We are bringing The Rembrandt Room back!
The winner of the 2015 Henry Award for Outstanding New Play is returning to Buntport’s stage!
$18 online ($15 students/seniors) NO ADDITIONAL FEES! $20 at the door ($17 students/seniors)
show-41
The Rembrandt Room
We are bringing The Rembrandt Room back!
The winner of the 2015 Henry Award for Outstanding New Play is returning to Buntport’s stage!
Opening night ticket $25 (reception included)
The Rembrandt Room
We are bringing The Rembrandt Room back!
The winner of the 2015 Henry Award for Outstanding New Play is returning to Buntport’s stage!
$18 online ($15 students/seniors) NO ADDITIONAL FEES! $20 at the door ($17 students/seniors)
The Rembrandt Room
We are bringing The Rembrandt Room back!
The winner of the 2015 Henry Award for Outstanding New Play is returning to Buntport’s stage!
Pay-What-You-Can! RSVP for tickets and pay what you can at the door!
The Rembrandt Room
We are bringing The Rembrandt Room back!
The winner of the 2015 Henry Award for Outstanding New Play is returning to Buntport’s stage!
$18 online ($15 students/seniors) NO ADDITIONAL FEES! $20 at the door ($17 students/seniors)
TONIGHT’S SHOW IS SOLD OUT!
PLEASE COME TO ANOTHER SHOW IN THE RUN.
we will have a waitlist (starting at 7:30) that you can sign-up for in person if tonight is the only night you can come. Seats might become available close to show time.
And there might also be seats available on pillows on the floor.
The Rembrandt Room
We are bringing The Rembrandt Room back!
The winner of the 2015 Henry Award for Outstanding New Play is returning to Buntport’s stage!
$18 online ($15 students/seniors) NO ADDITIONAL FEES! $20 at the door ($17 students/seniors)
THIS SHOW IS SOLD OUT!
We will have a wait-list (starting at 7:30) that you can sign-up for in person. Seats might become available close to show time.
There may also be space available on pillows on the floor. (floor seats $10, purchase at the box office)
Denver Post- “The Rembrandt Room” stars Erin Rollman in Buntport’s first solo show
Erin Rollman is stunning in Buntport’s “The Rembrandt Room”
But, as any good storyteller knows, the bored-looking guard standing beside the painting has a tale at least as interesting as the Greek myth represented on the hallowed canvas.There’s something antiseptic about a windowless gallery housing priceless treasures. The Old Masters are to be worshipped. Paintings in museums are to be revered. Art is untouchable.
On a blank stage save for an over-sized Rembrandt, we encounter a museum guard. She is detatched, with an itchy collar, bland blazer and comfortable shoes, most often called upon to direct visitors to the rest room. Occasionally she asks them to step back from the paintings and refrain from flash photography. Turns out she is a highly opinionated tour guide to matters of art history and feminism. She also guards a rich personal history.
The Buntport tricksters offer their first one-woman show, “The Rembrandt Room,” capitalizing on the sly talents of Erin Rollman. The play fully draws the audience into the painting in question. Literally and metaphorically, we sit in the dark waiting for light. Beams of light accentuate the action onstage, just as Rembrandt, master of shadow and light, directs our gaze to certain movements and actions within the painting of Danaë.
The renowned painting is a life-sized depiction of the character Danaë from Greek mythology, the guard informs us. The painting hangs in Russia’s Hermitage Museum, where the action is set.
The canvas has a loaded history: it was famously attacked in 1985 by an insane visitor who threw acid on it and cut it with a knife. The restoration took years.
Personal restoration is a slow process, too. But as the guard relates her personal despair, triumphs and oddball observations, we come to see her as she sees the Rembrandt: both are masterpieces and survivors. Both deserve scrutiny and appreciation.
Danaë is depicted as welcoming Zeus, who, according to myth, entered her locked chamber and impregnated her in the form of a shower of gold. Danaë gave birth to Perseus as a result and it didn’t end well: Danaë’s father, the King, had a premonition that he would be killed by a son born to Danaë.
The backstory is equally intriguing: Although the artist’s wife was the original model for Danaë, Rembrandt later changed the figure’s face to that of his mistress. As if that factoid isn’t enough to launch a play.
There’s more.
With detours through Catherine the Great, pregnancy issues, rape and the artist’s self-portrait within the painting, posed peeking around a curtain, the guard slowly reveals herself.
She has a way of touching our most human aspects as she peppers us with questions:
Calamaties befall folks all the time, as predicted in ancient myth, right?
Rollman, a co-founder of Buntport, is riveting throughout, taking us on a wild ride through her character’s tragi-comic aspects. She voyages from asexual and inconspicuous part of the background, to fully sexualized reflection of the nude in the painting (is she nude or naked? It’s a point we’re encouraged to contemplate). She convincingly ranges from hilarious to poignant and reaches depths you don’t see coming.
The interplay of Greek myth, a woman’s emotional rehabilitation and the restoration of a damaged canvas successfully echo and ignite in the 90-minute dark comedy. “The Rembrandt Room” is worth a visit ‐ just remember, no flash photography.
-Joanne Ostrow, April 8, 2016, Denver Post
OutFront Buntport Theater Company’s Rembrandt Room
Buntport Theater Company continues its triptych of Greek-myth-inspired plays with an unassuming dark comedy that throws the cult of simple answers into relief. Relief against what, exactly? The museum attendant (and only cast member on stage) reminds the audience early on that Rembrandt’s lighting is famous not for its clarity but for its shadows. Like the chiaroscuro in the painter’s work, the play is as passionate about epiphanies and revelation as it is devoted to anecdotes, sidebars, and footnotes. Some answers come, some don’t, and most of the way is only partly lit. Every age has its unique forms of simple answers. Ours fits them into 15-minute TED Talks and a regular churn of #helpful discretely numbered lists (6 Ways to Live Again after Your Break Up). We click and share these daily, we repeat mantras like “not the what or the how, but the WHY,” to the point of almost religious practice. We believe, on some level, that elegance can save us, and if we are to be rescued from stagnant jobs or disappointing relationships or poor company performance, why shouldn’t the answer emerge clearly and simply
“Welcome to the Rembrandt Room,” the narrator says, banally directing folks to the bathroom and launching into the standard analysis of the piece behind her. The painting is an intimate depiction‐”practically life size”‐of Danaë reclining on a bed moments before she is raped by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold (not to be confused with a golden shower).
Shortly after this simple introduction, however, we cross into alternate interpretations and counter histories of the work. “The longer you look at something,” the museum attendant tells us, “the more you can see the beauty in it.” Her speech, delivered more personally than a lecture, creates a web of meaning from the nude (or is she naked?) painting subject; the mistress and wife of the painter; the legacy and reputation of Catherine the Great, who originally purchased it from Rembrandt; and the 20th century vandal who attacked the painting with a knife, requiring a 12-year restoration process. Like the narrator, many of these women are waiting and hoping for a simpler answer than they have received, leaving the narrator to revise her original claim: “The longer you look at something, the harder it is to see, and the more real.”
Buntport’s choice to stage this play is incredibly risky ‐ pacing is often a challenge in one-actor pieces ‐ but Erin Rollman demonstrates compelling range and depth as the museum attendant, escorting the audience through art history, monarchies, mythologies, and intimate disclosures with ease and wit. The Buntport team’s dynamic script leaves one wanting more of the monologue, rather than less, and the overall effect is the same buoyancy ‐ always earned through complexity ‐ that they’ve shown in earlier productions.
Though the answers aren’t simple for the women of Rembrandt Room, their paths are marked by light and shadow.
-Paul Bindel, April, 18, 2016 OutFront
Littleton Independent- ‘Rembrandt Room’ is art for art’s sake
“Please stay two feet away from the paintings at all times …”
The painting (1836) is of Danaë, the mother of Perseus, we are told. She is reaching up toward Zeus, who will impregnate her with a shower of golden specks … A shadowy figure lurking outside the entrance to the room is a man with a fist full of paintbrushes ‐ one of Rembrandt’s numerous self-portraits.
“The bathrooms are off the stairs to the left …”
Rollman continues to combine comedy and flashes of humor for about 90 minutes as she lectures about history ‐ Katherine the Great owned the painting and we learn tidbits about the legendary Russian monarch as well as the information that a man had slashed the painting with a knife at one point and it took 12 years to repair it.
Every so often a scratchy radio sputters to life with a message to the guard ‐ or her phone rings …
But for almost 90 minutes, this inventive actress entertains the audience with a mix of mythology, history and goofiness.
Buntport fans and those looking for something new and different will want to visit the “Rembrandt Room” soon.
-Sonya Ellingboe April 15, 2016, Littletonindependent.net
Westword- The Rembrandt Room Is a Buntport Masterpiece
Every now and then, an artist ‐ or, in the case of Buntport Theater Company, an artists’ mind meld ‐ seems to pass through a metaphorical doorway. For more than a decade now, Buntport has been one of the bright lights on the local theater scene. With their company-created original works, members are capable of truly inspired goofiness, including a production based on Hamlet in which Ophelia was played by a goldfish swimming circles in a round bowl, giving a whole new meaning to Queen Gertrude’s lament, “Your sister’s drowned, Laertes”; light, laugh-outright comedy like their musical take on Titus Andronicus; grotesquerie; pensiveness; and intellectual inquisitiveness and moments of singular beauty, such as the one in Kafka on Ice when the writer sends a short story to his beloved Felice. In her hands, it unfurls into the paper figure of a man, and she dances with it. “The writing does quite well with her,” Kafka observes
Over the course of the production, the guide talks about many interesting things. How we see and judge art. The difference between nude and naked. Her dislike for Titian’s version of Danaë. The role of Catherine the Great ‐ the powerful patron of the arts who’s primarily remembered now for sniggering and apocryphal stories about the way she died ‐ in the painting’s history. Mythic and cultural views of women. Good as Buntport’s plays have always been, The Rembrandt Room, a long monologue by a guide watching over said room in Russia’s Hermitage Museum, reaches new heights. It’s transcendent, a brilliant work of art. The guide, played by Erin Rollman, stands by Rembrandt’s “Danaë.” She directs people to the restrooms, tells them to stay two feet away from the paintings, forbids the use of flash photography. And she returns again and again to the painting itself, where Danaë is shown naked, reclined on cushions, gazing toward the light falling through a gap in some draperies. The guide tells Danaë’s story: Having heard a prophecy that he would be killed by her son, her father imprisoned her underground so that she could never bear a child. But Zeus, that randy shape-changer, entered her dungeon in the form of a shower of bright coins and impregnated her.
The attack on the painting by a madman who poured acid on it and slashed Danaë’s belly in 1985, and the twelve years it took to get it restored. Rembrandt’s changes to Danaë’s face and changes that might have occurred during restoration. Rembrandt’s use of light, the mysteries of darkness and light. But the guide isn’t just giving us an art-appreciation lesson; she puts her own spin and interpretation on all of these ideas. Certain facts return again and again, and each time the meaning is deeper or a little different. The text is allusive, densely layered; you could keep yourself busy separating all the strands and contemplating them one by one. But you don’t want to get lost in an academic exercise; the point of this display is the nervous, spurty, ridiculous movements of the guide’s mind. She isn’t just anyone; she’s somebody very specific.
And this somebody is a figure that only Rollman, with her unique and considerable talents as an actor, could create. At first the guide seems eccentric ‐ if not quite mad ‐ with her nervous gestures, her weird laugh, the way her voice gets uncomfortably shrill here and there. She’s funny and silly and also tragic, particularly as you come to sense the echoes of her own life she finds in Rembrandt’s painting. But even when she’s most moving, catching at your heart with a moment of profound and mysterious grief, the guide undercuts herself with an ironic comment, tiny joke or apparent non sequitur. I’d call this is a tour-de-force performance, but that implies something flashier and more self-conscious ‐ almost an insult to the deep, clear truth of Rollman’s work.
But Rollman didn’t create this piece of theater alone. The script was written by the entire company, which includes felllow Colorado College grads Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg and SamAnTha Schmitz in a process I’ve never understood; I’d have expected writing like this to require solitude. But perhaps after all their years together, these artists have actually taken up residence in each others’ minds ‐ and the result is beautiful.
-Juliet Wittman, April 12, 2016 Westword