The Great Debate pits teams of non-experts head-to-head, toe-to-toe, and often dumb-and-dumber in lively debates of the inconsequential. Mundane topics are brought to life by ordinary, but opinionated folks. You’re bound to be a flip-flopper after listening to compelling arguments on things that never mattered.
Tickets are Name Your Price!
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Join us for a special Holiday Edition of BuntporTED Talks! In addition to watching “inspiring”, “informative”, ridiculous TED-style talks related to the holiday season, you’ll have the opportunity to win delicious treats (and, maybe, terrible prizes). There will be a smattering of fun activities, including live screen-printing of a new Buntport design so feel free to bring a t-shirt, tote, or something else to get printed (the design is 9×11). An end-of-year FUNdraiser — yes, we did the capitalizing “fun” thing like big nerds.
Tickets are Name Your Price
Please note that, due to many recent theater closures due to Covid outbreaks, we are still asking our audience to wear masks at in person events. Thank you for understanding.
You can also schedule your donations for Colorado Gives Day now! Click here!
LINCOLN PARK — Buntport Theater is unconventional. And with their new production, Crud, a story created using all the things found in an abandoned storage locker, they have moved even further toward the unorthodox. This is no mere attempt to reconstruct the past of this odd collection of stuff, it is something new, literally creating characters and the story from crud. It is a story of memory, of things, and of identity.
The play, created by the Buntport five, SamAnTha Schmitz, Erin Rollman, Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, and Brian Colonna, is surreal. Things seem to be real, with jelly toast, antlers, dolls (some in pieces), and shoes, just to name a tiny percentage of the featured crud. And there is a live video feed, constantly providing surveillance, adding an artificial layer of apparent reality. But by focusing on the stuff, the things, the possessions, and always worrying about if someone might be taking them, three of the characters ironically become completely blind to their possessions disappearing. It makes no sense as I describe it, but it seemed to make sense as I watched it on stage. I think it did, anyway.
Two characters are (sort-of) visible onstage as the house opens and the audience trickles in. Two more appear later. These characters are not separate from their stuff; they are physically and emotionally made of crud. But they are also human, and we can relate to them, perhaps more so because they are so tied up in stuff, in physical possessions, just as we all are.
The actors create these surreal yet real characters naturally. Brian Colonna is Broken Baby Doll Detective, with another broken baby doll detective on his shoulder, constantly clarifying which of those descriptions qualify which words. Militantly stuck in his need for “surveillancing,” he refuses to actually look at what is really happening around him. Erin Rollman is at her bizarre best as Dear Deer, climbing about the piles of crud, wonderfully thrilled by the simple pleasure of jelly toast. Hannah Duggan is comfortable as Barely Bear, in a costume that is amazing. The three are constantly interacting, mostly bickering and playing games, just as we would expect from those who have little real substance to their lives, but instead are focused on stuff. As the character called “I have no name,” Erik Edborg is the antithesis of the others … sort of. He is invisible to them, most of the time, and frightening to them when he appears. He is the only character that remembers things, which creates a very strange dynamic. He tells them that they will forget him, but that does not keep them from forgetting him a few minutes later. At times, he seems cruel, but he is not – he is compassionate, but can’t do anything for the others, because they only focus on crud.
The design elements cannot be considered separately from the play itself. Because Buntport fully integrates the creation of their scenery and costumes with the playmaking process, they are a crucial part of the storytelling. Even in this case, when all the stuff, the building blocks of the set and costumes, came from the storage locker, the way they put everything together onstage and in the costumes is phenomenal. Barely Bear’s costume, in particular, is amazing, not appearing human, nor really bear-like, but precisely what this character should be. “I have no name” is nearly invisible at the start, with the surveillance projected on him and his background. The live video is used appropriately, with select moments when the characters take full advantage of the capabilities it provides.
So maybe with Crud, Buntport is just being weird and funny. Very weird, and very funny. But I kept seeing glimpses of meaning as I watched, and the overarching commentary on how crud can dominate our lives and who we are is too important to ignore. In classic Buntport style, Crud is funny, absurd, and laced with meaning, but not too much meaning. And if you go see this, you will never be able to eat (or pronounce) raspberry jam quite in the same way again.
If You Go…
Crud runs through June 10 at Buntport Theater, 717 Lipan. Performances are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8:00 pm and Sundays at 3:00 pm, with an extra “pay-what-you-can” performance on Monday, June 5. Tickets are only $18 in advance, $20 at the door, with a $3 discount for students and seniors. For information and reservations call 720-946-1388 or visit www.buntport.com. Crud marks the end of Buntport’s 16th season, but their popular comic Great Debateseries continues through the summer on the third Tuesday of each month, along with The Narrators, a live storytelling show, on the third Wednesdays of each month. Look for an announcement of their 17th season this summer, which will hopefully also include the ongoing all-ages pirate/myth series Siren Song, on the second Saturday of each month.
Craig Williamson, June 1, 2017, North Denver Tribune
Amid the mess that is “The Crud” shine some gems of insight. Which is apt, since Buntport Theater’s latest, ambitious and absurdist performance piece takes on the stuff that humans keep — or, rather, shunt off to a storage unit we may or may not visit.
Last October, Buntport announced it was going to purchase a storage unit at an auction. “Yeah, like ‘Storage Wars,’ ” stated a later press release.
In that release, the company went on to lay out the artistic/philosophical parameters for its endeavor. “(W)e said that whatever we found in the locker would inspire our next play. We all knew that we didn’t intend to write a play about the original owner of the contents, but that this collection ― curated by a stranger ― would be a jumping-off point.”
I share some of the reasoning behind the entertaining albeit uneven show because it speaks to the personality of this always imaginative outfit. Because the Buntport troupe — Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, Brian Colonna and SamAnTha Schmitz (offstage) — most often operates in the “meta” sphere. Cogitate about, chuckle at and wrestle with human complexity is what the gang of five co-creators does with consistent and edgy aplomb.
And so “The Crud” finds three fanciful denizens of a pile of stuff contemplating … well, that’s the tricky part. Let’s say boredom, attachment, the waxing and waning value of “junk” for their owners.
Interceding from time to time is a white-clad fellow with a white plume atop his head. Portrayed by Edborg, the character “I Have No Name” is there to help Bearly Bear, Dear Dear and Broken Baby Doll Detective (and, more important, the audience) formulate questions about memory and forgetting, hoarding and letting go.
Off to one side of the stage is a pile of stuff that includes furniture, an old stereo receiver, clothes, a shoe here and there. It’s a “bunch of who-needs-it against a background of the same,” says I Have No Name at one point. making the comparison of the pile’s contents to those of our fading memory.
Behind a gauzy scrim on the other side of the stage is a white wall. Because the scrim acts as a screen for “surveillance” projections, the show’s visual field can be layered, disorienting or both.
The costumes, too, are bizarro. A pony head with antlers sits atop Dear Deer’s head. A wee toy man with no arms rests on Broken Baby Doll Detective’s shoulder. When introducing a hunch, the ultra-specific private eye (Colonna) presses “play’ on an old-style tape recorder. Out comes a sobering tune to loopy noirish effect. As for the kindly if dim Bearly Bear, Hannah Duggan makes a heckuva entrance (not to be spoiled here). Her pelt is made up of (mostly) stuffed animals sewn together.
Forget her moniker: Dear Deer (Rollman) isn’t very gentle. Aggravated by boredom is more like it. She does not respond favorably to Barely Bear’s sweet invitation to “go lick some batteries.” The only cure to her ennui: raspberry jelly, of which there’s a scant supply.
If “The Crud” sounds rather mad, it is.
The show has wit. When Bearly Bear gets hit with a wave of nausea, the audience guffawed. Some ender lines of dialog stick. For instance, “Let’s all hate each other is not as fun as it sounds.” And the repeated gesture of the characters greeting anxiety with “arms-open” is touching for its topsy-turvy vulnerability. As always, each cast member injects his or her performance with idiosyncratic verve.
What “The Crud” doesn’t have — and I want to say “yet,” because I can see how this show could become special in a future iteration — are some moments of empty space and quiet. Like the mix of treasures and rubbish Buntport purchased, the show’s ideas are strewn throughout the 75-minute piece.
The closest the “The Crud” comes to much-needed pauses are the interventions of Edborg’s character and the brief, repeated refrain “time passes.” It does, quite swiftly.
While a great deal of the clutter and breakneck pacing is intentional, the show would benefit from some deep breathes. Throw open that roll-up storage unit door! Let some air in!
Enter the Mysterious, work is always newly minted, nonlinear, rich in metaphor and submerged — perhaps inarticulable — meaning. Still, I can usually ferret out some kind of narrative, even if it’s highly fanciful. But I could find no real through-line or progression in Buntport’s latest original production, The Crud, which is based on objects found in a storage locker the company bought last year. That’s logical, I suppose, since the play’s oft-repeated catchphrase is “Time passes,” after which someone in the four-member cast will inevitably observe that nothing changes.
Once a hippie friend told me of an experience he’d had while stoned. (As I’m sure you know, profound breakthroughs in understanding often occur at these times.) Michael was eating mashed potatoes, and he suddenly realized that when the potatoes were on the fork in front of him, they represented the future. As soon as they were in his mouth, they became the present. And as they slid down his throat, they moved inexorably into the past. The Crud is about time, too, and like Michael’s story, it shimmers with absurd but oddly bewitching meaning. (This same Michael, by the way, once found himself intolerably thirsty while wandering in Berkeley’s People’s Park. But somehow he’d forgotten the mechanism for drinking. How did you get liquid into yourself? He tried pressing his body up against a tree in the hope that its sap would flow into him. When that didn’t work, he sat down next to a young mother seated on a bench, picked up her hand, and tried to match the tracery of veins in his wrist to the tracery in hers. He actually tried this on a few people. This being Berkeley in the ’60s, all of them surrendered their arms quietly, with no sign of surprise or resistance.)
Despite the nonexistent plot, there’s nothing sloppy or tentative about this production. In fact, it has moments that hint at tremendous insight — insight you never quite get but know is hovering in the air between you and the playing space. The acting is brilliant; Brian Colonna, Erin Rollman, Hannah Duggan and Erik Edborg (the offstage co-creator is SamAnTha Schmitz) work together with the kind of rhythm and mutual understanding that only comes from long and trusting collaboration.
The crud itself is a huge pile of cast-off objects, toys and appliances belonging to three very peculiar people. First comes Barely Bear (Duggan), who’s covered in dolls and stuffed toys, including the Cookie Monster. Dear Deer (Rollman) wears a horned horse’s head and a skirt made of rustling newspaper and magazine pages that she occasionally consults. (This touch really speaks to those of us whose shelves are filled with old journals we can’t throw away because they just might contain some crucial piece of information.) Dear Deer has a constant craving for raspberry jelly; I won’t describe the revolting way she acquires it. Then there’s the Broken Baby Doll Detective (Colonna), who behaves like a Raymond Chandler character but carries an armless doll version of himself on his shoulder — the other, literal Broken Baby Doll Detective. The objects in the pile keep disappearing, and it turns out they’re being squirreled away by I Have No Name (Edborg) to a misty place of forgotten memories behind a scrim. No Name figures there’s no harm done because the other three forget these treasures the minute they’ve vanished. All it takes is the cry “Time passes,” and for them the world begins anew.
All confusion aside, it’s hugely entertaining to watch these amazing characters bicker, laugh, fight and give up, handle objects and explore their individual worlds. The visuals are stunning. The scrim separating present from past, and through which you see everyone’s actions slightly distorted, creates a misty, shape-changing, fairytale world reminiscent of the one Alice encountered once she’d climbed through the dissolving mirror in Through the Looking Glass. Those weird costumes are miraculously evocative. Dear Deer, with her thick-soled black boots and flowing black hair, sometimes looks like a warrior woman; at other times, she’s a peculiar little girl — cocky and full of herself, but lost.
This is Waiting for Godot as written by Edward Lear: a world of color, strangeness, mystery and nonsense that you most definitely want to enter.
Juliet Wittman, May 23, 2017 Westword
HOARDER’S DELIGHT
An absurd fairy tale about both the crud on your floor and the crud in your head. (more…)
Oh ye citizens of area metropoles, it is time to get your Greek on. And two creatively robust theater companies are here to help.
The Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company and Denver’s Buntport have torn down the fourth wall to engage audiences with a tale of humans and gods. One utilizes the poetics of disaster and melancholy. The other plies mirth and throws one hell of an unreal supper party. Each boasts the fine services of a local acting luminary.
That Boulder’s “An Iliad” has timeless lessons is not exactly edifying news. Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s terse adaptation of Homer’s epic wrestles with the human tendency toward endless — and, in the case of the Greek-Trojan conflict — vain warfare.
Yet there’s great news to be had in the production, directed by Stephen Weitz. Chris Kendall’s performance as The Poet in this one-man show is awe-provoking.
The Poet arrives to the set carrying a rucksack of clinking bottles, tequila and whiskey. Sometimes he can be fuzzy on the names of the warriors — and the wars. Then again, his account isn’t limited to the bloody goings-on in Troy. At one point, a misremembered battle leads him to a foggy litany of wars. “The Punic War … The Fall of Rome …The War of the Roses … The Pequot War … The Mormon War … The Six Day War … The Troubles … Vietnam … Syria” all get a shout-out. (Ron Mueller’s set hints at the ruins of recently bombed-out towns as well as ancient dusty plains.) It is a feat and a burden to recount so much blood-letting, so much loss, so much hubris. Of course, he self-medicates.
The Poet’s recitation delivers the big names. There’s Achilles and Hector, Agamemnon and Paris. But he also sings of “the fighters of Coronea,” who man the ships in the bay outside Troy. “An Iliad” puts contemporary audiences in uncomfortable company. Such was the playwrights’ purpose in 2012, when the play premiered at the New York Theatre Workshop. (It won an Obie.)
When his memory slips, it bolsters the lessons of the play. “The point is,” The Poet continues, “on all these ships were boys from every small town in Ohio, from farmlands, from fishing villages.”
With graying hair and grizzled beard and eyes searingly focused on distant but riling memories, Kendall grabs hold of The Poet’s epic lament and never lets go. This is a performance of pause and vigor, hush and heat, not be missed but to be thrilled and chastened by.
*****
A different myth is getting a witty once-over in Buntport’s original one-act play, “The Zeus Problem.” What a dandy, a strutter, a bully Zeus is. What relish Jim Hunt takes in embodying that trespassing, traipsing, charismatic god.
A table — a really long one — is set for an odd, bickering dinner party. On one end sits Henry David Thoreau (Brian Colonna), hunched over a manuscript. He’s adapting “Prometheus Bound.” On the other end, Prometheus (Erik Edborg), Eagle (Hannah Duggan) and Io (Erin Rollman) huddle together. Zeus, being Zeus, takes any position he pleases.
How did this collection of guests come to be? Well, getting at that is the pleasing task of this comedy. Zeus has some very different ideas about Prometheus’ never-ending end. You may recall that the Titan’s punishment for giving humans fire found him chained to a rock, an eagle feasting on his liver. Duggan’s cranky Eagle would peck hard at the notion of “feasting.” Also up for debate: How did Io, the mortal daughter of Inachus, come to be a cow? Was it Zeus hiding her from his wife, Hera, or Hera herself? Or was there some other, darker cause?
The delightfully weird animal costumes for Io and the Eagle are themselves worth a night out. And the two characters chime in with critiques — smart and silly — on the sexual politics of the whole enterprise, often rendering “The Zeus Problem” utterly playful and pointed.
Did I mention the table is long? It’s long enough to become a runaway when Zeus feels the urge to vamp, to vogue, to shake his groove thang and pantomime the hurling of lightning bolts.
“An Iliad” and “The Zeus Problem” encourage us to slip into joy and sorrow, hilarity and ache. They represent a fine kind of escapism. One dons the mask of tragedy, the other comedy. And when those masks slide away, it is ourselves that we see.
Lisa Kennedy, February 16, 2017 Denver Post
If you’re a theater fan, you’ve seen Jim Hunt on various stages around town, usually playing kindly, warm-spirited, avuncular fellows. But in casting him as Zeus in The Zeus Problem, Buntport Theater Company has slipped the leash and given him immense power — and you know how power corrupts. Wearing a plum-colored jacket, white socks and sweatpants (to facilitate his “rise,” he explains more than once, gesturing toward his testicles), Hunt is a cruel, sneering, narcissistic tyrant, a god who can call down thunderbolts and — if he so chooses — obliterate humanity. For a while he rants at the audience, a long curtain drawn closed behind him. When the curtain slides back, we see we’re at a sort of dinner party. At one end of a long table sits a dapper Henry David Thoreau, earnestly scribbling away at a translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. At the other end is Prometheus, chained to his rock. Zeus has condemned him to a life of torment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humankind; a giant eagle continually tears out and eats his continually regenerating liver. That eagle is at the table, too, and so is Io, the beautiful maiden that Zeus transformed into a cow to prevent his wife, Hera, from sensing his lust for her.
Zeus has always disliked the way that he’s portrayed in Aeschylus’s play, particularly since he comes off far better in the playwright’s other works, so he’s here to harass Thoreau into doing him justice in the translation. He invents a game and orders everyone to play, collapses intermittently into sleep, argues, berates and threatens. As for the others, they have their own concerns — human, linguistic, metaphysical and plain absurd. The eagle, for instance, played by a hilariously peevish Hannah Duggan, hates liver and, if she has to eat it, thinks it should at least come with onions. Erik Edborg’s sad and complex Prometheus is primarily preoccupied with his own suffering, but he still has enough energy to face off against Zeus.
First of all, he argues, the fire he stole carries multiple meanings, spiritual as well as practical. (He doesn’t mention, though he could have, Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s theory that discovering how to control fire and cook actually made us human in the first place — and there is some discussion in the play about the effect of feeding cats cooked or raw meat.) Prometheus also points out that it was he who first introduced writing, agriculture, architecture, medicine and other civilizing arts. As for the poor, wronged Io, plaintively played by Erin Rollman, she ruminates a great deal about her digestive process, which disgusts her while also leaving her constantly hungry.
Except for a few moments of Zeusian lunacy — Hunt’s strangely Michael Jacksonish, self-celebrating dances and his occasional thunder-accompanied threat — there’s not much action; the play is pretty much all talk. But you won’t be bored for a moment, because it’s fascinating talk. The Buntport artists, who collaborated on the script with Hunt, have always been interested in language, myth and the way stories morph over time. Myths are ever-changing, and the authorship of Prometheus Bound is now disputed, too. Thoreau, played with dignity and conviction by Brian Colonna, is determined that his translation will convey as much as possible the meaning of the original, which results in his thinking a lot about rhythm and vocabulary. Watching, I was reminded of Lucas Hnath’s The Christians, now playing at the Denver Center, where an evangelical church essentially falls apart when members start arguing about the existence of hell. It’s a potent reminder of the problem of taking any key text literally, particularly the Bible, patched together from so many ancient sources. Or the United States Constitution, which strict constructionists insist requires judges to deal only with the written text and not to draw inferences from it. Language is a slippery beast, and meaning changes with changing times.
It seems that Buntport had the Trump presidency very much in mind when creating The Zeus Problem, a story about what happens when all power is invested in a single figure, particularly one as mercurial and unaccountable as Zeus. Prometheus’s mention of torture sets contemporary teeth on edge, and Zeus’s clownish and impermeable ego is irresistibly reminiscent of the current president’s. Except that Jim Hunt is a whole lot funnier.
Juliet Wittman, February 14, 2017, Westword
Buntport Theater describes their most recent creation, The Zeus Problem, as inspired by Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and current events. The story of Prometheus taking fire from the gods and giving it to humans, then being chained to a rock by Zeus, with an eagle eating his perpetually regenerating liver, is well known. But of course, this is Buntport, so they don’t just retell the story. They provide depth to all the characters, add in Henry David Thoreau working on a translation of Aeschylus’s original Greek play, and throw in the arrogant, insecure, angry, cruel, and immature tyrant Zeus, a character noticeably lacking (much to his chagrin) in the original play. While not manifestly tying the situation to the current political climate, the parallels are obvious. This is a thought-provoking and hilarious look at the original myth and at how easily power can be abused.
The play, as always written by the Buntport five, SamAnTha Schmitz, Erin Rollman, Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, and Brian Colonna, starts with a prologue by Zeus, beginning his defense for the horrible things he has done. The grand drape then opens, revealing what is later described as a “dinner party” (though only one character is actually eating anything for most of the show) at an immensely long table that also serves as an occasional acting surface. At one end is Thoreau, with his papers stacked in front of him. Zeus, of course, is seated in the center. At the other end is Prometheus, bound to a rock, Io, a woman whom Zeus has turned into a cow, and the eagle charged with pecking out and eating Prometheus’s constantly regenerating liver. The tableau is both absurd and striking, physically establishing relationships immediately. We then learn more about all the characters, with multiple layers of story being told, following what is in the original play and myth, but also providing insightful and often hilarious perspectives.
The acting is superb. Buntport had Jim Hunt in mind when they created the play, and his performance as Zeus is wonderful. He knows he is all-powerful, but he doesn’t understand or care about the suffering he causes – everything is all about him. He is constantly concerned about his appearance, the size of certain body parts, and while he says selfishly that he wants sympathy, his actions are inherently cruel. (Sound familiar?) Erik Edborg is Prometheus, pushing against Zeus, challenging the power structure. Edborg transforms nicely back and forth as he shifts to speaking the translated lines from the play, which are both jarring and surprisingly lovely (though they don’t always rhyme). As Io, Erin Rollman is tender and sympathetic, though somewhat dim (as one would expect from a cow), and intermittently hilarious as she deals with her bovine reality. Hannah Duggan brings the eagle, not a significant character in the story, to life wonderfully, complaining about her lot in life, saying that she “doesn’t even like liver,” and complaining that there are not even any onions. Both Duggan and Rollman capture an astonishing sense of the animals they are, adding bits and ticks that fit perfectly. As Thoreau, Brian Colonna is intelligent, articulate, quoting himself in appropriate ways, transcending the anachronism that brings the multiple time periods together.
Because Buntport does their own designs as they are developing a play, the technical elements are completely integrated with the storytelling. The set is lovely and striking, with a very, very long table, allowing for separation of the characters and giving Zeus a place to puff himself up above everyone else, as well as a bold and sparkling lightning bolt on the wall, never letting anyone forget Zeus’s power. The costumes are exceptional as well, particularly the two animals. It is difficult to describe why they are so good – there is more than suggestion, but they are still not literal, but allow these two talented actors to become the anthropomorphized animals. Prometheus’s t-shirt is humorously appropriate, and Thoreau is clothed appropriately for the period. The sound and lighting are both exceptional as well – the mixing of several different powerful classical music pieces when Zeus becomes angry is artistically and technically perfect.
Buntport has a remarkable ability to take a classic myth, make it interesting, very funny, and surprisingly real, and then give insights in to our lives today. Even with the humor, the pain and suffering is real. It is not just fire that Prometheus gave to humans, it is enlightenment and reason, and Zeus absolutely hates that. This is a battle between humanity and gods. To keep power, Zeus must fight against reason and justice, unwilling to admit to the cruelty of his treatment of Prometheus and Io. For humanity to survive, reason and justice must prevail, which is a very timely message.
Craig Williamson, February 10, 2017, North Denver Tribune
Denver’s theater community is putting the anxiety and tumult of the first weeks of 2017 on stage at a speed suited to a news cycle that is currently in overdrive.
Curious Theatre Company announced Thursday morning that it will produce “Building the Wall,” a new play from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan, whose name you may have seen in the news recently connected with the Oscar-nominated film “Hacksaw Ridge,” which he co-wrote.
On Friday night, Buntport Theater will also open its own show written after Trump’s election, “The Zeus Problem,” also a response of sorts — although in Buntport’s typically offbeat fashion — to the political climate.
“Building the Wall” was written in the weeks after President Donald Trump’s election and before his inauguration — and inserted into the Curious Theatre season schedule in an extraordinary midseason change.
“About a week ago this all started bubbling up, maybe ten days,” says Chip Walton, artistic director of Curious Theatre. After Schenkkan wrote the play, Walton says colleagues began sending him the script.
“Building the Wall,” according to the announcement from Curious, is a show that “looks at a time in the very near future when the Trump administration has carried out his campaign promise to round up and detain millions of immigrants. A writer interviews the supervisor of a private prison as he awaits sentencing for carrying out the federal policy that has escalated into the unimaginable.”
“Multiple people sent me the script,” Walton said, “I think in part knowing that we’re the type of theater that is committed to producing this kind of work, and the type of theater that is maybe nimble enough to say, ‘OK, let’s go, let’s do it.’”
Sure enough, Curious will squeeze the play in, starting during the end of the run of “Constellations,” which opens in March and runs through April 15. The theater will be part of what is called a “rolling world premiere,” which Walton says currently includes a theater in Los Angeles and will likely eventually include at least one other theater. Such a premiere helps new plays get over the hump from being produced in its first theater to being produced in its second, third and fourth, he said.
“The Zeus Problem,” a darkly comedic reimagining of the story of Prometheus Bound, depicts Henry David Thoreau working on his own translation of that story until a main character seizes control of the whole production, according to Buntport member Erin Rollman.
“Zeus derails our play,” she says. “He refuses to leave, he wants everything to be about him. He doesn’t like that in the original production he’s painted in a bad light.”
“He’d like to control the messaging,” Rollman added.
Rollman says the show isn’t explicitly about Trump, and that Jim Hunt, the actor portraying Zeus, bears no resemblance to Trump and makes no effort to imitate him, but that there are some clear parallels. Buntport, which writes most of its shows over the course of four or five weeks, scrapped the script they’d been working on after the election — there were giant pigeons involved — and started anew.
“We might have come in for a whole week and just stared at each other,” Rollman said. “It’s a bit of a blur.” But the process picked up steam.
“Because we write our own shows, and we do so relatively quickly, we thought, ‘We’re one of the companies that can pivot right now — and we should.’ ”
Of Curious’s shift, Rollman says, “I think that’s awesome. That’s hard to do. When you have a set season, the way that they did, it’s extremely hard to throw a whole other production in. And I think that that’s the type of thing that we have to be doing.”
Walton clearly agrees, and has accepted the challenge of taking a lead time for a production that can range from six months to a year and compressing it to two months.
“And we’ve got to find actors,” he says. “Many of the best actors around are committed to other projects already. The thing working in our favor is that so many artists feel so committed to this.”
In some ways, two months also seems far away — especially when you consider the one-protest-per-weekend schedule Denver seems to be on right now. But Walton doesn’t worry much about the public being burned out on politics by the April opening night of “Building the Wall.”
“If we’re fatigued by April, we’re all in trouble,” he says. “This is going to be a long haul.
“I don’t think you can go and march every weekend — I mean, you can, but there is a point at which we need to find other ways, in addition to protesting, in addition to marching, to continue the dialogue, to feed the soul of resistance.”
Late last year, just before the election, Curious hosted a staged reading of “It Can’t Happen Here,” a play based on Sinclair Lewis’s 1936 satiric novel.
And in just a few weeks, Buntport Theater is reviving its 2003 play, “The 30th of Baydak,” a look at dictatorship in Turkmenistan, for a staged reading on Feb. 20.
“The Zeus Problem” runs at Buntport Feb. 3-25.
“Building the Wall” will run at Curious April 4-19.