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played by Colonna, who lounges in a hammock and now and then bursts — hoarsely and not at all sweetly — into outdated pop songs.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

There’s no point trying to make linear or literal sense of Buntport Theater’s latest offering, Coyote. Badger. Rattlesnake. While that’s true of many of the troupe’s plays, this one skitters even more blithely than usual into absurdist territory and beyond into the ether.

The action takes place in and around a museum diorama featuring the landscape of North America’s Great Plains. Dead center on the set is a large, flat, square picture; on the floor in front of it are puzzle pieces of the same terrain, holding dry grass, rocks and pebbles, along with a rearing rattlesnake and a badger. The badger’s name is Mitchell. The coyote, Cecily, isn’t immediately in evidence, though she shows up later. Sort of.

Glenn and Carroll, played by Brian Colonna and Hannah Duggan, respectively, are in charge of maintaining the exhibit. They have feelings about the taxidermied wildlife, as well as philosophical thoughts about the nature of reality, the way we live in reality and the ways we mimic it. They deplore the fact that nature and animal life are reduced to dioramas like the one they’re working on, with labels and notes that don’t begin to convey the wonder and complexity of the real thing — though I don’t think either of them would use the words “wonder” and “complexity.” They don’t necessarily agree on any of those concepts, and they disagree particularly over anything that smacks of anthropomorphism. Because the badger and the coyote hunt together, Glenn thinks of them as “buddies.” Carroll rebukes him for that word, though her own feelings about Cecily are strong and complex.

Erin Rollman and Erik Edborg are the stagehands: Not museum employees, but Buntport’s stagehands, which means they occupy a different reality entirely from that of Glenn and Carroll. They put pieces of the exhibit in place, sometimes messing things up, and they, too, are engaged in philosophical argument.

Watching, I couldn’t help comparing the Buntporters’ eccentric, sometimes blade-sharp humor with other recent and less successful attempts at comedy where you could see the actors working for their laughs. The four performers here are at the top of their game, functioning brilliantly as an ensemble, and also — and I think this is crucial — never trying to be funny because they’re so immersed in the (unreal) reality of the events they’re living through.

At the beginning of the play, for example, Carroll is very angry. She believes Glenn brought in the bagel from which rose an insect infestation that destroyed much of Cecily’s face. Duggan has proved many times that she’s a genius at every kind of rage: repressed or volcanic, sullen or explosive, but this role allows her greater range than she’s had before. The character is not just terrifying, she’s also vulnerable and complicated; she feels the crazy things she feels very deeply, and there are hints now and then of a passionate empathy — if not for actual humans, then at least for the mummified animals of the diorama. Colonna’s Glenn isn’t cowed, however. His responses are perfect, whether he’s wry, puzzled, momentarily defensive, tuned out or, in a fantastical re-enactment, describing the sad death of Mitchell the badger. Rollman and Edborg hold their own, even though they’re working in half-darkness a lot of the time. Rollman bustles around and uses bits of scientific knowledge to boss Edborg and put him down while he, tall, quiet and kindly, holds the moral high ground.

For this production, the Buntport five (the fifth is SamAnTha Schmitz, who helps create the plays and takes care of tech during performances) worked with an outside artist, playwright Ellen K. Graham. I’ve seen absurdism in Graham’s previous work, though perhaps nothing quite as fanciful as this, and I tried to recognize her influence here, to figure out if there was some difference with Coyote. Badger. Rattlesnake. from Buntport’s usual tone and focus. I thought I sensed a bit more briskness and sharpness to the dialogue, perhaps less repetition — a kind of whizzing quality — but all of that can also be seen as Buntportian. It would have been so much fun to be a fly on the wall and watch these astonishing talents lay out their collective vision and somehow fuse it. But as it is, just sitting in the audience for this hilarious, ridiculous and brilliant piece of theater is enough.

Juliet Wittman, December 4, 2018, Westword

The five Buntport artists often create a full theater work based on a single eccentric premise: One of them saw Tommy Lee Jones standing in line for the Santa Fe Opera’s La Bohème some years back, and from that sighting emerged Tommy Lee Jones Goes to the Opera Alone, starring a giant puppet figure of the actor. When the group learned that famed scientist Nicola Tesla had been in love with a white pigeon, a kind of hybrid, multimedia play was born, though it enjoyed only a single showing. The gift of a slab of artificial ice gave Buntporters the cue for Kafka on Ice, a biographical piece that incorporated incidents from the author’s Metamorphosis and was performed on skates. But the idea that sparked the current offering, The Book Handlers, seemed on first thought particularly narrow. The Buntporters had encountered a satirical essay by an Irish writer, Brian O’Nolan, in which he proposed a service for rich people: handlers who would mess up the unread books on their shelves to make them look thoroughly perused. From this thread, the actor-writers have spun a glittering web of humor, wit and insight.

Start with the set, which looks like a life-sized Rube Goldberg contraption except for the fifty or so framed pictures — all shapes and sizes — of the same flower all over the walls. I really don’t know what these pictures signify, but I’m sure it’s something interesting, and they do keep Erin Rollman’s Linda busy painting at home and dusting at work. And who knows why the four handlers have set up this complex system of ropes, slides, platforms, racks, dangling buckets and levers to perform their work. Apparently you don’t just employ a little water to dampen a book properly, you don a clumsy wading suit and descend into a water-filled tub. Once there, you choose between complete immersion and flicking water drops onto the pages. While one of the handlers is doing this, the others are scuffing, dog-earing, scribbling notes into margins and, with much brow-furrowed effort, coming up with inscriptions. The period seems to be the 1940s to early ’50s, given Hannah Duggan’s flat little green hat and short white jacket as Connie Diane, and frequent mentions of the Andrews Sisters’ “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” though, Erik Edborg’s John looks rather Victorian. At any rate, time is fluid here, and Susan Sontag gets name-dropped before the evening is over.

The Book Handlers works on many levels. In some ways, the play itself becomes a book — maybe one of those marvelous intricate pop-up books that intrigued us as children. “Dog-ear this moment,” we’re instructed at one point. It also often becomes self-referential, with an actor addressing us directly to deliver a footnote or critique the script we’re hearing. Sometimes Duggan or Rollman will comment on her own character in the third person. Connie Diane doesn’t read much, but she proposes tackling Alfred P. Sloan’s autobiography and writing a memoir about the experience of reading it. The evening tends to evoke the idea of Russian stacked dolls and includes images within images like the intricate folds of a brain. Brian Colonna’s Jard — the only serious reader in the group — discovers O’Nolan’s essay and tells the others about it. This makes them all uneasy. Does it mean their job is satiric rather than real? Eventually, we get a swift exegesis of everything we’ve heard and seen that puts text, footnotes, phrases and key words together in a clear outline. Well, momentarily clear, because trying to recall it later, I found the outline dissolving in a silvery haze.

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.

Enter the Mysterious, work is always newly minted, nonlinear, rich in metaphor and submerged — perhaps inarticulable — meaning. Still, I can usually ferret out some kind of narrative, even if it’s highly fanciful. But I could find no real through-line or progression in Buntport’s latest original production, The Crud, which is based on objects found in a storage locker the company bought last year. That’s logical, I suppose, since the play’s oft-repeated catchphrase is “Time passes,” after which someone in the four-member cast will inevitably observe that nothing changes.

If you’re a theater fan, you’ve seen Jim Hunt on various stages around town, usually playing kindly, warm-spirited, avuncular fellows. But in casting him as Zeus in The Zeus Problem, Buntport Theater Company has slipped the leash and given him immense power — and you know how power corrupts. Wearing a plum-colored jacket, white socks and sweatpants (to facilitate his “rise,” he explains more than once, gesturing toward his testicles), Hunt is a cruel, sneering, narcissistic tyrant, a god who can call down thunderbolts and — if he so chooses — obliterate humanity. For a while he rants at the audience, a long curtain drawn closed behind him. When the curtain slides back, we see we’re at a sort of dinner party. At one end of a long table sits a dapper Henry David Thoreau, earnestly scribbling away at a translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. At the other end is Prometheus, chained to his rock. Zeus has condemned him to a life of torment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humankind; a giant eagle continually tears out and eats his continually regenerating liver. That eagle is at the table, too, and so is Io, the beautiful maiden that Zeus transformed into a cow to prevent his wife, Hera, from sensing his lust for her.

Zeus has always disliked the way that he’s portrayed in Aeschylus’s play, particularly since he comes off far better in the playwright’s other works, so he’s here to harass Thoreau into doing him justice in the translation. He invents a game and orders everyone to play, collapses intermittently into sleep, argues, berates and threatens. As for the others, they have their own concerns — human, linguistic, metaphysical and plain absurd. The eagle, for instance, played by a hilariously peevish Hannah Duggan, hates liver and, if she has to eat it, thinks it should at least come with onions. Erik Edborg’s sad and complex Prometheus is primarily preoccupied with his own suffering, but he still has enough energy to face off against Zeus.
First of all, he argues, the fire he stole carries multiple meanings, spiritual as well as practical. (He doesn’t mention, though he could have, Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s theory that discovering how to control fire and cook actually made us human in the first place — and there is some discussion in the play about the effect of feeding cats cooked or raw meat.) Prometheus also points out that it was he who first introduced writing, agriculture, architecture, medicine and other civilizing arts. As for the poor, wronged Io, plaintively played by Erin Rollman, she ruminates a great deal about her digestive process, which disgusts her while also leaving her constantly hungry.

Except for a few moments of Zeusian lunacy — Hunt’s strangely Michael Jacksonish, self-celebrating dances and his occasional thunder-accompanied threat — there’s not much action; the play is pretty much all talk. But you won’t be bored for a moment, because it’s fascinating talk. The Buntport artists, who collaborated on the script with Hunt, have always been interested in language, myth and the way stories morph over time. Myths are ever-changing, and the authorship of Prometheus Bound is now disputed, too. Thoreau, played with dignity and conviction by Brian Colonna, is determined that his translation will convey as much as possible the meaning of the original, which results in his thinking a lot about rhythm and vocabulary. Watching, I was reminded of Lucas Hnath’s The Christians, now playing at the Denver Center, where an evangelical church essentially falls apart when members start arguing about the existence of hell. It’s a potent reminder of the problem of taking any key text literally, particularly the Bible, patched together from so many ancient sources. Or the United States Constitution, which strict constructionists insist requires judges to deal only with the written text and not to draw inferences from it. Language is a slippery beast, and meaning changes with changing times.

In Greetings from Camp Katabasis, two campers are out in nature, annoying the hell out of each other, bickering, philosophizing, attempting to bond and mourning the death of a friend called Chuck.

Katabasis, according to counselor Amie (Friend?) — whose hysterically funny monologues frame the action and is probably just a larger-than-life memory the men carry with them — means some kind of descent: whether literal, into the depths of the self; or into Hades itself. We’re guessing Hades, since the men’s tent is beside a strip of river. We’d love to tell you what the river’s made of, but that would ruin the surprise; you’ll have to see for yourself.

The campers are Pete and Jim, aka Brian Colonna and Erik Edborg, a comedy team as zany, gifted and original as any of the historic greats: Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, the Goons or the Monty Python gang. Jim is a wonder-filled hippie with long hair, sandals and thick gray socks, who insists they’re on an important journey; Pete, gesticulating, excitable and easily bored, has come ridiculously overprepared, bringing a portable eyeball flusher, a Darth Vader Pez dispenser and a plastic doll called Annie to be used for CPR practice, among other things.

Amie, played by Hannah Duggan, is a figure as monstrous and overwhelming as Nurse Ratched, Miss Hannigan or any nursery-story villainess. She’s fiercely bossy and at the same time utterly ridiculous, warning against every kind of danger, from carrion-ripping ravens to tipped-over canoes to poisonous insects. There’s no way that anyone will get out of Camp Katabasis alive, she warns, fixing the audience with her glittering eyes. You believe her because no one can portray larger-than-life and bordering on the supernatural as well as Duggan.

Buntport Theater Company has been exploring issues of myth and loss all season, and there are some deeper meanings running beneath that river, ideas about reality and illusion, speculation on the nature of the universe and our place in it. What, the campers, wonder periodically, lies on the river’s further shore? The CPR doll is called Annie for a slightly creepy reason, too: Rescue Annie is the name given to such mannequins around the world, and the first Rescue Annie’s face was modeled on the death mask of an unknown young woman found drowned in the Seine in the nineteenth century. This apparent suicide had a slight smile, her eyes seemed about to open, and her death mask was venerated as a symbol of mystery and beauty by artists and poets.

But there’s also talk in Camp Katabasis about such trivial topics as how to ball socks and whether “hokily” is an actual word. The best thing about this production, which lowers the curtain on a truncated but profoundly evocative season, is that you get to see the folks of Buntport at play, and marvel at just how brilliant and funny they are.

-Juliet Wittman, May 19, 2016, Westword

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

Some things to know before attending Buntport Theater Company’s 10 Myths on the Proper Application of Beauty Products:

The play is set in a bathroom ‐ a somewhat cramped, lighted square in the middle of the playing space flanked by semi-darkness in which you can watch the characters not currently on stage standing, sitting, interacting or walking very slowly toward the doorway for their entrances. It’s even more cramped because the three musicians who comprise Teacup Gorilla are ensconced in the bathtub, providing the sound. 10 Myths is experimental but not pretentious, and more interested in enlightening than befuddling you ‐ but you won’t learn anything useful here about shampoo, hair gel or makeup.This production doesn’t make sense ‐ at least not linear sense. The piece is based on the novel Riding SideSaddle, by Miriam Suzanne, who’s also part of a band called Teacup Gorilla. The novel is written on 250 notecards, and it’s “open source” ‐ which means, I think, that you can find and modify it if you want. Buntport, a company known for creating original plays based on all kinds of prompts ‐ seeing Tommy Lee Jones in line for a production of La Bohème in Santa Fe; locating a large sheet of artificial ice and figuring it would work perfectly as an underpinning for Kafka’s Metamorphosis; wondering if Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus wouldn’t be better as a musical ‐ clearly felt free to do exactly that. So the troupe has added dialogue and a kind of goofily mixed-up structure based on repetition of the beauty-products motif.

So now you’re ready.

The characters are a group of people who live together. They’re all misfits, primarily sexual misfits, and none of them are at home in their bodies. They’ve known each other forever, and they’re open about their bathroom habits ‐ except for the guy who can’t pee when anyone else is there. In the persons of actors Erik Edborg, Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan and Erin Rollman, they’re warmly accessible. These actors work together with comfort and authority, with an almost musical sense of timing that comes from years of creating theater as a team. Two new actors, Diana Dresser and Michael Morgan, have joined them here, and ‐ surprise ‐ they fit in brilliantly and add some wonderful madness of their own.

At the center of the story (non-story?) are Herman (Edborg) and Sam (Dresser), aka Hermaphrodite and Salmacis. They are striving to become one being, male and female, and in front of our eyes, they do ‐ and then they separate again. We learn that Sam has died and Herman is grieving. No one in the house is remotely surprised by any of this; they pay no attention to Herman’s profound grief ‐ less because they’re hard-hearted than because that’s just the way the cards fell.

Jolene (a masculinized Rollman) and Jenny (Duggan) have their own partnership, and they groom each other’s hair a lot. Jolene has only one arm, and the others speculate on the cause, the likeliest suggestion being that she cut it off because she has xenomelia ‐ an irrational obsession in which a person believes a limb doesn’t really belong to them and may even be harmful or hostile.

10 Myths is about our relationship to our bodies ‐ spit and piss, diarrhea and sweat: Someone mentions a woman who sat on the toilet so long her butt grew around the seat. Hermaphroditism is only part of the sexual picture. The play makes us think about the dizzying variety of possible physical variations to human genitalia and their spiritual and psychological consequences; the usual categories of “male” and “female” are just too simplistic. The play isn’t perfect; it’s a touch too long. But what I particularly liked is that it remystifies a world of pansexuality that had begun to feel trite and mechanical. Years ago, when you read about human beings who felt trapped in their own bodies, or thought about the essence of being male or female, profound echoes arose. These days the discussion is just about surgeries and hormone pills, bathroom arguments and the supposed beauty and bravery of Caitlin Jenner.

10 Myths restores a sense of mystery and magic we’d been missing, irrational gods and strange love, the nymph in the crystal water and the boy-man she prayed to possess forever.

-Juliet Wittman, March, 9, 2016 Westword

 

A clothesline on which tops and bras are hung spans the stage. Other than that, the set consists of four shrouded forms that are eventually unshrouded to reveal four middle-aged people sitting in boxes — if you consider Buntport Theater Company’s Brian Colonna, Erin Rollman, Hannah Duggan and Erik Edborg middle-aged. But as Rollman points out, middle age is a shifting boundary, hard to define, and this is territory explored in the latest Buntport creation, Middle Aged People Sitting in Boxes.

The characters can hear and speak to each other, but they can’t touch each other through the plexiglass barriers of their boxes; they can also stand up and walk these boxes from place to place, creating interesting geometrical configurations. In the box on the right, Colonna struggles with that ubiquitous modern horror: trying to get something done by phone. He can’t access the site he needs online, because it no longer recognizes him. But when, after a long wait, he actually gets a human being named Angela on the phone, she can’t help him, either — because the system says he doesn’t exist. All of this is particularly hard to cope with because he’s tethered to a landline by a long, curly cord and is wearing no pants. Periodically, the others exhort him to please put them on, but he explains that he can’t until he finds his socks — because first socks and then pants is his rule for dressing.

In her box, Duggan occupies herself with her job, which involves classifying data. On the other side of her, Rollman organizes a 25-year high-school reunion on Facebook. And then there’s Edborg, who seems to have moved into a new place and is trying to organize his belongings. This is hard because he’s a hoarder and has also mislabeled his stuff: The box that says “cutlery,” for instance, contains an embroidered pillow. And another box that arrives in the mail labeled “spice rack” turns out to be something else entirely.

What is Middle Aged People Sitting in Boxes about? There are a lot of lists and a lot of attempts on the characters’ part to categorize. This passion for order takes an array of forms, from enumerating all the buildings and businesses in a particular neighborhood to Edborg’s musings about how to use a spice rack when he can name only three spices to how you’re defined by those quizzes that ask what historical personage you’d be or reveal how your favorite fruit exposes your personality. “You’re trying to control the chaos,” Duggan tells Edborg kindly. “That’s what middle-aged people do.”

The idea of order is all mixed up with the idea of data — how we acquire it as well as how we sort it — and that leads to talk about generations: X-ers and Y-ers and Networlders, all of whom view the world in different ways because of the different ways in which the world comes to them. There are references to the usual targets: people’s obsession with their gadgets, the proliferation of emoticons and selfies, the way one generation fails to understand another’s way of using technology — though the cast also points out that dividing human beings into generations with arbitrary cut-off points is deceptive in itself. But the dialogue isn’t obvious: The Buntport crew goes deeper, showing that there’s something profoundly mysterious about the way our brains work, and raising a slew of questions about the ubiquity of facts and the ease with which we can look them up: Does this make people dumber because they no longer know how to research, or smarter because they don’t have to waste time unearthing facts and can use the easily acquired information to deepen understanding?

Since this is a Buntport production, everything is hilariously askew, and the show is both filled with absurdities and dizzyingly clever. The performances are spot-on and the timing impeccable. Middle Aged People does communicate a sense of loss: These people are boxed in, after all, time is inexorably passing, and we’ll never know what’s happened to poor Angela or even if she really exists. Still, there’s a willingness to embrace the unknowable — and even magic in the shape of a little one-horned fairground goat passed off as a unicorn. It may have been just a sad, sickly animal, but there’s something about the idea of a unicorn and our willingness to accept it that transcends lists and data and frees the imagination — just as this play does.

-Juliet Wittman, April 16, 2015,Westword