An audience favorite comedy form 2017 that is unlikely to be spooky. Unless you think podcasts and Boston Market are spooky.
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A comedy that is unlikely to be spooky. Unless you think podcasts and Boston Market are spooky.
(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
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
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
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A comedy that is unlikely to be spooky. Unless you think podcasts and Boston Market are spooky.