Buntport Theater

Season 6

A sailor wearing bright yellow overalls and boots sits on a barrel marked “whale oil” while holding a spoon and a metal bowl. In the background is a red curtain, a rope ladder, and several hanging buckets.

Westword- The floor gets very wet in Moby Dick Unread

When I first attended a Buntport Theater Company production and found six people in the audience – myself and my friend two of them – I’d never have predicted that the troupe would make it ten years. Other smart and talented companies have fallen by the wayside, but the six Buntporters, who met at Colorado College, moved to Denver and create all their material collaboratively, just keep on going. For this anniversary season, they’ve chosen to remount some past productions and do staged readings of a couple of others. Some might see this as a copout or a year-long semi-vacation – and I’m sure it’s partly that. But it’s also an opportunity for the members to examine past material and get a sense of where they might yet go. And for viewers who haven’t yet experienced their quirky, experimental brand of theater, it’s a chance to catch up.

The company has done a lot of exploring in ten years. Buntport has created spoofs of well-worn genres; rock musicals; horror; a serious, low-key domestic play; and another that’s upside-down political. Everything it does testifies to the power inherent in objects – which sometimes become people – as well as the crazy malleability of the physical universe and the centrality of the actor, who creates entire new realities with nothing but his mind, voice and body. The sets are cheap and inventive, the scripts a mix of brilliance and silliness. Among the shows Buntport will reprise this year are Seal. Stamp. Send. Bang., a ridiculously funny takeoff on the postal system; Winter in Graupel Bay, a bittersweet evocation of small-town life; The 30th of Baydak, which reminds us of the grim reality of life under dictatorship; and perhaps my favorite Buntport show ever, Kafka on Ice, a play I thought would never come back because some nasty human had stolen the artificial ice on which the action takes place.

The first revival, Moby Dick Unread, opened last week. The inspiration is literary, and the tone veers dangerously between satire and homage. Someone in the troupe – or perhaps everyone – loves Melville and wanted to spend weeks immersed in his great novel. But what caught Buntport’s attention was not the overarching story of Captain Ahab and his nemesis, but all the quirks and diversions. Where producers usually streamline novels, the Buntporters focused on Melville’s disquisitions about carpentry, whether the whale is or isn’t a fish, Garnery’s paintings of whales and whaling, and the difference between a fast and a loose fish. They found humor in Moby Dick, and also moments of poignance – such as Pip’s near-drowning and subsequent madness. Inevitably, this means there’s a shagginess, even formlessness, to the production, but it’s faithful to the discursive nature of the book. Mercifully, it’s also much, much shorter.

Other Buntportian hallmarks include self-mockery. The actors frequently draw our attention to the artificiality of what they’re doing. They switch roles by donning a hat or doffing a sock. The sea is a group of buckets suspended by ropes, the harpoon a spoon, Jonah’s whale a chalk drawing. “We’re making do,” everyone keeps assuring us. But we only need a chalk outline or a toy to represent the whale, since it’s the concept of whaleness that Buntport is evoking.

When I lived in New York, experimental theater was contemptuous at the core. You – the audience – were the bourgeoisie, and you were there to be scorned and made uncomfortable. The actors might yell in your face, or jump over you, or release live rats among the seats. The Buntporters are exploring some artistic edges, but they’re doing it in the most genial way possible. The floor gets very wet in Moby Dick Unread. So at the end, after the applause, the actors walk forward and – almost before you can figure out what they’re holding under their arms – unroll strips of carpeting so you can get to the exit without slipping. How can you not love these guys?There are also moments of unexpected beauty: The prologue is performed by Eric Edborg, who summarizes the entire plot by chasing a wind-up white whale around a tank of water – but then he suddenly sends a long arc of glistening spray from one end of the playing area to the other. The other performers – all energetic and delightful – are Erin Rollman, Hannah Duggan and Brian Colonna.

-Juliet Wittman, September 23, 2010, Westword

Two men, one seated and one standing, are “rowing” in a wooden coffin, using mops as oars. In the background is a red curtain, a rope ladder, and several hanging buckets.

Westword- Moby Dick Unread • Buntport presents a whale of a tale

One of the perils of an English education is that it leaves gaps. While I and any of my old school friends could discuss Shaw, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf at some length — and on a more contemporary note, I’d be happy to talk your ear off about Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie — I’ve read very little of Steinbeck, Hemingway and quite a few other American heavyweights. Of Herman Melville, I know only “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

When members of Buntport Theater promise that you don’t have to have read Moby-Dick in order to enjoy their Moby Dick Unread (in fact, they suggest that you see the production, then impress your friends by pretending you’ve read the novel), they’re telling the truth. I did enjoy the play.

Most stage and film adaptations of novels emphasize the story line, streamlining the action and trimming away minor scenes, the author’s digressions, sometimes a subplot or two. But the Buntport team announces proudly, “This is Moby-Dick with all the fat.” They linger lovingly on Pip’s ordeal alone in the vast sea and the arcana of an actual historic London court case on whale fishery that made a careful distinction between a “fast fish” and a “loose fish.” The result is a kind of serio-comic glossary, a meditation on Melville’s masterwork. It’s also as inventive as everything Buntport does, making clever use of space arrangements and objects (a rope ladder, buckets of water suspended from the ceiling) and combining parody and homage.

As always, the actors create their low-tech special effects with what seems like touching earnestness while their faces and bodies offer ironic comments: Look, we’ve drawn a large chalk whale on the back wall. Laugh all you want, but notice that it’s also resonant with meaning. Perhaps even mythic. Think of the vastness of the sea, the mystery of these huge creatures. Think of Job. Oh, come on, folks — don’t get that serious. It’s just a chalk drawing. “We’re making do,” various members of the cast keep telling us after particularly iffy or unexpected pieces of business. Because the style is so unpretentious, the heavy subject matter seems light and palatable, yet it’s never trivialized. Rather than coming between you and Melville’s world, the Buntporters — Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman, with Evan Weissman and SamAntha Schmitz working off-stage — illuminate it. And Edborg’s prologue, which uses an aquarium and a wind-up toy whale to give you the entire action of the play, is worth the price of admission on its own.

But though I had the promised good time, I couldn’t help noticing that my friend, Jim, who had studied the book in college, was more deeply mesmerized by the production, and hugely exhilarated afterward. When he talked about what we’d seen on the way home, I realized that he’d found all kinds of echoes and subtleties that I’d only partly glimpsed, and Moby Dick Unread became thicker and richer in my mind. My response to the idea of actually reading Melville’s swollen, portentous, 650-page epic has always been quite unequivocal: I would prefer not to. Buntport not only provided a fine evening of theater, but it inspired me to pick up the damn thing and begin. That has to count for quite a lot.

-Juliet Wittman, April 12, 2007, Westword

A man in a red top, black suspenders, and glasses looks out inquisitively. Behind him are several hanging buckets in front of a red curtain.

Out Front- “Moby Dick Unread”

Landlubbers beware! Buntport hath lampooned the whale!

Do not arrive late for “Moby Dick Unread.” The curtain-raising scene done by Erik Edborg is sublime in its supremely funny conception and execution. It involves a toy whale, an aquarium and one of the funniest faces and physiologies to hit the Denver stage in eons. More I will not tell you. You have got to experience this funny bone satisfying condensation of the essentials of Melville’s novel for yourself. Brian Colonna’s a Pip which slips beneath the waves to Davey Jones’ Locker as skillfully as he ascends to the light at the top of the waves, er, buckets. This is Moby Dick with the blubber left on. All the parts you skipped over to get to the juicy parts are suddenly alive with the imaginative writing, acting and staging at Buntport. Izaiah d. buzeth’s sound design for “Moby Dick Unread” is so right on target that whenever he aims his sonic wand at the young geniuses on stage, their art is experienced to an exponentially funny degree. Magnificent! Hannah Duggan is especially funny as the peg-legged Ahab. One scene in which the Pequod skims over the stage and past the first row with Ms. Duggan staring stony-visaged above the crowd, did not receive the applause and laughter that it should have on the night I attended. It was a moment of sublime cinematic theatricality of the comic variety. The marvelous inventiveness of the scenic design comes from that childlike creativity one associates with the sandbox. And as Hamlet says, “The play’s the thing.” The energy of this group is formidable as they take on the major and minor characters of Melville’s famous tome. Erin Rollman is outstanding in numerous roles which are delineated in costume and prop only by the switching to beard or hat or pipe. There is a storm in which it rains “buckets,” which is magnificently staged with Buntport’s signature panache. The show is dazzling, and I must thank Buntport. Now I don’t ever have to read the book.

Get on board the Pequod now or be keel-hauled by those who color within the lines!

Not to be missed.

-David Marlowe, April 2007, Out Front

Three sailors sit in a small sailboat. A fourth sits on the edge of the boat, wearing bright yellow waders

Moby Dick Unread

THAR SHE BLOWS

Four performers, one boat on wheels and a few buckets of water add up to all 135 chapters of Melville’s classic novel.

(more…)

Rocky Mountain News- Buntport navigates wacky waters

From its beginning, Buntport Theater has shown some marked strengths: taking an irreverent approach to literary classics; creating sets that dazzle the eye because of their ingenuity, not their expense; and making the audience laugh rather hard.

All three talents take the stage again in Moby Dick Unread, a 90-minute take on the Melville novel that most people know but few have read. Buntport takes advantage of that point to spin off in wild tangents, focusing more on the arcana of the epic than silly things like plot and character development.

Things begin portentously, as Erik Edborg silently takes the stage, where, to very serious music, he winds up a plastic whale and drops it in a fish tank, enacting a pantomime battle with nature as he plunges hands, arms and head into the water in a fruitless attempt to capture the toy.

But these creative forces – four onstage actors, aided by Samantha Schmitz and Evan Weissman – would never settle for such a simple setup. Rather, they roll out a small wooden sailboat that serves as the Pequod, and buckets of water descend from the ceiling, soon serving a multitude of purposes and suggesting a sailing vessel’s riggings. A large rope ladder in the corner allows for more diverse staging, as well as an allusion to a ship’s crow’s nest.

The actors go through an elaborate explanation of how we know, for example, when Erin Rollman is Starbuck and when she is the ship’s carpenter, but distinctions like a beard or a hat don’t help as much as characterization. In truth, any fidelity to portrayals carries less weight in this production than the comic surprises in store.

Brian Colonna utters the book’s opening words, “Call me Ishmael,” and serves as a kind of everyschlub observing the battle royale before him. Hannah Duggan wears a brown sock for Captain Ahab’s peg leg but is most enjoyable when her Ahab sobs over the whale or whines over leaking oil.

Like most of the company, Edborg plays multiple characters, and contorts his face with lickety-split reactions.

Rollman distinguishes herself again, creating characters so distinctive they don’t need costuming. Her barking, growling Starbuck contrasts nicely with the muttering, stammering ship’s carpenter.

Bits and pieces float through this production, from the taxonomy of whales to the story of Jonah. The play does begin to outlast its inventions, but when a group consistently turns out dazzling, original work of high quality, such complaints seem like asking for a second dessert.

-Lisa Bornstein, April 6, 2007, Rocky Mountain News

A woman in a peacoat and fingerless gloves holds rope tied to a spoon in a threatening manner. Several metal buckets hang from above.

Denver Post- “Moby” fathoms the funny while trolling the deep

“Moby Dick Unread” begins with a mad actor dropping a tiny wind-up whale into an aquarium.

Hit the dramatic music, and soon Erik Edborg is splashing madly trying to retrieve the toy, finally taking a desperate cue from Buster Keaton and attempting a candy- apple-style head-bob. He fails. He silently curses the gods. Blackout.

This prologue could be subtitled, “Moby Dick in Miniature.”

They’re lying, of course, with that “Unread” title. The smarty-pants from the Buntport Theater have not only pored over Herman Melville’s 135-chapter classic, they’ve likely burned a few bags of popcorn mocking Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart taking turns as the apoplectic Ahab on celluloid.

“Moby Dick Unread” is Buntport’s 21st original undertaking, though if this great young company has an m.o., it’s just this kind of quirky literary re-interpretation (having already toyed with “Cinderella,” “The Odyssey,” “Hamlet,” “Titus Andronicus” and “Don Quixote,” not to mention five years of “Magnets on the Fridge” book-club episodes).

These are theatrical Cliff’sNotes for short-attention spans – respectful of the original but infinitely more fun.

Walking into Buntport is like walking into a new world every time. This group of six thirtyish pals always comes up with something so wonderful to behold, you feel like a kid again.

For “Moby Dick Unread,” it’s the 15 pails of water dangling from the rafters, which will become overturned during a brilliantly staged storm. It’s the glorified canoe on wheels that doubles as the Pequod. It’s the use of Edborg’s stomach as a storyboard. It’s the chalkboard etching of a whale against a wall that’s just big enough to make the man standing in front of it appear to be Jonah inside that other famous fish’s belly.

It’s easy to see how staging Ahab’s epic, ongoing aquatic chase on dry land must have seemed irresistible to Buntport. The universality of our obsessive need to stare down our demons is evident to anyone who’s seen “Zodiac.” White whales: We all have one.

But at its core, Melville’s tale is a lonely and solitary pursuit. Buntport also captures its melancholy, as well as its musical, mystical and religious undertones. There’s a constant underscore of ocean sounds punctuated by sad strings and hearty whaler songs. Like the book, this staging is funny and weird, and ultimately quite sad.

Our four on-stage actors are Edborg, Erin Rollman, Hannah Duggan and Brian Colonna (with Evan Weissman pulling backstage ropes and Samantha Schmitz handling technical duties). In quick-change fashion they bring us Ishmael, Starbuck, Elijah, Queequeg, Pip and more.

But this ensemble, which writes and stages all its shows in collaboration, is also charmingly enamored with Melville’s odd meanderings and side stories, which is why they bill the show as “Moby Dick with the fat left on” – while still coming in at a lickety-split 80 minutes.

The actors have self-deprecating fun with their own lack of ethnicity (the crew of the Pequod was multinational, and our four actors are as white as Ahab’s whalebone leg). They each have great moments but this time it’s the versatile Edborg, and particularly Duggan as the revenge-driven Ahab, who most resonate.

The actors’ recurring mantra is, “We’re making do.” And do they, until things end with a thud. After that stunningly staged storm comes the climactic chase, in which Ahab gets caught in harpoon ropes and becomes forever lashed to the whale. But we don’t see it. We’re told straight out, “We couldn’t think how to show that to you.” So, finis.

I appreciated the honesty, but having been spoiled by that storm, I felt let down. It didn’t seem so much like they were “making do,” it seemed like perhaps they had just run out of time.

-John Moore, April 5, 2007 Denver Post

A woman in a pink top and flowered apron holds a watering can in one hand and a white cockatiel bird in the other. She is speaking to the bird, dotingly.

Rocky Mountain News- Buntport players bring eccentricities of ‘Graupel Bay’ to life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A man in a pinstriped suit clasps his hands in his lap, staring out wistfully.

Westword- Winter in Graupel Bay • Our Town meets our town in Buntport’s latest

When you enter Buntport Theater, you find yourself facing what looks like the front of a long, low, open dollhouse with rooms on two floors. These spaces are inhabited by various eccentric characters. There’s Polly, the little girl who serves as narrator; a pair of gossiping old crones;

the hapless and perennially unemployed Andrew Fromer, with his dreams about a vaudevillian grandfather who played the rear end of a horse and longed to play the front. Bruce Bentley is a man with a single passion, photographing snowflakes; the town drunk, Toothy Bill, has the soul of a poet; the proprietor of the local shop fondles an imaginary pet – Snowflake, her deceased and beloved cat. And we also meet Lady Fergus, a delusional elderly woman who believes she’s an aristocrat and has persuaded the local banker to serve as her butler.

The day is the winter solstice, and the tone of Winter in Graupel Bay nostalgic and tinged with melancholy. There’s a touch of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, or such pastiche, multi-voice pieces as Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood and Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Polly grieves for the lengthening nights and shortening days; later, we learn that it’s possible to celebrate darkness.

With each of the five Buntport actors playing more than one role, the action flows easily from space to space. Some of the characters are more convincing than others. Erin Rollman is charming as the precocious Polly; her shop proprietor and befuddled Lady Fergus are funny but less grounded. You feel for Hannah Duggan’s lovestruck Peg Muford and Brian Colonna’s sad-sack Andrew Fromer. Erik Edborg’s Toothy Bill, with his kick-stamp walk and wolfish grin, is quite wonderful – as is the enigmatic persona Edborg presents at the play’s end, despite the fact that I never figured out who he was supposed to be or what he represented. Something to do with the moon, I think.

Winter at Graupel Bay contains so many of the elements I love about Buntport – the humor, intelligence and originality; the ingenious use of space; the lively, expressive music and appealing performances – that I hate to say it doesn’t quite work. But alas, it doesn’t. While the production is pleasant to watch and often humorous, it’s neither consistently comic nor consistently evocative. A lot of the dialogue is literate and interesting, but other parts are flat. The character of Bruce Bentley, for example, is clearly based on nineteenth-century naturalist Wilson Bentley. According to Kay Redfield Jamison’s wonderful book, Exuberance, Bentley brought such passion to the photographing of snowflakes that he mourned for years over one crystal, broken while being transferred to a slide. Evan Weissman renders Bentley’s quiet depth perfectly. But the script calls for Bentley, frustrated by a dry spell, to simulate a snowstorm with flour, creating a model of the town and deploying a large sifter. The result is clever, but the entire concept struck me as too self consciously whimsical. As did the ever-present dead cat, although Rollman’s mime as she stroked and cuddled it, and at one point tried to avoid being scratched, was very amusing.

Like all of Buntport’s plays, Winter in Graupel Bay was developed entirely by the seven-person company. (In addition to the on-stage actors, Matt Petraglia and SamAnTha Schmitz contribute their creativity and expertise.) What they’ve created here is charming and soulful, but it needs more work and a stronger, clearer contour.

-Juliet Wittman, December 14th, 2006, Westword

An annoyed woman in a sleeping cap clutches her bed covers as a smiling man sits on the edge of her bed, holding a small tray with a teacup and sugar bowl on it.

Denver Post- Buntport stitches life of a town into holiday quilt

To answer the perennially perplexing question – “What to perform during the holidays?” – Denver’s perpetually innovative Buntport Theater has created “Winter in Graupel Bay,” a poignant and witty snapshot of the residents of a small town on the shortest day of the year.

The company’s evolving proficiency in collaborative theater – this is its 20th original production – expresses itself in a delightfully complex and interwoven storyline and a poetic script that conjures a neighborhood somewhere in the vicinity of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” and Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood.”

A spare but multifaceted set offers us a cutaway of the residents’ living quarters and entry into their intimate behavior. The jazzy sound design that accompanies the scenic interludes of the burghers scurrying to and fro sets an up-tempo pace for the proceedings.

Above all, Graupel Bay is inhabited by a collection of quintessential characters; company members play multiple roles. Precocious Polly Soldonovich (Erin Rollman) serves as the narrator, setting the stage and filling us in on the locals’ eccentricities. Dressed in a jumper and accompanied by only a small rubber ball, Rollman skips from one abode to the next, inviting us to join her as she makes her inquisitive rounds.

First, there’s Mrs. Green, an elderly gossip who trades barbs with Mrs. Walsper at tea every day, where they perform their version of Russian roulette, each trying to poison the other when she’s not looking. In an ongoing series of vignettes, Hannah Duggan and Rollman switch cups with elaborate hand choreography, orchestrated to a riot of vocal gymnastics that air the neighborhood’s dirty laundry.

Every town needs a loser, and in Graupel Bay that’s Andrew Fromer, who for the life of him can’t seem to land a job. Morose from head to toe with a face nearly as long, Brian Colonna’s Andrew mopes around town when he’s not seeking solace in sleep. We learn he’s inherited his karma from Great-Grandfather Fromer (Evan Weissman), who spent his whole career in show biz as the rear end of a horse.

Weissman sends us to a bygone era with his melodramatic flair for vaudevillian song and dance numbers – first a soft-shoe solo and then a spin around the stage with Duggan’s Peg Mulord.

Erik Edborg, as the local drunk, Toothy Bill, cleverly avoids overdoing the stereotypical indications of inebriation, painting a souse worthy of the best fools: silly one moment, astute the next.

As the day unfolds, we meet the rest of the townfolk, including the irrepressible Rollman’s Miss Perkins, the terminally cheery shop owner; Lady Fergus, a pretentious bed-bound grand dame of operatic proportions; Colonna and Duggan’s Bob and Addy Hooks, he obsessed with the obits and she with her cockatoo; Weissman’s Clark Walters, a couch potato with a penchant for old movies; Bruce Bentley, whose daily purchase of flour is a local mystery; and Edborg’s William and Larry Lunelia, a lonely banker and a stargazing dreamer.

If you’re burned out on the Sugarplum Fairy’s magic and Ebenezer Scrooge’s miraculous transformation, perhaps a day in Graupel Bay is just the ticket to lift your holiday spirits and bring home your everyday blessings.

-Bob Bows, December 8th, 2006, Denver Post