Buntport Theater

Season 17

A photo of Edgar Allan Poe in a t-shit with grumpy cat that say NOPE. The title above says "Edgar Allan Poe Is Dead and So Is My Cat"

North Denver Tribune- Buntport Delivers Creative Comedy with a bit of Meaning in “Edgar Allan Poe is Dead, and So Is My Cat”

LINCOLN PARK: Buntport Theater has been presenting brilliantly clever original productions for over 16 years, with their earlier works focused more on comedy, and more recent work somewhat darker and more serious, but still containing a comic thread. Their latest production, Edgar Allan Poe Is Dead, and So Is My Cat, returns to their funny roots, but still manages to make the audience think about the nature of life, and especially what it takes to make life meaningful.

 

Edgar Allan Poe Is Dead, and So Is My Cat starts with the burial of a cat (though there is some question of whether it is a funeral, or even an event, and whether there will be snacks available). We met That One Guy (that is the way the character is identified in the program), who is obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe. He emulates Poe, does a podcast on everything Poe (which he calls a “Poedcast”), and emulates Poe in every way possible, including eating at Boston Market, because Boston is where Poe was born. He buys a suit at thrift store, so he can wear “another man’s suit,” just as Poe apparently did a few days before he died. This is all incredibly annoying to his sister, whose cat has just died. When (spoiler alert) the discarded suit comes to life, things get really interesting.

 

As is always the case, the five members of Buntport jointly wrote, directed, designed, and deliver the show. It is full of many funny little bits that constantly pop up, but all are part of story that is engaging, with twists and turns that are funny at a deeper level as well as surprisingly thoughtful and interesting. The staging is fairly simple and direct, with much of the action in the yard of a house that curiously has no doors. The show also includes effective use of awkward silences that add a strange sort of tension to the humor.

 

The cast (the onstage members of Buntport) brings to life fascinating yet absurd characters. Brian Colonna is That One Guy, over the top in his obsession with Poe, unable to conceive how those around him may not hold the poet with the same reverence he does. Hannah Duggan is His Sister, almost constantly annoyed with him, in a very natural, sisterly way. Duggan also opens up nicely as the show progresses, but never loses that caustic “sisterness.” Erik Edborg is the congenial His Best Friend, jealous when Colonna’s attention goes elsewhere. Erin Rollman is paradoxically the most reasonable of the characters as Burt, the suit, expressive and articulate.

 

The set, lighting, and costumes, designed by the 4 cast members listed above and SamAnTha Schmitz, are integrated into the production well. The set, a simple brick wall, enables some extra silliness, having no normal doors, but with functioning windows. The costumes add some nice bits of humor, and the lighting is well controlled and illuminates well.

 

Buntport always delivers comedy with meaning, and Edgar Allan Poe Is Dead, and So Is My Cat is no exception. This show does focus more on the comedy (by design), but they can’t help themselves; there is also some important, and dare I say profound stuff here about relationships, about art and its creation, and about the importance of making life notable. By inserting the absurd into an otherwise normal world, it makes the normal absurd, allowing the characters to become uncommon. But mostly, it is just really funny.

If You Go…

Edgar Allan Poe Is Dead, and So Is My Cat runs through November 18 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, November 6. 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. Buntport continues their popular comic Great Debate series on the third Tuesday of each month (with BuntportTED Talks occasional replacing it), along with the wonderful ongoing all-ages pirate/myth series Siren Song, on the second Saturday of each month. Buntport’s next original show (their 46th) will open in early 2018, and they will be bringing back My Quest to Gallantly Recapture the Past in the spring.

Craig Williamson, November 2, 2017, North Denver Tribune

A woman is sitting on a folding chair in her yard. Next to her is a men’s suit that looks like it is moving on its own. There is no body in the suit, but it is sitting cross-legged next to her on the ground. In the background, in the basement window of the house we can see a man looking horrified.

Westword- Buntport’s Edgar Allan Poe Is Dead and So Is My Cat Is a Purrfectly Silly Evening

Hannah Duggan, in an enveloping gray hoodie, and Brian Colonna, wearing very tight-fitting underpants, are about to bury a cat — her cat — while bickering bitterly. She’s loud and angry, he affects learned speech and a haughty demeanor. The cause of their argument: He bought a secondhand suit for the funeral; she says it’s not a funeral, they’re just burying her cat. Besides, the suit, which he’s already taken off and discarded on a pile of autumn leaves, looked stupid. According to the program for Edgar Allan Poe Is Dead and So Is My Cat, Colonna is playing “That One Guy” and Duggan “His Sister.” The other characters listed are Erik Edborg as “His Best Friend” and Erin Rollman as “Burt.”

Most of the people in the crowded, cheerful opening-night audience doubtless knew that the members of Buntport Theater have been presenting their astonishing work for over sixteen years, and that all of the productions are created by these four actors and a fifth, non-acting company member, SamAntha Schmitz. The scripts are original, powered by the artists’ obsessions, idiosyncrasies and talents, as well as whatever nugget of peculiar information has lodged recently in someone’s mind.

During the first few minutes of Edgar Allan Poe, with Duggan yelling and Colonna poncing around, though, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe this time the group, normally so reliably brilliant, had come a cropper with this show. Maybe it was going to be just plain silly. And as it turned out, that’s the goal. As the program explains, the actors “just want to laugh right now. We want something that occupies us for ninety minutes in a silly fantasy. We hope you want that, too.” Of course we do. We need a laugh as our president and his puppet Congress threaten to destroy everything we care about, hammer blow by hammer blow, from education to medicine, art to justice, democracy to the very world we live in.

But Edgar Allan Poe isn’t just silly; it’s Buntport-style silly. Which means silly in the inspired, nonsensical vein of Edward Lear, creator of “The Yonghy Bonghy Bo” and “The Dong With the Luminous Nose.” Is it disgusting that butterflies taste with their feet? His Best Friend wants to know. Whenever food is mentioned, That One Guy springs to the defense of Boston Market chicken, so unjustly and universally defamed. And later, there’s a discussion of margarine, that nasty industrial stuff that mid-twentieth-century women were persuaded to buy as more nutritious than butter. Under pressure from the dairy industry, manufacturers weren’t allowed to color their product, so little packages of yellow dye came with the unappetizing white blocks. As I listened, I remember thinking that the margarine riff served as a metaphor, encapsulating something important. But by the time I left the theater, I was so dizzy with laughter I’d forgotten what.

Despite the cast’s best intentions, there are moments that do suggest a deeper meaning beneath the arguments spiraling around in circles like peel stripped from an apple. Buntporters are always thinking about art — what it is, how it’s made. In Edgar Allan Poe, someone delivering a soliloquy stops to remark on the uses of soliloquy. “We are discussing metamorphosis,” another character says grandly, while heaving away a garbage bag. The reason That One Guy bought a secondhand suit was that Poe, to whom he devotes a worshipful podcast, wore another man’s suit to a funeral — but since he’s purchased the suit, it’s no longer another man’s, His Sister argues. Of course, there are references to Poe’s “The Raven” and his essay “The Philosophy of Composition.”

Every element — sound, visuals, costumes, lights, the use of space — is brought together in service to the company’s vision (whatever the hell that is). The set is a leaf-strewn garden fronting a conventional-looking house that the performers have to scramble in and out of since it has no doors. Each actor has a distinctive presence, and they balance each other perfectly: Edborg’s dopey friend, Colonna, trying for the gravitas of a genuine literary critic; Duggan’s hotly passionate disaffection. As for Erin Rollman — you’ll have to see what she does for yourself.

This show is a nod to the spooky season, complete with candles, fog machines and sinister music, as well as an homage to Poe, a release from political anxiety and an assertion of the liberating power of unadulterated silliness. And that’s more than enough.

-Juliet Wittman, October 31st, 2017 Westword

A black and white still of a television debate between Richard Nixon and JFK.

The Great Debate

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 $7 online ($6-$8 at the door)

A black and white still of a television debate between Richard Nixon and JFK.

The Great Debate

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 $7 online ($6-$8 at the door)

Siren Song: A Pirate’s Odyssey

A comedy series for all pirates and their parents- bringing you new high seas hijinks returns to the stage fall of 2017! Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, an audience-suggested song launches each play-full voyage.

From the people who brought you Trunks and Duck Duck Dupe!

$7 online ($8 at the door)
(more…)

blogspot.com- Marlowe’s Musings: A Knight To Remember

“A Knight to Remember” relates the tale of a young man who now 35 has never been as happy as he was in fourth grade. Brian Colonna’s autobiographical illumination of his memories of his fourth grade crush on a girl who didn’t know where to put her hands touches. Even the orthodontist from his childhood gets into the mix by way of a tee shirt bearing the inscription: “Stainless Steel Sex Appeal.”

Simplistic-seeming yet saucily savvy, Colonna’s script allows for the intervention of other cast members who take HUGE pleasure in deftly breaking all theatrical rules with childlike abandon. Only the audience takes more pleasure in their antics than they do! Examples of these are: When you don’t have lines you don’t talk. Or if you are not in the scene then you don’t stick your head out from the side curtain in view of the audience. “A Knight to Remember” is a return to childhood with reminiscences based on a book about “Knights.” It’s part “Fellini- Amarcord”(“I Remember”) and part The Marx Bros’ “A Knight at the Opera” … without a lot o’ Spam. (Sorry!) There is grandiose movie music that gives the auditory illusion of Hollywood chivalry at its most florid.

In one scene Sir Brian appears as Sirs Lionel, Sagramore, and Dinadan in projections of various lobby fotos of Vanessa Redgrave’s Guinevere singing “Take Me to the Fair.” As we listen to the voice over of Julie Andrews from the Broadway version of “Camelot” we get one of the most hilariously correct similes in the show. “Her voice is like a clean white shirt drying in the sun.” Beyond that there is an amazing suit of armor and a chivalric mount that will make the producers of “War Horse” weep.

A pencil experiment in which the adorable Hannah Duggan raps :”where’s my PENcil, where’s MY pencil, WHERE”S my pencil” while strutting around with a plush black chair pasted to her butt stuns. Duggan’s hilarious turn as the show’s onstage technical director for sound, lights and constantly changing and deliciously fluid set design is a hoot!

Erin Rollman is her usual brilliant self in numerous roles including both of Brian’s parents, his fourth grade teacher and his fourth grade squeeze as well as a thoroughly minimal and delightfully innovative Lady of the Lake.

Although I didn’t guffaw a whole lot in this one … even after the show I had to sternly tell my happy face to stop smiling because it was getting EXTREMELY painful and I was starting to fear that the tragic face of the critic would never again be mine. Happily the tragic has returned and all is in critical condition again.

To paraphrase the Bard’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”: “The short and the long of it is – Buntport’s show is preferred.”

It’s comic caviar on crackers!

(“Not much of a cheese shop tho!”)

-David Marlowe, April 29, 2013, www.blogspot.com

A man stands in front of a white wall dressed in a suit of armor. He holds a large sword by his side.

Westword- The hilarious A Knight to Remember is a metaphor for its creators

Buntport Theater Company put several peculiar messages on Facebook before A Knight to Remember opened. These implied that the theater group – known for the creative synergy of its members – was divided on this piece about Brian Colonna’s childhood fantasies of knighthood. Erik Edborg would not be involved, the messages said, nor would SamAnTha Schmitz, Buntport’s off-stage tech impresario. We shouldn’t expect to see Evan Weissman, either – though he has had one foot out the door since founding the political-activist organization Warm Cookies of the Revolution. We learned that Hannah Duggan would be doing the tech, which she promised to mess up, and that Colonna himself would take tickets at the front desk. Did this imply a serious schism within the company?

But A Knight to Remember turns out to be a lighthearted, entertaining and thoroughly Buntportian evening of theater.

The tech consists of Duggan sitting on the floor wearing a gigantic bean bag strapped to her bum (why? Because sitting on the floor for an entire evening is hard) and slipping photos and sketches into a trio of the kind of overhead projectors teachers used in the tech-bereft olden days. But Duggan – as those of us who know and love her realized ahead of time – was never going to perform her services with selfless devotion. She bitches and kibbitzes as Colonna attempts to re-create his memories, which include bits of old books about chivalry, memories of a trip to the Renaissance Fair, and a crush on a classmate called Danielle. Required to take the role of a knightly opponent, she corners Colonna and won’t stop whacking him until the entire scene implodes into a welter of blows and childish recriminations.

Erin Rollman plays many figures, from teacher to squire to dentist, often in hyper-quick succession. Like Duggan, she has no compunction about interrupting the proceedings, particularly in a long segment where she demonstrates her versatility by going from the evil Ursula in The Little Mermaid to the Hunchback in Hunchback of Notre Dame and then complaining when she’s prevented from playing all the characters in the final scene of Fatal Attraction.

But funny and talented as these crazy ladies are, the evening belongs to Colonna as he acts out childhood scenes, attempts to eat a cup of noodles with his sword and informs Duggan that she’s supposed to shut up when she actually has no lines. His performance is honest, masterful, modest and just plain charming, with moments of genuine sweetness and nostalgia. Of course, the gleaming, clanking suit of armor he wears (courtesy of Chris Weed) is almost a character in itself, and certainly helps.

Though the script and basic structure were put in place ahead of time, the actors are making up a lot of the play as they go, feeling moments of real irritation, pushing each other to the limit, and periodically coming back and reconciling like kids who’ve been told sternly to stop fighting and get along. So I can’t tell you if what I saw on Saturday night will be anything like what you’ll see when you go. In fact, Rollman at one point informed us they were skipping a scene that had worked brilliantly the night before. This company really does invent with the kind of freshness and vitality you see in children playing games and just making up one thing after another as they go along; in this way, their work illustrates the creative process itself.

Knight also hints at the dynamics within the company. I have no doubt that Colonna – who often seems to take a back seat – got a bit pushy about his idea, and I imagine the others really did give him grief, with Duggan and Rollman perhaps agreeing to help more out of friendship than conviction. But if their on-stage balkiness is real, it also turns out to be hilarious theater. Rollman’s big monologue about how she loves the limelight is doubtless as true as it is self-mocking. So A Knight to Remember works as comedy, theater, an evocation of childhood hopes and dreams – and a metaphor for the company’s communal creativity. Perhaps it also works to explore and expiate some real tensions. And it definitely proves that the Buntport troupe can always bring things together in the end. Long may this quest continue.

-Juliet Wittman, April 18, 2013, Westword