rape, murder, mutilation and rivers of blood. Each unbelievable plot twist seems to exist solely for the purpose of ushering in more mayhem.

In the Buntport version, five actors play all of the characters, using minimal costumes and scenery. There’s a board to one side of the stage adorned with caricatures of the actors’ faces. Beneath each face is a list of names, and above each name is a lightbulb. At the beginning of every scene, someone runs to the board and rapidly illuminates the relevant bulbs so you know which character the actor is supposed to be at that moment. Some characters, like Tamora’s sons, are represented by objects — in this case, a gas can and a radio. Evan Weissman plays only one role throughout — actually, multiple roles wrapped into one. This guy is called Someone Who Will Probably Die. Like Kenny in South Park, Weissman gets knocked off over and over again; unlike Kenny, he does it with a certain sneering élan.

In addition to the helpful character board and a second board on which the corpse score is noted in chalk, there’s a van in the middle of the space, painted to represent a house on one side and a forest on the other. This van is rolled from place to place by the actors as needed, while Brian Colonna, who plays Titus with insane energy, urges the audience to help by yelling, “Push, push.” Pretty soon it sounds as if you’re in an obstetrics ward with a horde of prospective fathers. And, yes, we do ultimately get a newborn on stage — Tamora’s son, who, because of his resemblance to her evil Moor lover, Aaron, she — Lady Macbeth-like — wants killed. (Aaron isn’t a Moor in the Buntport version; what gives away the child’s paternity is the fact that he’s inherited his father’s black mustache.)

The action is punctuated by song. At one point, Titus is convinced that he can save his two kidnapped sons by cutting off his hand. He, his brother and a third son compete for the honor of mutilation in a warbling trio. There’s also cheerful singing as Tamora instructs her sons in how to rape and mutilate Titus’s daughter Lavinia, played by Hannah Duggan.

The acting is frantically funny. Erik Edborg prances and weaves about the stage like an animated cartoon figure; Erin Rollman is a smoothly evil Tamora. No one can do silent exasperation better than Hannah Duggan: Her expression when Titus asks her to reveal the name of her assailants after the rape — she’s dripping blood and supposedly missing both hands and tongue — is priceless.

There’s no attempt to make a statement here, just a fast, effervescent evening of fun. “You’ll let me know when these guys do another production?” asked Linda as we left.

-Juliet Wittman, January 27, 2005, Westword

One woman holds her hand over the mouth of another woman.

Westword- Sketchy Stuff • Buntport’s Macblank, while funny, feels like an extended skit

In putting together their original comedy Macblank, the folks at Buntport relied on the theatrical superstition that there’s a curse on Shakespeare’s Macbeth and that those performing it are in danger of unknown catastrophe. There really are actors who refuse to speak the play’s title in a theater, and it’s well known in theatrical circles that if the name has been spoken, the speaker must turn three times and spit over his left shoulder. Or quote a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Or something like that.

Macblank involves a company of five that is developing an experimental version of “The Scottish Play,” and their curse is Beth, played by Erin Rollman, who’s both the most superstitious and the most murderously ambitious member of the cast. Beth is blind, self-righteous, a whiner and a bully. She’s followed everywhere by devoted Greg (Evan Weissman), who’s given to quoting outworn proverbs and uttering strange non sequiturs. Hannah Duggan’s Miranda tries to serve as the voice of reason, but she only becomes genuinely animated and involved when describing her own life, whose turns and twists mirror several of Shakespeare’s plots. Brian Colonna is Rob, who lives a typical actor’s life. That is, he works six jobs, arriving at the theater exhausted to watch in horror as everything falls apart. And, of course, there’s the company star, the guy with the phony British accent: Ryan, as played by Erik Edborg.

These are smart, inspired and highly original comics, and their audacity alone has the audience spluttering with laughter. Beth recites, with profound satisfaction, example after example of problems attending Macbeth productions (she knows, because she’s Googled the topic); consults her horoscope in Cosmopolitan for hints that she, not Ryan, should be playing the lead; ignores lovelorn Greg; and wields a baseball bat with fiendish determination. Miranda glows as she describes a boyfriend “hung like a donkey,” a cousin who was served gerbils baked in a pie, and the time she accidentally made out with “a girl dressed as a guy.” The best monologue is delivered by Greg, who describes his childhood performing experiences in a meaningless mishmash of sense and sentiment that includes memories of his grandmother’s gifts of packets of saccharin. This is the kind of odd, discursive humor pioneered by the late, lamented Andy Kaufman — except that where Kaufman, under his mask of innocent passivity, was clearly a hostile character, Weissman’s Greg is all shiny eyed ignorant sweetness.

Buntport opened two shows in tandem this season. The first, Kafka on Ice, is brilliant, while Macblank shows signs of being hastily put together. Edborg, in particular, seems to only half inhabit his role. Ryan is fascinating at the beginning, and Edborg certainly rises to all the big comic moments, including a brilliantly uninhibited rendition of Puck’s epilogue in Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the English accent comes and goes, and when Ryan sustains a leg injury, Edborg can’t even be bothered to limp, climbing onto a chair with the supposedly injured limb taking all the weight — an Acting 101 mistake.

Macblank is more an extended comedy sketch — albeit a sophisticated one — than a play. After a while, the humor begins to feel a little repetitive, and you want a trace of plot and some character development. Still, even though this show lacks the inventiveness of Kafka on Ice, it makes for an entertaining evening.

-Juliet Wittman, October 28, 2004, Westword

A man writing at a desk concentrates as a large beetle looms behind him.

Rocky Mountain News- Kafka’s life gets a frivolous spin • Buntport skates over a few of play’s themes for sake of humor

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

On a carpeted floor, two people are in a battle. One has a sword, the other has a baseball bat.

Denver Post- Curse of Macbeth: “Macblank” loses steam

Who would have thought if you pitted William Shakespeare against Franz Kafka mano a maggot, the bug would squash the Bard?

When it comes to the two original productions the Buntport Theater Company is running in repertory through Dec. 3, “Macblank” is an amusement compared to the more sophisticated and realized “Kafka on Ice”.

No one produces original ensemble comedies with the intelligence and depth of Buntport. What makes them so magnificent is that they have such a low threshold for boredom. They constantly concoct artistic challenges for themselves both noble and mad. Here, not content with merely presenting their 14th new collaboration, they are debuting Nos. 14 and 15 simultaneously.

“Macblank” would have made for a fabulous episode of Buntport’s winter side gig, “Magnets on the Fridge,” the biweekly original sit-com that returns for a fourth season Nov. 16. Each episode is loosely based on a random book title, and “Macblank” plays as if the Scottish play were the most recent slip of paper pulled from the lunch pail.

Each “Magnets” episode is developed in its miraculous entirety in two weeks. That is part of the appeal. But as a mainstage production, “Macblank” feels similarly rushed.

“Macblank” is constructed, too loosely, as a documentary of one company’s doomed production of “Macbeth,” the world’s most famously cursed play. So many bad things have happened during 400 years of productions, thespians won’t even utter the title inside a theater unless in performance.

“Macblank” is so pregnant with parody possibilities, it’s like plugging fish in a pond. The Buntporters lampoon all those “Macbeth” superstitions while sweetly toying with the peccadilloes and insecurities of actors and poking self-effacing fun at themselves.

The “Macblank” troupe consists of five lovingly hardcore theater geeks whose names have been changed to protect them from being too easily compared to the Buntporters playing them.

Stuffy Ryan (Erik Edborg) dons a faux British accent from having lived in London for 21 months as a boy. Rob (Brian Colonna) is the typical tense actor working six miserable jobs. But underdog Evan Weissman walks away with the show as misfit Greg, the prototypical theater outcast. He’s a sweetly insecure loner looking more for a home in this theater (or a girlfriend) than a calling. Greg constantly blurts awkward non-sequiters that ring painfully true to anyone who has ever tried a little too hard to fit in.

Then there is Beth (Erin Rollman), heartbreakingly passive-aggressive and growing drunk with desire to improve her position in the production. You know there must be underlying parallels to Shakespearean text, and in Beth we are clearly witnessing a descent into murderous madness to match the killer king. Ah, such a thin line between a curse and a capital crime.

Between scenes, cast members offer “Real World”-style confessionals. Most amusing are Miranda’s (Hannah Duggan) real-life travails, all of which parallel Bard works such as “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (my boyfriend looks like a donkey!”).

But as the evening wears on, “Macblank” runs out of steam. The evening is dominated by Beth’s anecdotes about past cursed productions, and a device that works initially grows tiresome. More fun could have been had with the fact that Charlton Heston once suffered severe burns on his groin from wearing tights that had been “accidentally” soaked in kerosene in a 1953 production.

Because the company’s adherence to “Macbeth” parallels go by the boards, the evening ends with a thud. Our perpetrator suffers no consequences, and no outsiders sweep in to clean up the mess.

But there are worse things that could be said of a company than that really it only suffers in comparison to itself. Call it the curse of Kafka.

-John Moore, October 21, 2004, Denver Post