Every great painting should have something to say. But if you spend a majority of time staring at the canvas, you might just miss that the museum guard standing next to the painting also has something to say.

That possibility provides the concept for Buntport Theater’s “The Rembrandt Room,” a one-woman show that follows a day in the life of a museum guard diligently standing watch adjacent to Rembrandt’s iconic “Danaë” painting that’s housed in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The guard expounds on the history of the painting — as well as her own.

Erin Rollman, who helped write the play along with other Buntport performers, is the only actress to have performed the solo role for the Denver theater company. Buntport is bringing the show to the Longmont Museum for two weekend performances.

But what made a bunch of quirky Denver theater creatives want to base an entire show on a museum guard standing in front of a 1936 painting of a character from a Greek myth in the first place?

Rollman said the play started as an experiment with the Buntport team’s initial interest stemming from its relationship to both real and mythic women. The group saw the possibility that it could be used as a vehicle to explore the treatment of women throughout the painting’s nearly 400 year existence.

Those women include Danaë, whom Zeus showered with gold in order to impregnate, as well as the wife and the mistress of Rembrandt, both of whom served as inspirations for the painting.

The play also comments on the reign Catherine the Great, the Russian monarch who acquired the painting, and how she is remembered more for a myth about her death by copulation with a horse than her achievements as Russia’s longest-reigning female ruler.

“We look back at her whole 35-year reign and kind of reduce it down to some not very nice things,” Rollman said.

Then there is, of course, Rollman’s fictional character as the museum guard who weaves together these stories and comments on the figures all while revealing her own story and experience in the process.

Also looming large is the weighty history of the canvas itself — a history that the audience will come to recognize in the guard’s life.

“In 1985, a visitor to the museum sliced open the painting with a knife that he had found and poured sulfuric acid on it,” Rollman said. “At first they thought it was destroyed, but they ended up being able to fix it after 12 years.”

But while the play mines weighty subjects, its default setting is one of humor, Rollman said.

“There is a lot of comedy and then some moments of real emotional depth, so it’s fun to perform,” she said. “And I have to talk for about an hour and 20 minutes, so it better be fun for me to perform.”

Paul Albani-Burgio March 7, 2019 Times Call