Name: The Great Debate- Simon Says VS Garfunkel
Start: 2026-04-21T19:30:00-06:00
End: 2026-04-21T21:00:00-06:00
Location: Buntport Theater

Two people dressed in black in a black room are facing each other expressionless. The one on the left is wearing a bridge that was built around their waist. The one on the right is wearing a colorful bus built around their waist. Sitting below them on the floor is another person wearing all black with a white boat built around their waste is smiling and waving to the camera.

Boulder Weekly- The Crappening

Buntport Theater’s new play is a delightfully disgusting dive into Chicago’s messiest moment

Leave it to Denver’s Buntport Theater to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the grossest accident to make national headlines. The experimental company continues its tradition of flushing traditional theater norms down the drain with Eyes Up, Mouth Agape, a riotous take on the infamous 2004 incident involving 800 pounds of shit and a Dave Matthews Band tour bus.

As the bus crossed Chicago’s Kinzie Street Bridge, it discharged sewage, showering an open-air tour boat below — a nightmare scenario of terrible timing. The driver of the bus was eventually fined $10,000 for polluting a waterway and sentenced to 150 hours of community service and 18 months of probation. The band paid the State of Illinois $200,000 and donated another $100,000 to environmental groups.

In a 2009 interview, Matthews told a radio host, “It would be funnier if it was anyone else but me. … I’ll apologize for that as long as I have to.”

Shit gets real

Buntport’s five-person ensemble, who co-wrote this original play with guest artist Emily K. Harrison of Boulder’s square product theatre, embraces this grotesque story with the same joyous absurdity that has defined the theater group since 1998, diving into the event’s fallout with wry humor, clever design and a slight wink to the audience.

Rather than reenacting the hilariously improbable incident, the creative team wisely focuses on the aftermath, as told by the key “players” involved: the bridge (Erik Edborg), bus (Brian Colonna) and boat (Hannah Duggan), all of whom are anthropomorphized by actors dressed in black with playful models of these objects hanging around their abdomens.

The play’s imaginative set includes a strikingly tall, stylized representation of the Sears (er, Willis) Tower on one side, as well as a central projection screen that anchors the action and displays live footage from multiple onstage cameras. This combination of detailed costumes and real-time projections creates the impression of watching a bizarre but strangely captivating talking-head documentary come to life.

This decision to stage the incident as a series of post-mortem interviews heightens the farcicality while emphasizing the undeniable pathos of each player’s situation. Each character comes to life through interviews conducted by a frantic, truth-seeking documentarian, played with manic energy by Erin Rollman, who passionately (if curiously) seeks deeper meaning in the event.

The documentarian, standing in for both the Buntport team and the audience, questions whether this incident holds any deeper meaning or if it’s just an excuse for poop jokes. It’s a question the play never definitively answers, but one that allows for gleeful exploration of its own silliness.

Wit and waste collide

While Rollman’s documentarian orchestrates the proceedings, it’s Duggan and Colonna who steal the show as the hapless boat and the unapologetic bus.

Duggan’s boat, dubbed “Chicago’s Little Lady,” is fiery and bitter, delivering her grievances with biting wit. After enduring what was, quite literally, a crappier day than most, she is understandably salty, lamenting her fate as an essential cog in Chicago’s relentless tourism industry, forced back into duty almost immediately after the cleanup. Duggan’s sass and indignation make her both sympathetic and sharply funny.

Meanwhile, Colonna’s bus is a delightfully slippery character, playing the devil’s advocate in defense of the (supposedly) innocent Dave Matthews Band. His character exudes confidence and comes prepared with an “alternate bus theory” that blames Linkin Park’s tour bus instead. Colonna’s bus is as smooth-talking as a seasoned politician, spinning his own narrative with impressive dedication, despite the smelly evidence.

A bridge too mild

While Duggan and Colonna bring energy and memorable comic timing to their roles, the performances and writing around the Kinzie Street Bridge and the Sears/Willis Tower (Harrison) are less effective. Edborg’s bridge, though intentionally passive and mild-mannered, struggles to maintain the comedic momentum of the show. His dry delivery occasionally works, particularly with his joke about how he is better known for the 1992 Chicago flood than this, but the character often feels like an afterthought to the show’s zany energy.

Similarly, Harrison’s Sears Tower provides some clever laughs, particularly with running jokes about refusing to be referred to as the Willis Tower and her character’s desire to turn the entire ordeal into a musical. The jokes become repetitive, but the writing eventually culminates her arc with a spectacular payoff: a hilariously outrageous musical number that turns “Poopgate” into a chaotic spectacle of song and dance.

Eyes Up, Mouth Agape doesn’t attempt to offer a profound message or extract deeper meaning from Chicago’s most infamous moment of public defecation. Instead, it revels in its own ridiculousness, finding comedy in the unlikely convergence of a bus, bridge and boat — and the unforgettable shit that ensued. The show’s refusal to take itself too seriously is what makes it work, offering up escapist, crass humor in a time when laughter feels more necessary than ever.

As we enter four more years of Trump’s America, it is nice to have a place where we can laugh at life’s unexpected chaos, no matter how messy it is.

-Toni Tresca, Nov 13th, 2024, Boulder Weekly

OnStage Colorado- Buntport’s gross-out comedy is its funniest in years

‘Eyes Up, Mouth Agape’ a twisted study in perspective — and poop

Once upon a time, on Aug. 8, 2004, Chicago’s Little Lady had 800 pounds of liquid human waste dumped on her as she passed beneath a bridge.

The perpetrator was a Dave Matthews Band tour bus, and the contents of the coach’s septic tank passed through the metal grates of the Kinzie Street Bridge and onto an unsuspecting group of people on the tour boat. They were looking up, mouths agape, at Chicago’s skyline when they were defiled and befouled in the most appalling manner.

Blecchhh!

For most, this 20-year-old incident is best forgotten. But for Buntport Theatre Company, Denver’s all-originals troupe, it sounded like a good idea for a play. It’s gross, for sure — a poop, pee, vomit and fart joke spectacular that gleefully flouts good taste while delivering perhaps the most laugh-out-loud funny Buntport show in recent memory.

This one has a few departures from a typical Buntport production — if such a thing exists. For one, all of the characters are inanimate objects. The bus is played by Brian Colonna; Chicago’s Little Lady is, of course, Hannah Duggan; the bridge is brought to moribund life by Erik Edborg; and Erin Rollman is a filmmaker doing a documentary about The Dave Matthews Bus Incident. And while those four typically comprise a Buntport cast (with SamAnTha Schmitz offstage), Eyes Up includes guest Emily K. Harrison as the guitar-strumming Sears (Willis) Tower.

Mounting pressure

The other big difference is the addition of music, which isn’t a typical component for Buntport. High atop the set and wearing a headpiece suggesting the top of the Sears Tower, Harrison adds musical flourishes throughout while there’s even a bit of a choreographed number toward the end.

Eyes Up also includes a live video element that’s become something of a signature for Buntport. Rollman sits upstage with three cameras, which she alternately turns on the bus, the bridge, the boat and the building with the stream appearing onscreen — just like a documentary cutting to separate interviews. It’s a neat way to present a film documentary onstage, even though the actors are compelled to sit in the dark when the camera is trained on other subjects. (It also has the added benefit of allowing actors to face away from the audience while still having their face in shot.)

What follows is a series of interviews that start off pretty tame and then escalate into all manner of whining, finger-pointing and recriminations as the objects recount the DMB bus incident from their own unique vantage point. Buntport went all out on the costumes, with Duggan, Colonna and Edborg in all-black body suits and wearing their well-designed object around their waist.

Rollman’s character goes from the calm, agnostic documentarian to an active, opinionated participant as the objects drive her to distraction with their internecine squabbles and criticism leveled at the filmmaker herself. Even the Sears Building goes from impartial observer to a judgmental, god-like figure inserting itself into the action.

As the documentarian digs deeper into their accounts, we see more and more of the personalities. Colonna’s bus is clearly the main culprit, but his character starts spinning the story like a PR crisis pro, deflecting the blame and even at one point trying to pin it on the tour bus of the band Linkin Park (the ol’ second bus theory).

The Little Lady grows increasingly fired up as the real victim here (never mind the passengers). It’s another great performance by Duggan, made even more impactful because the mere sight of her as the daintily named boat is simply hilarious — and in stark contrast to the character’s strident assertions of its victimhood.

Meanwhile, both of them discount the role of the bridge since the vile excreta passed right through its grates. Edborg is perfect as the Kinzie Street Bridge — a morose, sad-sack character whose deadpan delivery neatly complements the more frenetic bus and boat.

I’ve seen many Buntport shows over the years, and I’ve grown quite accustomed to the core four actors and the type of material they create. It’s kind of like having a corner diner where the staff never changes, they know how you like your coffee and even if the daily special isn’t exactly your cup of tea, you know it’s always something good. In Eyes Up, Buntport serves up something with a bit more over-the-top spice while Harrison adds a fresh voice and guitar to the melee.

Eyes Up, Mouth Agape is definitely the most disgusting play I’ve ever seen, and a bit of a challenge to my general prudishness around the scatological. But if you can get on board with the “everybody poops” mindset and the utter hilarity of the situation as recreated by the Buntport crew, you’re in for a very funny and utterly unique night at the theatre.

-Alex Miller, Nov 5th, 2024, Onstage Colorado

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Eyes Up, Mouth Agape SOLD OUT

A comedy about a very not non-atypical situation.

For SOLD OUT shows a waitlist will start when the boxoffice opens (30 min before showtime) and as seats become available or at showtime we will call people from the waitlist. We encourage you to come and get on the list as often people do not show up for their tickets.