show-48 – Buntport Theater

A dorky looking scientist sits in front of a microphone. He has a clipboard and papers on his lap and he is sitting in front of a television that shows two women on the home shopping network.

Westword- Rats! Buntport Creates Another Successful Experiment in Universe 92.

Those who love Buntport Theater Company know that this group of five writer-producers tends to seize on intriguing small facts with unseemly relish and pick away at them until they’ve either disappeared altogether or dissolved into laughter. Recently, performers Erin Rollman, Brian Colonna, Erki Edborg and Hannah Duggan, along with offstage impresario SamAnTha Schmitz, discovered that mice sing. And they do: The males sing sweetly birdlike songs to court the females, though the pitch is too high for humans to hear.

Singing mice aren’t at the core of the company’s latest offering, Universe 92, but the mysteries of animal behavior and cognition are, and there is a bit of song. The company has created a large Rat, excellently played by Colonna, who lounges in a hammock and now and then bursts — hoarsely and not at all sweetly — into outdated pop songs. Using a microphone.ADVERTISING

Colonna’s Rat is contained within walls painstakingly made of cut-out cardboard pieces. He’s a lab rat, all on his own and under study. He talks, sometimes makes a clicking-chucking sound. The three other actors are the lab assistants who take care of Rat and test him in various ways — though not in some of the ways you’d expect. They don’t open his head to insert wires into his brain or test his response to GMOs. Mostly, they give him objects and ask him to rate these with either stars or the kinds of faces you get on a pain scale. Rat isn’t very interested in their work. His ratings are tossed off contemptuously or simply not forthcoming. The objects include the microphone — which he loves — as well as a brush he uses to groom his own belly, a bunch of celery (which he rates a complete bust), a turkey knife, and an object that’s a major success, which everyone seems to see as essentially alive: the Roomba. Because if you’re examining the essentially unfathomable boundaries between animals and humans, why not contemplate the meaning of artificial intelligence in robotic objects, too?

We know the Buntporters have their own relationship with inanimate objects. If you can turn Laertes into a Teddy Ruxpin bear and Ophelia into a goldfish in Something Is Rotten, your version of Hamlet, your sense of the difference between animate and inanimate is so weird that of course you can get a roomful of people fixated on a zooming, glitching, bustling little Roomba.

While I can swallow the idea of a giant talking rat, and know that rats are commonly used in experiments because of the similarities between their brains and ours, I don’t understand why Rat is being asked his opinion on things you’d find on Amazon or Facebook ads or popping up in marketing e-mails. There’s a lot of talk about the commodification of all our tastes, wants, ideas and peccadilloes, which are monitored, stored, sold and used to assess everything from who’s most likely to vote in an election to who is searching for sandals right now. But does anyone want to know if their toothbrush would appeal to a rat?

The three researchers are very different in their approach, and — since all of the Buntporters are wonderful performers — they’re each uniquely fascinating. Dr. Lorelei MacGuire (Rollman) is all business. She wants data, data and more data, and she’s deeply opposed to empathetic human-rat interaction, which can mess up the figures. She’s not a true scientist, though, because she has no intellectual curiosity. She doesn’t care what the data actually reveal, just wants them sent to the people who slice, dice and monetize them. Pamela Hamilton (Duggan) has a bit of an inferiority complex because, unlike the other two, she has no doctorate. While she does seem to possess a certain sense of wonder, it’s not about science, and her impulsive and very funny questioning tends to annoy MacGuire and Dr. Frank Calhan, played by Erik Edborg. Calhan is the researcher with soul, a lonely, baffled man who longs to connect with Rat in some way. But if you’re hoping one of those wonderful, off-kilter relationships will develop — the kind that shows up on videos where a cat and an owl play together or creatures emerge from the depths of the sea to nuzzle a woman lying on the beach, you’re not going to get it. Rat is not only surly, but very literal-minded. Except when it comes to Roombas.

There’s lots of food for thought beneath the fizzy pleasures of this show: about science and the virtues of using observation and inference as well as straight-up numbers; the ethics of experimenting on sentient beings; the desire most of us feel to understand animals and all the myths and stories that desire generates. Perhaps central is the paradox of rats themselves, those despised, supposedly filthy creatures that, as people with pet rats will tell you, are in fact smart, interesting and affectionate.

Universe 92 might be even more interesting if Buntport had looked deeper into these things, and into what numerous studies are telling us about creatures we think we understand though they occupy entirely different sensory-psychic-neurological worlds. We now know that rats seem to laugh when they’re tickled. Even stranger, they can be taught to play hide-and-seek with scientists — not for food or to avoid electric shocks, but apparently for the sheer joy of play. A stronger examination of such intriguing facts could add significance to this intelligent and entertaining production.

Juliet Wittman September 30, 2019 Westword

In the foreground a Giant white Rat is yelling into a microphone. Behind him, a scientist wearing a blue jumper and holding a blue clipboard, is smiling. Next to her a television on a cart is showing a ring that is being sold on the home shopping network.

Marlowe’s Musing- UNIVERSE 92 BUNTPORT THEATRE: 9/17 – 10/19

In the Chinese Astrological Calendar next year is the Year of the Rat. We have Buntport Theatre to thank for giving us an early preview and a chance to see 2020 through the lens of their new and original play, UNIVERSE 92.

In this work a rodent is observed by three animal behaviorists, who record the animal’s every twitch. Brian Colonna gives a luminous performance as Rat. In the paws of a less talented actor the role might have been cheesier. The three behavioral scientists are played by the other three comic geniuses over at Buntport: Erin Rollman (Dr. Lorelei MacGuire,) Erik Edborg, (Dr. Frank Calhan) and Hannah Duggan (Pamela Hamilton.)

It’s a bit of a spin on 1984 as in this production Rat sorta kinda maybe has one Big Brother and two Big Sisters who watch over him from the lofty heights of their scientific perch in order to observe his movements and record them in their analytic research. The celery brought in to feed the rat at the performance at which this reviewer was present was just not enough nourishment for a rat that size. You may, as this reviewer did, feel that the rat could have probably used a few more snacks. If one were to criticize the production at all, he might say that there was little realism in the aromatic sensing of the rat by us as audience. (Perhaps the crew cleans the rat cage between performances.)

There is a wonderfully creative use of cardboard for the set and for the bottom of the rat cage! (The newspaper used for sanitary purposes seemed to be especially absorbent and may explain the lack of rat odor. One can only imagine that they must be old reviews from the Denver Post and/or The Thrifty Nickel.) Except for the fact that the rat is made to watch sitcoms on television while lying in his hammock, he/it is treated mostly humanely throughout. Making a rat watch television and then critique it with however many stars makes one aware of the perils of critics writing reviews from the couch. But I digress. True, the rat is lazy, but it’s always being watched just as Orwell puts forth in 1984. It’s not being given any incentive to find work or even to exercise.

One feels sad for a rat being forced to lie in a hammock doing nothing for all its life except self-pleasuring and judging new contraptions – presumably from Amazon- that are introduced into its world by self-adulating scientists who misidentify and misapply the tried and true methodology of animal research. At one point in the production a robotic vacuum cleaner – “the sad Roomba” – is introduced into the scenario. Perhaps this may have been a bit ‘de trop’ since the random patterning of its (the roomba’s) search for debris seemed mostly unsuccessful.

UNIVERSE 92 is silly and just plain fun.

Scamper to get tickets.

David Marlowe September 30, 2019 Marlowe’s Musings

A giant Rat is in a cardboard enclosure laying in a rope hammock with a microphone on his lap. There is a television on a cart, a tall green rolling chair, and another cart with papers on it. In the walls of the cardboard enclosure there are 3 windows. Three scientists are seated in the windows and next to them are cardboard graphs showing weird sciency stuff.

GetBoulder.Com- Theater Review: Universe 92

UNIVERSE 92 – Written and directed by Buntport Theatre Company. Produced by Buntport Theatre Company (717 Lipan, Denver) through October 19. Tickets available at 720-946-1388 or buntport.com.

A new show from Buntport is always a reason to cheer. Some are mostly brilliant; some are really brilliant; and some are brilliantly brilliant. Everyone has their favorite Buntport show and lobby conversations generally swirl around which ones everybody liked the most. A display in the lobby listing every show gets people remembering and laughing at those memories. Their ability to create unforgettable theatre moments is unprecedented. You may not remember how the characters got to that moment, but you will never forget the moment and your reaction to it. There’s also usually one or two laugh till you choke moments in each of their original productions.

This new one is no exception. The main character is a giant rat swinging in a hammock in the infamous Universe 92, the 92nd such universe created for lab rats that are being tested for different things . . . totally stupid things. Like his preference of one over the other episodes of old TV programs. High above and looking down on his cardboard cell are three “scientists” who are watching the rat, asking the questions, posing the situations to determine the rat’s reactions, and arguing among themselves about the value of their work, their treatment of their subject, and each other’s qualifications to do the work. Meanwhile, the rat is being petulant and arrogant, demanding outrageous things just to prove to himself that he’s still the top rat.

Brian Colonna is the Rat with a long tail and his butt sprung hammock. He seems to realize the ridiculousness of the situation, but still plays it for all he can get. Erik Edborg is the most sympathetic of the researchers, even helping Rat escape for a short time. Erin Rollman is the uptight and rigid clinician who doesn’t see anything funny in the situation and is all business. Hannah Duggan is the one who goes along to get along, but still protests over everything. Together they get in each other’s way, never acknowledge the humor in what they are doing and treat the rat like a giant pain in the ass . . . . which he is.

A great deal of the enjoyment is in the attention to small detail and the cleverness of the staging. The entire rat’s habitat is coated in cardboard. Periodically in the course of a conversation or lecture to the audience, one of the players will pull a tab or slide a panel or cut a hole in the cardboard to reveal a flow chart or a diagram to illustrate some “important” point, usually about the value of animal testing. . . in a totally useless way. At one point a whole car made out of cardboard comes out of the wall complete with a small set of dashboard dice also made out of cardboard. The work that went into this complicated and clever set is amazing.

I think just one of the reasons Buntport is so popular with its faithful band of followers – and there are many reasons – but one is that they tackle complex human relationships, complicated philosophical precepts, and both obscure and familiar artistic/literary works and explore them in a new undiscovered way. They do it in a modern vernacular with humor and without taking themselves too seriously. It is performed in such a way that the audience – though unfamiliar with the subject matter – can go right along with them, understanding the conversational dialogue and learning as they go. So at a Buntport show, we are entertained and allowed – nay, encouraged – to feel smarter than when we came in. We learn while we laugh. Thank you, Buntport.

A WOW factor of 8.5!!

Beki Pineda October 15, 2019 Getboulder.com