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!
In the spirit of the many television shows that are returning after ending years ago, we are bringing back our first live sit-com, Magnets on the Fridge! It’s time to catch up with the old gang and their shenanigans as they try to navigate “new Denver”. Whether you are a long-time fan of Magnets on the Fridge or a total newbie, this is for you! 5 episodes in 2020 (no episode in March) come hang out with the now 40-somethings as they attempt to deal with the new normal.
Tickets $10
The five Buntport artists often create a full theater work based on a single eccentric premise: One of them saw Tommy Lee Jones standing in line for the Santa Fe Opera’s La Bohème some years back, and from that sighting emerged Tommy Lee Jones Goes to the Opera Alone, starring a giant puppet figure of the actor. When the group learned that famed scientist Nicola Tesla had been in love with a white pigeon, a kind of hybrid, multimedia play was born, though it enjoyed only a single showing. The gift of a slab of artificial ice gave Buntporters the cue for Kafka on Ice, a biographical piece that incorporated incidents from the author’s Metamorphosis and was performed on skates. But the idea that sparked the current offering, The Book Handlers, seemed on first thought particularly narrow. The Buntporters had encountered a satirical essay by an Irish writer, Brian O’Nolan, in which he proposed a service for rich people: handlers who would mess up the unread books on their shelves to make them look thoroughly perused. From this thread, the actor-writers have spun a glittering web of humor, wit and insight.
Start with the set, which looks like a life-sized Rube Goldberg contraption except for the fifty or so framed pictures — all shapes and sizes — of the same flower all over the walls. I really don’t know what these pictures signify, but I’m sure it’s something interesting, and they do keep Erin Rollman’s Linda busy painting at home and dusting at work. And who knows why the four handlers have set up this complex system of ropes, slides, platforms, racks, dangling buckets and levers to perform their work. Apparently you don’t just employ a little water to dampen a book properly, you don a clumsy wading suit and descend into a water-filled tub. Once there, you choose between complete immersion and flicking water drops onto the pages. While one of the handlers is doing this, the others are scuffing, dog-earing, scribbling notes into margins and, with much brow-furrowed effort, coming up with inscriptions. The period seems to be the 1940s to early ’50s, given Hannah Duggan’s flat little green hat and short white jacket as Connie Diane, and frequent mentions of the Andrews Sisters’ “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” though, Erik Edborg’s John looks rather Victorian. At any rate, time is fluid here, and Susan Sontag gets name-dropped before the evening is over.
The Book Handlers works on many levels. In some ways, the play itself becomes a book — maybe one of those marvelous intricate pop-up books that intrigued us as children. “Dog-ear this moment,” we’re instructed at one point. It also often becomes self-referential, with an actor addressing us directly to deliver a footnote or critique the script we’re hearing. Sometimes Duggan or Rollman will comment on her own character in the third person. Connie Diane doesn’t read much, but she proposes tackling Alfred P. Sloan’s autobiography and writing a memoir about the experience of reading it. The evening tends to evoke the idea of Russian stacked dolls and includes images within images like the intricate folds of a brain. Brian Colonna’s Jard — the only serious reader in the group — discovers O’Nolan’s essay and tells the others about it. This makes them all uneasy. Does it mean their job is satiric rather than real? Eventually, we get a swift exegesis of everything we’ve heard and seen that puts text, footnotes, phrases and key words together in a clear outline. Well, momentarily clear, because trying to recall it later, I found the outline dissolving in a silvery haze.
The primary theme has to do with information, the way we select, process and organize it, how we each individually understand the things we know. And also how apparently unrelated bits and fragments can link or cohere: Offer Rollman’s Linda a cup of tea, say the word “Darjeeling,” and brace for her lecture on colonialism. There’s reference to H.G. Wells’s concept of the world brain: a universal encyclopedia everyone could access and that would help bring about world peace through the dissemination of information. We have something very like this now, of course, but the Internet’s contribution to peace is questionable.
In the context of this play, it’s interesting to think about how the Buntporters put a work together. After seventeen years of collaboration, they must be inside each other’s minds, sorting, stealing and sharing facts and ideas. This play’s odd, unexpected, cunning, apparently irrational yet oddly meaningful set almost serves as a metaphor for the process.
This is a fizzy, heady evening — deeply clever, but not in an intimidating, hey-look-at-me sort of way, in part because the characters are real and specific and the performances so spot-on that you don’t think of them as performances at all, just people going about their business in front of you. Buntport has long been a bright spot for Denver theater-goers, and here the actors are working at the top of their form. Don’t miss it.
Juliet Wittman, March 7, 2018, Westword
Perhaps it’s less common these days, but there was a time when pretentious, well-off folks would have their decorator fill their built-in bookshelves with rows of colorful, shiny new books, or elegant leather-bound sets in assorted sizes — or a mix. But when one would visit that library, the books had obviously not been read, dog-eared, underlined and loved — they were pristine. And suppose those owners wanted visitors to view them as well-read and scholarly?
Irish author Brian O’Nolan elaborated on that idea for an essay he wrote for The Irish Times, under the name Myles na gCopaleen.
“And so, we wrote a play,” say the members of Buntport Theater, who discovered the essay: Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg and Erin Rollman, who perform as well — supported by multi-tasking SamAnTha Schmitz, who runs sound, lights and other tech processes, plus the box office.
This clever, articulate, energetic crew originally connected at Colorado College and formed a theater company when they graduated — which has remained together since and grown stronger as its members created careers. (A few originals have dropped out.) They write, direct and stage all their own plays on highly creative sets — usually based on someone’s essay, story, play, legend or book from the past. And once in a while, someone has just had a “what if?” idea, I’m guessing.
Per Buntport Theater Company’s program notes on O’Nolan: “He imagined a service in which wealthy people could have the books in their extensive libraries `suitably mauled’ in order to look read.” That seed of an idea was enough. The group went to work, writing individually and piecing it together — and created another of its truly hilarious plays: “The Book Handlers.” It runs through March 17 and is clearly worth the time and effort to score tickets if you can!
Buntport has also performed history-based outreach programs for kids, including those at Lone Tree Arts Center in the south area, as well as regularly scheduled events at the Denver theater for adults and children. But the three or four original plays they produce each year require a visit to Denver’s Art District, where they operate in a warehouse space at 717 Lipan St., two blocks west of Santa Fe Drive.
The Book Handlers’ jumbled workshop fills the stage one sees upon taking a seat in the theater. Desks, of course, ladders to higher levels, swinging baskets and buckets for book-transfer, an old bathtub for “water damage,” specific, annotated, corporate-style processes written in a fat volume, dictating words and actions for annotations, wine and coffee spills and dog-earing corners of pages, etc.
Duggan, as Connie Diane, cheerfully sings “Elmer’s Tune” each day when she arrives through the entryway, while Erik Edborg (John), who’s in charge, manages to be silly and officious at the same time, imaging himself in a Teddy Roosevelt role occasionally, while scholarly Jard (Brian Colonna) knows a lot of stuff from his reading — but not here, of course! Erin Rollman is in top form as fussy Linda, who has lots of issues and a special way with words as she waters plants, and sputters through her workday. Amazing energy.
The routine changes, depending on who’s located where, but rope-borne baskets and buckets swing through the air delivering volumes for special coffee stains, pounding, scraping and dunking. They are sent along a sort of belt-drawn assembly line at times, on a slide at others, and stacked awaiting their next treatment, until “suitably mauled,” then shipped out again to make space for more. And all too soon, the 90-minute piece is over — I could have happily watched longer.
Sonya Ellingboe March 12th, 2018 Parker Chronicle
Like that slow, satisfying burn of your favorite spicy foods, “The Book Handlers” at Buntport lingers with you long after you’ve left the theater and gets even better the more your mind dives into the juicy themes of the play. Seeming to draw inspiration from “The Twilight Zone,” absurdist playwrights like Eugène Ionesco (The Bald Soprano) and existential thinkers like Kafka, this show is a multi-layered piece about everything and nothing. The play centers on 4 characters who distress books in order to make it look like their wealthy owners have actually read them. They clock in each morning, exchanging the same greetings; toil at their tasks; make chit chat at the office; a bell rings to mark the end of the day and they exchange trite goodbyes. Though their work is absurd, the routine of the workplace is easily to recognize and pulls the audience into considering the meaning of life, the purpose of work, the power of words and whether Connie Diane and Jard are really acceptable first names (this is a Buntport show after all!). Masters at blending deep themes with quirky humor, the Buntport troupe, who write all their own shows, have done it again. A triumph! Catch “The Book Handlers” now through 3/17.
March 5th 2018, Go Play Denver
A haphazard quest disguised as play
Do you remember Buntport’s 2012 ridiculous comedy A Knight to Remember? No need to. We’re bringing it back for you. Sort of. Featuring real armor, a fake horse, and seven overhead projectors.
INTELLECTUAL NONSENSE
Do you have a large library full of beautiful but unread books? Never fear! The Book Handlers are here to make your books look worn-in and well-read. Look cultured, cultivated, literate without all the fuss of actually having to read anything. A satire inspired by a short story by Brian O’Nolan.
Buntport Theater reads their 2001 holiday comedy
Donner: A Documentary
(a live documentary about the reindeer, not the –ahem– party).
Come hear a vintage Buntport play and have freshly baked cookies. It’s bound to be a silly evening.
Tickets are $25 • Seating is limited. (more…)
There’s high-brow, middle-brow and low. And then there’s the often arched-brow shenanigans of Buntport.
In its latest, “Edgar Allan Poe Is Dead and So Is My Cat,” the wiseacre (emphasis on “wise”) company of five mines a testy brother-sister relationship for laughs more than literary insights. That’s intentional, though, at their finest, they deliver both. But if you’re looking for a larky amusement, seek no further.
Things open on a funeral for a feline friend in Baltimore. In front of a brick facade, on a downward sloping lawn is a tiny rectangular hole, a mound of dirt nearby.
A man stands clad in a brown turtleneck, handsome dress shoes and colorful, rather tight boxer briefs. The pattern on them is the Baltimore Ravens logo. That port city is where the poet (and, for that matter, the cat) of the title met their ends. The oddly clad man’s discarded suit rests on a pile of leaves. He purchased his suit — or as he intones with “get it? get it?” glee throughout the play, “another man’s suit” — at a thrift store.
The show’s program IDs this fellow, played with over-enunciating pleasure by Brian Colonna, as “That One Guy.” You don’t have long to wonder why. He’s that guy who repeats facts and factoids, that guy whose obsessive interests and hardly original insights demand constant affirmation.
Hannah Duggan plays His Sister, the bereaved. She’s not happy that her brother keeps trying to turn the burial into a rite. He even invited His Best Friend (Erik Edborg) to the under-attended non-ceremony.
That One Guy’s penchant for the pedantic isn’t the only thing exasperating his sister. He’s 40, and lives in her basement where he hosts a “Poedcast” on all things Edgar Allan Poe.
In addition to That Guy’s broadsides about Baltimore’s hardly native but very much adopted son, we learn facts about Tolstoy and a tidbit about a toymaker who presented Louis XIV with a particularly inventive mechanical toy.
The set is modest and effective. From the start, the latticed garden-level windows draw interest. The costumes — from the boxer briefs so tight they fit like a codpiece to the convincingly alive Suit to His Sister’s grey hoodie to the assorted Poe-related T-shirts — are humorous in their own right.
Buntport has never feared traversing the space between silly and absurd. For instance, the sister’s brick home has no stairs, a head-scratcher that makes for some fine slapstick exits.
Then there’s the matter of the suit. Redolent of Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman — but so much kinder, gentler, erudite — the suit is voiced by Erin Rollman.
There are moments when “Edgar Allan Poe” resembles an “SNL” — or more brainy Monty Python — sketch, but Buntport is always able to sustain its idea-buttressed lunacy. The troupe — with ace SamAnTha Schmitz behind-the-scenes — consistently works through its heady humor with hearty compassion. In fact, it aimed to deliver a decidedly not-Poe-like romp because there’s more than enough darkness out there.
The writing is often swift, the actor’s delivery even swifter. As the beleaguered Best Friend, Erik Ekborg captures the weird competitive need embedded in the notion of “best friend.” Like That Guy, he tries too avidly.
Early in the 90-minute show, the Suit remarks on its own presence: “it was always going to be awkward … but I hope it was a little magical, I mean at least when I first got up. Or if not magical, I’d settle for surprising.” It was surprising — and magical.
3 stars