When the members of Buntport Theater Company are at the top of their form, wonderful things happen. And with Naughty Bits, they’re at their peak both in terms of performance and — since this company creates all its plays collaboratively — in terms of the humor, flow and inventiveness of the script, which happens to focus on a missing member.

Naughty Bits tells three related stories, all surrounding the figure of the famous Landsdowne Hercules, or Heracles, a Roman statue of the mythic hero holding a club over his left shoulder and the skin of the Nemean Lion he killed as his first great labor in his right hand. The statue was restored in the eighteenth century — except for its broken-off penis. In one of the three stories, set in the 1920s, an inconceivably wealthy fellow called Harry conducts an extended flirtation with his witty and seductive mistress, Jenny. She’s teasingly scornful of the Hercules statue — which he’s purchased — and all the other great artworks on his English estate, also recently purchased. Then there’s the 1950s Art Historian, insanely passionate about his work, fumbling with his slides and projector as he expatiates on the wonders of the statue, its missing part and his thoughts about art in general to us, the audience. The contemporary Romance Novelist, meanwhile, having done some research into the Landsdowne Hercules, is pitching a book proposal to her editor. She wants to put the statue in the home of one Lady Louisa, who will fall in love with it, missing genitalia and all. As she munches on hot dogs and spins her torrid, silly, soulful plot, the Novelist’s relationship with the distant male editor is revealed as more and more complicated.

The three segments may be separate, with each protagonist in his or her own reality, but they gradually come together over the course of the evening, and the last line of dialogue in almost every scene leads suggestively into the next, until the ideas meld together to form a kind of whole, a meditation on love, sex, art, history, power, money and gender that ends with a fleshy (sort of), outrageous and snortingly funny climax. Naughty Bits illustrates the way a work of art travels through time, changing both physically and in the way it’s interpreted, taking on different colorations and significances in different eras and in individual imaginations. This Hercules is a paradox — a hero, a love god, the epitome of male beauty — but lacking the essential male appendage. So he represents — at least to the Novelist — both male and female or neither, a kind of coming together in peace and mutual understanding.

Naughty Bits also plays with the assumed gulf between high and low art. Of course a connoisseur’s interest in a naked statue has a touch of low prurience, and this is certainly true of the Art Historian, who both thrills to the statue’s aesthetics and is rendered inarticulate by his distress and excitement at the whole genital issue. Meanwhile the Romance Novelist, while conceding her usual work is smut, is clearly reaching for something new here; she’s in the puzzled, open and exploratory state of anyone absorbed in genuine artistic creation. Buntport has illustrated this dichotomy in previous work, demystifying high art and taking down artistic pretension while still treating great works with profound respect. In Tommy Lee Jones Goes to Opera Alone, for example, a waitress beefs up the plot for La Boheme and sings happily along with the arias. (Tommy Lee Jones will return in January.)

Erin Rollman’s Jenny is a comic masterpiece, elegantly slutty, a parody of a 1920s movie siren. Brian Colonna is crazy funny as her suave lover, Harry. Erik Edborg has made a practice of creating outlandish characters and inhabiting them so fully that you absolutely believe in them, and he does it here with the deliciously mannered Art Historian. The inimitable Hannah Duggan brings all kinds of passionate, angry, vulnerable conviction to the Romance Novelist, along with a strong dash of feminist rage.

But Naughty Bits is anything but dense or polemical. It’s a dazzling, skillfully structured, swift-moving and original comedy, filled with insane imaginings, daring bits and hilarious bons mots. And when those deeper currents surface, they sparkle and flash, too.

-Juliet Wittman, September 24, 2014, Westword

Last produced four years ago, Jugged Rabbit Stew is one of Buntport’s best shows, a startling and peculiar mix of comedy, sadness, magic, craziness and erudition that only this troupe could produce. And this revival brings back Evan Weissman, a longtime member who left – sort of – a while back to create a political organization called Warm Cookies of the Revolution. “The plan would be if there are any remounts, we’ll try to have me involved as long as that’s possible,” he says. “It’s not like a clean break; I’m still around all the time, but I’m not working on the next show. I won’t write for that or be in it. It’s kind of like breaking away from family – even if you want to, you can’t. And I don’t want to.”

As for Warm Cookies, it’s “a civic health club,” he explains. “You go to a gym for physical health or church for spiritual health. This is a place to exercise your civic health, to discuss vital issues in a fun way. I think Buntport is a part of that. We’re trying to engage people; theater and art does that. But with Warm Cookies, it’s a little less abstract, and I’m interested in trying it out right now because I feel we’re on the precipice and need to push back pretty hard to create the world we want.”

Buntport has created quite a world in Jugged Rabbit Stew. Weissman plays Alec, the Amazing and All-Powerful, an impotent magician with rock-star delusions who can’t actually can’t perform a single trick without the help of the real creator of magic – Snowball, a scruffy, mean-spirited rabbit currently on strike. Snowball (Erik Edborg) spends his time stealing objects that have no meaning for him but whose loss will upset their rightful owners: a video of a student’s high-school graduation, for instance. He lives in a strange, bare place with an array of stolen objects suspended from the ceiling, a wall covered with overlapping newspapers, and several televisions on which he watches home movies – video of rabbits, that is. In addition to the inanimate objects he’s filched, he has stolen the legs of Marla, the magician’s assistant (Hannah Duggan), replacing them with the overall-clad limbs of a workman so that she can no longer dance. Also missing is Alec’s right Arm (played by Brian Colonna) which, detached from its owner, now wanders the world on its own. Snowball’s kleptomania has reached such dangerous levels that among his acquisitions is a cheerful young Woman (Erin Rollman) he spotted in the audience, fell in love with and spirited away to his lair.

Weissman says he’s glad he returned for this play “because it gives us the opportunity to be really silly and have a few genuine moments. And every actor wants to be a rock star, and this is my opportunity to fake that.” He likes the segment when the Arm falls in love and sings a duet (composed, like all the scintillating songs in the show, by Adam Stone). “That’s pretty great,” Weissman says, “the idea that this disembodied thing has thoughts and feelings of its own and a sense of fate and love. And I like the concluding bit when my arm gets put back on me, which is sad for Arm and his love, but kind of magical.”

All the action revolves around Snowball, who – despite his depradations on their persons – is profoundly loved by both Marla and Alec. He’s as complex a character as a man in a scruffy white bunny suit can be – constantly vengeful, but also terrified by the threat implied in the play’s title. While Arm, having found his love, proudly assumes the role of hero in an old-style Western, Snowball ponders his fate as tragic hero, and Woman prattles chirpily about Aristotelian heroes, Byronic heroes and anti-heroes. Each member of Buntport brings a unique and specific quality to the stage; Weissman has often been, paradoxically, both the most sincere and the nuttiest. It’s a delight to watch his Alec, dauntless and cheerful despite the missing arm, prancing around in yellow shoes and singing his heart out about “That Special Hare.”

“It feels great to be on stage with each other,” he says. “We have a common aesthetic; we think the same things are funny. We’ve worked together so long, there’s something seamless about it.”

-Juliet Wittman, February 27, 2014, Westword

The best part of Electra Onion Eater, which opens Buntport Theater Company’s thirteenth season, comes at the beginning, when Erin Rollman stages a television show called Cooking With Electra and proves yet again that she’s one of the top comic actresses around. Poor Electra is aiming at Julia Child-style chumminess and cheer, but her output consists solely of onion tarts, and her sorrow is overwhelming. She chops and chops, but her anguish breaks through in great howls. She picks up a vicious-looking cleaver and tries again, uttering a cry of vengeance with each chop — Hah! Hah! Hah! — as the blade comes down rhythmically and you fear for her fingers. Periodically she breaks off for more shrieks and moans, or to calmly explain the biology of tears. The warring expressions on Rollman’s pale face are priceless, and this scene is completely original, howlingly funny, almost frighteningly intense.

Television dominates this original play based on the story of Electra and written by members of Buntport and Drew Horwitz. The action is set in the 1950s, and Electra has a small, clunky television set in her kitchen. When her favorite soap starts, she pauses in her endless chopping and leans in to watch. In the living room, her mother, Clytemnestra, played by Hannah Duggan, is ensconced in a cozy chair in front of another television. You can hear the soap they’re both watching. It’s the work of musician/sound artist Adam Stone and concerns a doctor, the blind patient to whom he wishes to donate his corneas in an operation he’ll carry out himself, and an obsessive, stalking lover — and in a twisted way, it shows that the melodramatic imaginings of classical Greek tragedy are still with us today…or our view today of the ’50s. These moments when they’re absorbed in the same program represent the only time that Electra and Clytemnestra are remotely in sync with one another. We’ve seen some intense theatrical mother-daughter pairings recently, but this is the most intense yet: These women hate each other with a black-hearted, icy fury.

Electra plans to kill her mother because Clytemnestra is responsible for the death of her father, Agamemnon, and, like Gertrude in Hamlet, is now happily cohabiting with the man who helped in the deed, Aegisthus. The murder was motivated by Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia — Clytemnestra’s other daughter and Electra’s sister — to appease the gods and cause them to smile on his military ventures. Electra is hoping her long-lost brother, Orestes, played by Erik Edborg, will return to help in her task of vengeance. Why the onion pie? Because sometimes even the most dedicated heroine of a Greek tragedy needs a little help in summoning the endless supply of tears she’s required to shed.

Agamemnon is buried in what looks like a narrow alley behind the kitchen, and Orestes does indeed come back — wearing a snappy cordovan leather jacket that matches his orange-brown shoes and accompanied by a friend named Bruce (Horwitz) — to venerate the grave. He knows Electra is longing to see him, but he won’t reveal himself to her just yet. His plan involves spreading fake news about his own death to lull Clytemnestra into a false sense of security. Then — presumably because he’s unaware of the existence of that lethal cleaver — he’ll kill her with Bruce’s pocket knife. So Electra and Clytemnestra fight. Bruce and Orestes plot. Offerings, mostly of tufts of hair, are made on the grave. In moments of deep joy or sorrow, the protagonists sing commercial jingles.

Electra Onion Eater showcases, once again, the comic inventiveness of the Buntport troupe, but the rest of the play doesn’t live up to the inspired lunacy of the beginning. Peeling off the layers of this Onion may be entertaining, but reveals no deep meaning.

-Juliet Wittman, November 14, 2013, Westword

Buntport Theater Company put several peculiar messages on Facebook before A Knight to Remember opened. These implied that the theater group – known for the creative synergy of its members – was divided on this piece about Brian Colonna’s childhood fantasies of knighthood. Erik Edborg would not be involved, the messages said, nor would SamAnTha Schmitz, Buntport’s off-stage tech impresario. We shouldn’t expect to see Evan Weissman, either – though he has had one foot out the door since founding the political-activist organization Warm Cookies of the Revolution. We learned that Hannah Duggan would be doing the tech, which she promised to mess up, and that Colonna himself would take tickets at the front desk. Did this imply a serious schism within the company?

But A Knight to Remember turns out to be a lighthearted, entertaining and thoroughly Buntportian evening of theater.

The tech consists of Duggan sitting on the floor wearing a gigantic bean bag strapped to her bum (why? Because sitting on the floor for an entire evening is hard) and slipping photos and sketches into a trio of the kind of overhead projectors teachers used in the tech-bereft olden days. But Duggan – as those of us who know and love her realized ahead of time – was never going to perform her services with selfless devotion. She bitches and kibbitzes as Colonna attempts to re-create his memories, which include bits of old books about chivalry, memories of a trip to the Renaissance Fair, and a crush on a classmate called Danielle. Required to take the role of a knightly opponent, she corners Colonna and won’t stop whacking him until the entire scene implodes into a welter of blows and childish recriminations.

Erin Rollman plays many figures, from teacher to squire to dentist, often in hyper-quick succession. Like Duggan, she has no compunction about interrupting the proceedings, particularly in a long segment where she demonstrates her versatility by going from the evil Ursula in The Little Mermaid to the Hunchback in Hunchback of Notre Dame and then complaining when she’s prevented from playing all the characters in the final scene of Fatal Attraction.

But funny and talented as these crazy ladies are, the evening belongs to Colonna as he acts out childhood scenes, attempts to eat a cup of noodles with his sword and informs Duggan that she’s supposed to shut up when she actually has no lines. His performance is honest, masterful, modest and just plain charming, with moments of genuine sweetness and nostalgia. Of course, the gleaming, clanking suit of armor he wears (courtesy of Chris Weed) is almost a character in itself, and certainly helps.

Though the script and basic structure were put in place ahead of time, the actors are making up a lot of the play as they go, feeling moments of real irritation, pushing each other to the limit, and periodically coming back and reconciling like kids who’ve been told sternly to stop fighting and get along. So I can’t tell you if what I saw on Saturday night will be anything like what you’ll see when you go. In fact, Rollman at one point informed us they were skipping a scene that had worked brilliantly the night before. This company really does invent with the kind of freshness and vitality you see in children playing games and just making up one thing after another as they go along; in this way, their work illustrates the creative process itself.

Knight also hints at the dynamics within the company. I have no doubt that Colonna – who often seems to take a back seat – got a bit pushy about his idea, and I imagine the others really did give him grief, with Duggan and Rollman perhaps agreeing to help more out of friendship than conviction. But if their on-stage balkiness is real, it also turns out to be hilarious theater. Rollman’s big monologue about how she loves the limelight is doubtless as true as it is self-mocking. So A Knight to Remember works as comedy, theater, an evocation of childhood hopes and dreams – and a metaphor for the company’s communal creativity. Perhaps it also works to explore and expiate some real tensions. And it definitely proves that the Buntport troupe can always bring things together in the end. Long may this quest continue.

-Juliet Wittman, April 18, 2013, Westword

Early in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, there’s a longish scene of almost pure exposition as Prospero, a powerful scholar and magician, explains to his daughter Miranda why they are stranded on an enchanted island. Prospero had been the Duke of Milan until his brother stole his dukedom and sent them both out to sea on a rickety craft. By a miracle, they survived and arrived at the island, which they share with Caliban, a half-human creature who supposedly represents the basest and most earthy human instincts, and a creature of pure spirit, Ariel. And now, Prospero tells Miranda, he has called up a storm that will shipwreck his evil brother, his nephew Ferdinand and much of the court so that he can exact his revenge.

It’s from this scene that Buntport’s Wake: A Corruption of The Tempest by William Shakespeare derives its inspiration. Prospero is long gone here, but because he’s so present in the minds of Miranda, Caliban and Ariel, and because the story he told Miranda provides the structure for their lives, he haunts the stage. Except that what he described never happened: no storm, no ship, no prince for Miranda, no revenge, no forgiveness. All the three characters have to give their existence any shape is a cassette tape of Prospero’s that tells the ending of the story, but they’re forbidden to listen to it. On a set consisting of ramps, white tree branches, an upper room and a grass-topped cage containing Caliban, they wait. This Miranda is no beautiful princess-to-be, but a wild, mucky girl with haystack hair who — as Caliban points out to her — now smells as bad and fishy as people in The Tempest used to say he did.

Miranda’s relationship with Caliban is intense. Sometimes they’re a pair of children exploring or squabbling; sometimes she bullies him, teases or pulls rank; sometimes she’s tender. And as Caliban alternately whimpers, threatens to attack, mocks her or himself, it’s clear that he’s in love with her. Caliban was always a complex character — Shakespeare gave him some of the loveliest speeches in this play — but in Wake, everyone is trapped inside Prospero’s story, and to Prospero, Caliban was nothing but a brute. Meanwhile, ethereal spirit Ariel has become an ambiguous, gray-clad figure, someone Miranda summons with an imperious gesture when she wants something and who — as Prospero’s representative — intervenes when chaos threatens.

Prospero renounces his magic toward the end of The Tempest, breaking his staff and drowning his book. This is a late Shakespeare play, and it’s believed that Prospero represents the playwright himself bidding goodbye to his work and the multifarious worlds he created. In Wake, Prospero’s exit is less poetic and more despairing. It shatters what might have been a genuine moment of transcendence and jolts the action into fast-forward.

The acting in Wake is absolutely astounding. Erin Rollman gives herself completely to the role of Miranda, and lives it with passion and intelligence. Brian Colonna’s Caliban is rich and full — strong, squirming, ironic, childish and evocative. We’ve all seen many Prosperos: They have power and dignity; they tower over the action; their statements are grave and significant. But in his big gum boots, Erik Edborg’s Prospero is unique — loving with Ariel, hectoring Miranda and bullying Caliban — and he delivers the best-known lines in The Tempest in ways you’ve never heard them before. The Buntporters collaborated with musician Adam Stone on Wake and in addition to creating the island’s soundscape, Stone plays Ariel. He’s anything but the elfin character we might expect, but there is something ethereal about both Stone’s music — unearthly sounds, dissonances, snatches of song, bits of melody — and his quiet, intense presence.

Wake is imagistic, suggestive and evocative rather than logical. Irresistibly reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the play is also completely original. It’s about the way artists shape reality and narrative shapes worlds. And also about music, waiting, being half-mad with boredom and — in an unexpected moment as brief and radiant as a firefly flickering in the darkness — love. Like Vladimir and Estragon, Miranda, Caliban and Ariel find ways to pass the time — which, as Estragon commented, would have passed anyway. Like Beckett himself, the Buntporters find a music in nothingness and in the search for meaning where meaning can’t be found.

-Juliet Wittman, January 31, 2013, Westword

The opening scene of Sweet Tooth is mesmerizing: a bare stage, a woman in a fur coat standing in front of a white sheet and singing “It’s cold.” A hand appears from behind the sheet offering a glass, sprinkling water on the woman, and then the sheet is removed to reveal a rose-colored living room filled with various strange portraits of this same woman. We discover she isn’t really cold.

Des Esseintes did much the same. Inspired by reading Dickens, he decided on a visit to London. But having gone to an English restaurant in Paris where he found the clientele repellent (“laymen with broad pork-butcher faces and bulldog muzzles, apoplectic necks, ears like tomatoes, wine-sodden cheeks, bloodshot, foolish eyes”), he decided he didn’t actually need to experience the island itself; it was represented sufficiently by the restaurant and a guidebook. George and her people read Dickens, too, though they don’t really like his work, and their approach to life is similar.She’s George, a wealthy eccentric who has retreated from the world like Jean Des Esseintes in Huysman’s Against Nature, a quintessential work in the decadent-aesthetic turn-of-the-century tradition (think Oscar Wilde). George has decided to create a hermetically enclosed, aesthetically perfect little universe for herself, one in which artifice is elevated above nature and a simulated event is superior to the event itself. With the help of two devoted followers — Hortense the maid and the artist George calls Mister (because there’s no male equivalent to the word “mistress,” and she doesn’t like “gigolo”) — she invents fake interludes to appreciate.

Pastry being about as artificial as cooking gets, the three eat a lot of desserts, and the result is predictable. George gets a toothache — meaning she has to deal with a very real, pressing and painful reality. A dentist is called in, a practical, low-key guy called Dr. Manette (another Dickens reference), and the group invites him into its shared fantasy life. Will he break through the enameled craziness with his forceps and angled mirror, or move deeper and deeper into the rosy-tinted trap following a trail of poisoned sweets?

There’s a lot of wit and ingenuity here, and also guts: When the Buntport Theater actors come up with an original concept, they tend to ride it through to the bitter end, not shying away from the craziest implications, exploring every possible crevice. Which makes Sweet Tooth as intellectually stimulating as it is lively and funny.

The theme goes beyond ideas about art versus reality. George isn’t just a solitary aesthete like Des Esseintes. She’s a monstrous and destructive narcissist, a controller and manipulator, a deeply sick woman with the power to draw others into the depths of her sickness. She can get Dr. Manette to see a mouth full of inflammation and decay as beautiful, persuade Hortense to sacrifice her very self, and play poor Mister like a sad little puppet. “The dark parts give me trouble,” George observes early in the play, and soon enough, those dark parts threaten to swallow the light.

Sweet Tooth is a collaboration with musician Adam Stone, and he provides a series of strange, passionate and funny songs on such topics as abscessed teeth and Pear William cake.

This is a generally dazzling piece of work. But while Hannah Duggan’s Hortense is unpretentiously self-effacing and Erik Edborg does a sterling job of portraying an ordinary dentist caught in an extraordinary situation, as George, Erin Rollman comes across like every movie diva you’ve ever seen in an old film, and Brian Colonna is all fluttering mannerism as Mister. These are both excellent actors — it’s Rollman’s stillness and gravity that makes the opening scene such a stunner — but rather than playing people who behave artificially, they play the artifice itself, unleashing a horde of tics, shticks and pecadilloes we’ve seen from them too many times before. It’s enough to make your teeth hurt.

-Juliet Wittman, November 1, 2012, Westword

The six members of the Buntport Theater Company like taking up strange facts, historical anomalies and odd and eccentric bits of information and working them into their communally created plays. After one Buntporter spotted Tommy Lee Jones standing in line for tickets to La Bohème at the Santa Fe Opera, they came up with the inspired idea of turning the actor into a giant puppet, seating him in a coffee shop with a chatty waitress and a piece of pie in front of him, and having him muse on life, art, music, performance and Puccini in Tommy Lee Jones Goes to the Opera Alone. The marriage of symbol, action and words was potent (and will be returning to Buntport for three days at the end of this month). Some years ago, in The Mythical Brontosaurus, they created a character who had to be coaxed out of near catatonia because of a crisis of faith: He had found out that the brontosaurus was no more, that it was only a juvenile specimen of a previously discovered lizard.

So when they learned that an eighteenth-century clown named Carlo Delpini had gone to prison because he’d said the words “roast beef” on a stage unaccompanied by music, thus contravening a meaningless and idiotic law laid down by the Lord Chamberlain, they were inspired.

Absurdity and humor definitely flavor The Roast Beef Situation. The costumes — evocative of commedia dell’ arte, with Delpini in the traditional white clown outfit with a soft shape-changing hat and the others sporting bald heads with curls of various hues, some of which are used periodically as facial hair — are brilliant in their shape, color and detail. There’s a loaf of French bread in the hand of a prison guard that turns out to be amusingly rubbery rather than stiff. All of the personalities are clownish, and there are scenes that repeat like a leitmotif.

But unfortunately, the repeating scenes don’t add the resonance they should, and the piece just doesn’t work. Jokes get repeated too often. When Delpini first gets to prison, he finds that every one of his fellow inmates has bludgeoned a man to death, yet they’re all shocked by his crime — not the words “roast beef,” but the fact that he’s an actor. Yes, actors were once considered vagabonds and trash, and, yes, the joke is mildly funny at first — but not funny enough for the number of airings it gets. Delpini’s envy of the famous clown Grimaldi, who redefined the entire concept of clowning, likewise gets mentioned a couple of times too often. (Still, clowning is a topic I’d rather like to see the Buntporters explore sometime, given their own entirely original form of it.)

Mockery of absurd laws is an obvious theme, and Erin Rollman carries a long list of them, which she periodically unfurls from her breeches — another comic touch that works for a while but gets overused. But the play doesn’t have much new to say about censorship or persecution — though the Lord Chamberlain actually continued to control what was seen on England’s stages for more than two centuries. In 1963, the crazed comic genius Spike Milligan was told he could only mount The Bed Sitting Room, a post-apocalyptic satire of London nine months after World War III in which the protagonist had turned into a bed sitting room and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan into a parrot, if he made several cuts and changes, including the following: “The mock priest must not wear a crucifix on his snorkel” and “Omit ‘the perversions of the rubber….’ Substitute ‘the kreurpes and blinges of the rubber.'”

This being a Buntport production, there are still some very funny moments, of course. In an inspired piece of mime, Brian Colonna as Delpini demonstrates a comic bit in which he raises his right leg and uses it like a gun — not very effectively — and Rollman promptly shows how it should be done, finishing with a loud and convincing gunshot. Colonna’s highly physical description of a traditional Punch and Judy show is also terrific, and so is the discussion that Evan Weissman initiates about the difficulties of living up to his name, Plausible Jack.

But the semi-serious points the company wants to make feel fragmented and unconvincing, and the moments of high-flying absurdity aren’t quite frequent enough to carry the evening.

-Juliet Wittman, June 13, 2012, Westword

Tommy Lee Jones Goes to the Opera Alone is a tough act to follow, but Buntport Theater Company is going for it with the last show of the season, The Roast Beef Situation. The play, which opens at 8 p.m. tomorrow, is old- — as in eighteenth-century, clown-troupe-style Commedia dell’Arte old — school comedy, with a fresh satirical take on censorship.

The Roast Beef Situation begins with a true story, which goes like this: In 1787, a clown named Carlo Delpini was thrown in jail, along with the rest of his company, for speaking the words “roast beef” on stage without any music playing in the background. Per Lord Chamberlain’s Licensing Act of 1737, only licensed theaters performing approved material could perform words on stage without music.

Buntporters stumbled on this piece of trivia in an arts and culture magazine based out of New York, called Cabinet. From there, they brainstormed and collectively penned The Roast Beef Situation, their 32nd production together. “In the process of him being in jail with all the people in the show, he kind of takes back ‘roast beef’,” says Brian Colonna, the Buntport collaborator who will play Delpini. “We kind of just blew it up right there, based on that little story about the clown going to jail.”

The Roast Beef Situation is layered with a condemnation not just of the act of censorship that sets the play in motion, but of the absurdity of the law and government enforcement of it. The levity of the clown comedy is interrupted by political barbs directed at authority. With the theater emerging as an art form, says Colonna, “the establishment is a bit concerned people would get to say things they wouldn’t approve of. Performers were starting to do that. The Lord Chamberlain, who made the law, was being satirized at the time.”

While creating clown comedy, Buntport had to deal with the dimension of creepiness that clowns have taken on in recent years, thanks to Pennywise, John Wayne Gacy and Poltergeist. “I feel like people hear ‘clown’ and they’re like, ‘Yeah, I don’t think I’ll go see that,'” Colonna admits. “Poltergeist ruined clowns for everyone.” But these are not modern, conventional circus clowns; they are designed largely in the Commedia style, with Delpini dressed as stock-character Pierrot, with a white buttoned frock and cap. There is nothing creepy about them; they’re just ridiculous.

“They’re inspired by the real outfits,” says Colonna of the costume design. “Erin (Rollman) made them, and at the moment they’re one of my favorite aspects of the show.”

There is always humor to be found in laughing at the inadequacies of others. The common themes of competition and self-doubt among artists did not escape Buntport as places to find humor. “We mention Grimaldi, who is probably the most famous clown from that era,” Colonna notes. “Delpini is only a footnote. His friends bring up Grimaldi constantly.”

And, as always with Buntport comedy, the company hopes for more than just laughs. “There’s a line that goes, ‘To know what is ridiculous, you must know what is sublime,'” Colonna says, drawing a connection between the text and the experience he and his collaborators hope to create with this show. “I think people will mostly get the ridiculous, but hopefully, for one second, the sublime will pop up.”

-Shaughnessy Speirs, May 24, 2012, blogs.Westword.com

Buntport Theater Company has always had a creative way with music: The ensemble’s choices for openings, accompaniment and intermissions are spot-on, and some of its shows have included fruitful collaborations with local musicians. So when two Buntporters spotted tough-guy movie star Tommy Lee Jones standing in line at the Santa Fe Opera for tickets to La Bohème, it got their speculative juices going. The result is a brilliantly original piece of theater called Tommy Lee Jones Goes to Opera Alone, with a large puppet Tommy Lee Jones at its center.

This puppet is around five feet tall, pale and thin-limbed, with imposing eyebrows and large, highly articulated hands, courtesy of Denver puzzle-box master Kagen Schaefer (robotics teacher Corey Milner helped rig those hands for action). But if the hands are eloquent, the mouth is permanently shut tight. Four actors, all wearing black suits and masks, provide the animation: Brian Colonna works the head, Evan Weissman and Erin Rollman the tricky hands, and, sitting almost completely still, his features obscured, Eric Edborg serves as the puppet’s voice.

The action is set in a coffee shop where Tommy Lee Jones goes regularly for coffee and pie. He has a longstanding teasing and affectionate relationship with waitress Jane – Hannah Duggan, the only troupe member who gets to be an actual, freestanding human being. Jones wants to talk to us, the audience, and he has a lot to talk about: cowboy boots, movies, his background, how human speech evolved (and the price we paid for it) and, of course, opera – the grandest use to which those evolved voices can be put. He shares his ideas about the quality of Elvis’s singing, Puccini (“sincere and at the same time counterfeit”) and live performance (“You are always seeing…something that will never happen again”). He’s particularly fascinated by Turandot, the opera Puccini left unfinished at his death. Periodically, he activates a gold pocket watch from which arias emanate.

Buntport has always made a point of bridging – or rather, completely ignoring – the line between high and low art, so it’s no surprise that this production humanizes and demystifies opera. Tommy Lee Jones explains that the melodies of many popular songs come from opera, and shows that opera belongs to everyone – him, us, and irrepressible waitress Jane, who feels free to sing along and contribute her own ideas about plot.

Puppets have been in Buntport’s DNA from the beginning: In this company’s hands, anything from a stuffed bear to a car antenna can become human. And puppets also hold a strong fascination for the rest of us, from bloodthirsty horror-movie mannequins to child-mesmerizing Muppets. Much of the play’s meaning is imagistic rather than verbal, and there’s something deeply evocative in the three black-clad puppet manipulators, who look sometimes like nurturers and sometimes like bringers of death. The puppet isn’t realistic, and yet by the end of the evening, it has acquired some strange semblance of life. Which means you have to ponder what it signifies when a man’s body parts assert emotional and physical independence, when his right hand is at odds with his head. No wonder the poor man has dreams in which he’s trying to fit his boot over his ears. And when these figures desert the puppet to fold in on himself, we feel real sadness.

There’s a sense of continuous recursion, boxes within boxes, stacked Russian dolls. At one point, Jane mirrors the action by staging her own mini-puppet show, using a ketchup bottle, a fork that morphs from a character in Turandot into a pie-eating utensil, a syrup bottle. Turandot supposedly reflects events in Puccini’s own life, and the plot of the opera in turn gets re-enacted here – in a very unexpected way.

The acting is terrific, reflecting the company members’ deep commitment to the work and each other. Duggan, in particular, adds irresistible sparks of life and humor with every entrance.

Part of Buntport’s mission is to make art transparent. There’s no attempt at illusion or concealment: All the transitions and manipulations happen right in front of your eyes. Tommy Lee Jones is, among other things, a meditation on the process of creation, the relationship between artist and audience, and the fact that a great work of art changes over time and is therefore never finished.

-Juliet Wittman, April 3, 2012, Westword