How perfect that Buntport is reviving Kafka on Ice – first produced in 2004, and one of my favorite of the company’s many inventive works – as part of a citywide celebration of all things Czech. First, because Franz Kafka is the Czech author best known in this country, with legions of schoolkids guided every year through his novella, The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant beetle. And second, because the Buntporters’ sensibility, humor, use of objects and puppets, bare-bones tech and ways of playing with physical size and perception are so very Czech. When, for instance, Kafka sends one of his stories to a woman he loves, in her hands it unfolds into the paper figure of a man, with which she then dances. “The work does well with her,” he observes. The beetle itself takes many forms in this show, from an elongated shadow to an actor in a big, huggy felt costume. In one frenetic scene, it morphs from a hand puppet into a plastic remote-controlled toy that skitters frantically around the stage.

There’s a brilliant mix of genres and parodies on show as well, from a flirty, meet-cute, silent-movie-style ice-skating scene (oh, yes, everyone except Kafka himself skates through this) to a high-stepping parody of the Yiddish theater the author attended with a friend.

The script of Kafka on Ice is unchanged from the first iteration, and yet the show felt different this time around – still intensely funny, yet sadder, too. Critics talk about how the plight of poor Gregor – trapped and isolated in his ugly carapace, terrified of his father and reliant on the intermittent kindness of his sister, slowly sickening until, to the relief of his family, he quietly expires – reflects Kafka’s despairing view of his own existence. Buntport intertwines this plot with pieces of Kafka’s other writings and events from his life, and while I remember some glimmers of transcendence last time, they now seem to have vanished. Perhaps in part because Josh Hartwell has taken over the role of Kafka from Gary Culig and makes him more baffled, gentle and unhappy; perhaps because the entire ensemble – all the other performers are the same – has matured and changed in indefinable ways.

But with this production, I was more aware of a parallel theme, one that carried a fragment of hope. An author’s work is never really his own, nor is his life. Kafka on Ice explores the transformations and permutations Kafka’s work and reputation went through in the years following his death – including this production itself. In one hilarious scene, Erin Rollman plays a somewhat dim teacher trying to explain symbolism with the aid of a soulless educational cheat sheet. In another, lepidopterist and major literary figure Vladimir Nabokov (Erik Edborg) gives his scholarly opinion on just what kind of creature Gregor Samsa transformed into. But there’s also a quietly powerful interlude in which a voice in the dark simply reads the beginning of the story. The lights come up, and we see a schoolboy walking slowly across the stage, book in hand. Every now and then Kafka/Gregor’s existential loneliness gets broken – by a sudden embrace from the charlady, for example, outrageously played by Evan Weissman in a maid’s outfit. (I took this as a manifestation of Weissman’s essential kindliness, since the charlady in the actual book is a pretty rough character.)

Before he died, Kafka asked his close friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his work. Brod didn’t – an obvious betrayal. But what I’d missed before and definitely noticed this time around was a certain depth to Brian Colonna’s Brod, and words that justified an action that not only preserved Kafka’s priceless literary legacy, but in some sense rescued his soul.

-Juliet Wittman, February 2, 2011, Westword

More than once during the Buntport Theater’s Kafka on Ice, the character of Franz Kafka (played by Josh Hartwell) comments on how stupid it is to stage an ice-capade revolving around his life and work. “It’s inappropriate!” he protests. As justification, toward the end of the play, another character offers up an aphorism once penned by Kafka himself (most likely about himself): “He runs after facts like a beginner learning to skate, who, furthermore, practices somewhere where it is forbidden.”

It’s an interesting way to tie it together – but it’s telling, and pretty awesome, that the Buntport troupe didn’t dig up that quote until after they’d decided to put Kafka on ice.

The inspiration for the play, it’s fairly well known, was actually the ice itself. “We were teaching a class, Evan [Weissman], Erin [Rollman] and I,” says troupe member Hannah Duggan, who helped adapt the show an plays several characters in it, “and one of our students was like, ‘I have a skating rink in my back yard,’ and we’re like, ‘no you don’t.'”

As it turned out, that student’s father was a manufacturer of synthetic ice, which Duggan describes as “plastic with Armor-All sprayed on it,” and the Buntport decided they had to do something with it. “So we thought, well, what could we do on ice? And Kafka just seemed like the best choice. Just because it seems so not on ice. It really couldn’t be less.”

In a weird Buntport way, this makes perfect sense.

That was all back in 2004, when the production was first staged – soon after, the fake ice, along with all the production’s setpieces and costumes, was stolen, and the show was gone – but not forgotten by anyone that got to see it or even hear about it. For good reason: It’s bizarre, hilarious, heartbreaking, brilliant and silly; as Westword own Juliet Wittman wrote back when it was first staged, “It’s safe to say that no one else – anywhere – is doing theater like this.” And that’s still pretty much true. Now, with the help of some generous benefactors who helped the company acquire a new sheet of ice, it’s back. And you’re a fool if you don’t go see it.

A big part of what makes this play so striking and different is the way that it’s set up. The set design is bracingly minimalist: Just a room with the fake ice in the middle of it, a desk and a couple of creative props: Memorable ones include a tiny model of a bedroom, a remote-control cockroach (you really just have to see it to understand how great this is) and the startlingly beautiful use of a large sheet.

Like Kafka, the Bunport spends this show running after the facts of his life like beginners learning to skate – literally: When they decided to do this show, nobody could skate. “We still don’t really know how,” Duggan jokes, “but we do anyway.” Still, while it’s interesting, that quote is hardly a necessary justification. After all, Kafka had a famous penchant for the bizarre and the surreal, for placing straight-man characters in the middle of absurd insanity – and if the play’s underlying argument that Kafka’s characteristic straight-man character was really Kafka himself is true, then maybe Kafka would have appreciated these proceedings more than even the play itself admits.

-Jef Otte, January 31, 2011, Westword Blog

When I first attended a Buntport Theater Company production and found six people in the audience – myself and my friend two of them – I’d never have predicted that the troupe would make it ten years. Other smart and talented companies have fallen by the wayside, but the six Buntporters, who met at Colorado College, moved to Denver and create all their material collaboratively, just keep on going. For this anniversary season, they’ve chosen to remount some past productions and do staged readings of a couple of others. Some might see this as a copout or a year-long semi-vacation – and I’m sure it’s partly that. But it’s also an opportunity for the members to examine past material and get a sense of where they might yet go. And for viewers who haven’t yet experienced their quirky, experimental brand of theater, it’s a chance to catch up.

The company has done a lot of exploring in ten years. Buntport has created spoofs of well-worn genres; rock musicals; horror; a serious, low-key domestic play; and another that’s upside-down political. Everything it does testifies to the power inherent in objects – which sometimes become people – as well as the crazy malleability of the physical universe and the centrality of the actor, who creates entire new realities with nothing but his mind, voice and body. The sets are cheap and inventive, the scripts a mix of brilliance and silliness. Among the shows Buntport will reprise this year are Seal. Stamp. Send. Bang., a ridiculously funny takeoff on the postal system; Winter in Graupel Bay, a bittersweet evocation of small-town life; The 30th of Baydak, which reminds us of the grim reality of life under dictatorship; and perhaps my favorite Buntport show ever, Kafka on Ice, a play I thought would never come back because some nasty human had stolen the artificial ice on which the action takes place.

The first revival, Moby Dick Unread, opened last week. The inspiration is literary, and the tone veers dangerously between satire and homage. Someone in the troupe – or perhaps everyone – loves Melville and wanted to spend weeks immersed in his great novel. But what caught Buntport’s attention was not the overarching story of Captain Ahab and his nemesis, but all the quirks and diversions. Where producers usually streamline novels, the Buntporters focused on Melville’s disquisitions about carpentry, whether the whale is or isn’t a fish, Garnery’s paintings of whales and whaling, and the difference between a fast and a loose fish. They found humor in Moby Dick, and also moments of poignance – such as Pip’s near-drowning and subsequent madness. Inevitably, this means there’s a shagginess, even formlessness, to the production, but it’s faithful to the discursive nature of the book. Mercifully, it’s also much, much shorter.

Other Buntportian hallmarks include self-mockery. The actors frequently draw our attention to the artificiality of what they’re doing. They switch roles by donning a hat or doffing a sock. The sea is a group of buckets suspended by ropes, the harpoon a spoon, Jonah’s whale a chalk drawing. “We’re making do,” everyone keeps assuring us. But we only need a chalk outline or a toy to represent the whale, since it’s the concept of whaleness that Buntport is evoking.

When I lived in New York, experimental theater was contemptuous at the core. You – the audience – were the bourgeoisie, and you were there to be scorned and made uncomfortable. The actors might yell in your face, or jump over you, or release live rats among the seats. The Buntporters are exploring some artistic edges, but they’re doing it in the most genial way possible. The floor gets very wet in Moby Dick Unread. So at the end, after the applause, the actors walk forward and – almost before you can figure out what they’re holding under their arms – unroll strips of carpeting so you can get to the exit without slipping. How can you not love these guys?There are also moments of unexpected beauty: The prologue is performed by Eric Edborg, who summarizes the entire plot by chasing a wind-up white whale around a tank of water – but then he suddenly sends a long arc of glistening spray from one end of the playing area to the other. The other performers – all energetic and delightful – are Erin Rollman, Hannah Duggan and Brian Colonna.

-Juliet Wittman, September 23, 2010, Westword

You have to wonder at the sheer gutsiness of the Buntport Theater Company, whose members took an absurd idea and then – instead of playing around a bit, giggling and letting it go – decided to carry the concept forward, step by step, moment by moment, to its logical and intensely illogical ending, trusting that others would willingly give themselves up to this phantasmagorical universe. Jugged Rabbit Stew is an original musical whose sunnily innocent surface carries a darker underlay, an underlay involving blood, dismemberment, the way humanity destroys its gods, predation and carnivorousness – which takes on a whole new dimension when the meat in question not only walks and talks like a man, but can perform astounding feats of magic. All of this is pounded home by Adam Stone’s inspired rock songs, some hilarious, some carrying a thumping portentousness reminiscent of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The plot concerns Snowball (Erik Edborg), a giant rabbit who works with a magician called Alec the Amazing and All-Powerful (Evan Weissman). At his best, Alec can pull off only the simplest and most obvious sleights of hand; Snowball is the genuine magical power behind the act. This bunny is anything but sweet and fluffy, however. He’s a miserable, scruffy creature who looks a little like the ugly, ragged-toothed White Rabbit in Jan Svankmajer’s film Alice and who likes stealing things that others value and are useless to him, simply to make as many people as possible miserable: the VHS tape of a graduation ceremony, a gravy boat, an old-fashioned gramophone. All of these objects hover below the ceiling throughout the action. Snowball has confiscated the legs of magician’s assistant Mystical Marla (Hannah Duggan), replacing them with those of a middle-aged workman so that she can no longer dance; he took away Alec’s right arm. Despite the depredations he’s wrought on their bodies, both Marla and Alec are in love with him. Also dangling from the ceiling, seated, is Woman (Erin Rollman), a regular audience member whom Snowball loved until he spotted her one evening in the company of another rabbit. A chatty, cheerful person in pink ruffled shoes, remarkably unfazed by her predicament, Woman eventually falls in love with Alec’s disembodied arm, played by Brian Colonna, and the two enact a Hollywood fantasy in which she is the gutsy ranch owner and he the traveling farm hand (pun most definitely intended) who’ll save her land.

This is not the only place where the production underlines its own artificiality, satirizing magic shows and theatrical conventions in general (a character standing in the distinct spotlight that universally signifies a soliloquy overhears another in a similar spotlight, to the latter’s great irritation), and looking at the ways we use language to create story and propel action. They niggle over usage: the fact that a rabbit is not a hare (unfortunately, “hare” works much better for song lyrics) and whether the potatoes in TV dinners are whipped or mashed. Woman is a chattering ninny most of the time, but Snowball had originally imagined her as an intellectual and, toward the play’s end, she becomes the figure he’d imagined, lapsing into erudition and discussing his role as tragic hero: Is he the classical noble-but-with-a-fatal-flaw model, the romantic Byronic type in rebellion against convention, or a twentieth-century anti-hero?

Edborg’s crazed energy somehow shines through the face-obscuring bunny mask, and Colonna also manages to surmount a smothering black costume that covers everything but his right arm and delivers a sizzling performance. Duggan is by turns cynical, angry and pathetic as lovelorn Marla; Rollman makes Woman as appealing as she is fluff-headed. Weissman has tended to play the quieter and more sensitive Buntport roles in the past, but here he lets loose with a brilliant cascade of tics and tricks, and a balls-out singing style that parodies every dopey, mannered vocalist you could ever imagine.

With its truly startling originality, Jugged Rabbit Stew is one of the deepest, weirdest, funniest and most assured things Buntport has done in its decade of amazing theater. It also testifies to the fruitfulness of the collaboration with Stone, as the Buntporters take on the musical form, bow to its conventions, then twist it every which way and back until it becomes their own. Don’t miss this production.

-Juliet Wittman, May 27, 2010, Westword

The members of the Buntport Theater troupe have always been interested in the creative process. They’ve imagined Alexandre Dumas creating his three musketeers after reading a novel borrowed from the library; suggested what would happen if Ovid, having burned the manuscript of Metamorphoses in a fit of pique, came face to face with one of his creations on the road, the woman-turned-cow Io; and woven the strands of Franz Kafka’s own history into the plot of his best-known work, Metamorphosis.

In The World Is Mine, Buntport gives us Eugene O’Neill in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy and thinking about beginning work on Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the play that dramatized the life of the author’s booze-drug-and-self-pity-soaked family and that he famously said was written in tears and blood. (In an interesting piece of artistic cross-fertilization, Paragon Theatre will open Long Day’s Journey Into Night next week.) The Buntporters treat this somber material with their usual fizz and humor without in any way trivializing it. They tackle O’Neill’s self-absorption head on: The set represents the inside of his mind, and the three other characters – all mustachioed like O’Neill himself – exist only as he sees them, or pretty much as he sees them; every now and then, one or another hints at an alternative self the playwright hasn’t noticed. The action takes place in the living room O’Neill envisions for his play; it has a sofa, piles of books, patterned wallpaper, a desk – or are there two desks? It takes a second to realize that much about this realistic-seeming set is out of kilter: in addition to the two desks, there are two chandeliers and two telephones; there are also a plethora of light switches and an oddly too-low entrance space. The kind of tape theaters use to mark the placement of props and furniture outlines almost everything. A profile of Erik Edborg, who plays O’Neill, is mounted on the back wall, facing left; opposite it, the same portrait has been flopped so it’s facing right. Or rather, facing itself. We half notice that there are glasses everywhere. And once the action begins, we find that the entire place bleeds alcohol as characters pour drinks from almost every available object, from a chandelier to a telephone.

One of the playwright’s sons has committed suicide; he is estranged from his surviving children, a drifter son and his daughter, Oona, who, to his fury and chagrin, has married a clown: Charlie Chaplin. O’Neill is being taken care of by a nurse, Cathleen, who reminds him of Oona and whom he will transform into the Tyrones’ dim, flirtatious Irish maid in Long Day’s Journey Into Night – hence the absurdly high heels she wears along with her mustache. His wife, Carlotta, is on the scene, too. She talks about creating a space where he can write (as the real Carlotta did), but mostly she babbles about the Chinese furnishings she plans for the house they intend to build and parades around in a succession of elegant dresses and surprising hats. The final character is Erland, come from Sweden to give O’Neill the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, which he must present to the playwright in the hospital because he is too weak to travel. Erland sometimes morphs into Jamie, who represented O’Neill’s loved and hated older brother in Long Day’s Journey.

As always, Buntport manages to lighten ponderous material while finding in it unexpected depths. One trick the company uses brilliantly is to concretize the metaphorical; the booze-soaked room, for instance, tells us everything we need to know without the characters having to stagger and slur. Oona’s image appears unexpectedly on a screen; O’Neill finds there’s no way to get rid of the costume his actor father wore in The Count of Monte Cristo, which reappears every time it’s bundled out of sight. What better way to communicate the iron hold of the past? Then there are the twin portraits. They’re clearly a sign of O’Neill’s narcissism – he’s trying to figure out which profile is the better – but they also represent the artist confronting himself, the man who must write versus the man who’d do anything, including kill himself, to avoid the pain of writing.

The World Is Mine raises the central question about Eugene O’Neill’s artistry: the fact that his focus is so relentlessly, claustrophobically inward. In their humorous and unpretentious way, the Buntporters – actors Edborg, Erin Rollman (Carlotta), Hannah Duggan (Cathleen) and Brian Colonna (Erland), along with co-creators SamAntha Schmitz and Evan Weissman – suggest that when feelings run deep enough and genius is sufficiently capacious, personal obsession becomes universal and transforms into art.

-Juliet Wittman, February 03, 2010, Westword

Every now and then, the Buntport troupe decides to remind audiences that they’re not just clever, funny, creative and entertaining; they’re also artists. And that’s just what they do with Indiana, Indiana, a production based on a novel by Laird Hunt of the University of Denver. The story isn’t complicated. An old man, Noah, who’s always been a little touched, remembers his life and obsesses over his brief, lost marriage to Opal. Scenes from his life – his childhood, his short stint as a mailman, his interactions with his parents – are acted out in a surreal way; periodically, someone called Max reads him letters from Opal, most of them communicating a kind of febrile ecstasy. It turns out that Opal, too, had mental problems, and was committed to a mental institution by (I think) Noah’s father, Virgil. Virgil may also have ended Noah’s visitation rights, so there’s longstanding and unresolved pain between father and son.

The piece is imagistic and poetic rather than literal. With their usual deft and imaginative stagecraft, the Buntporters have filled the evening with fluidly surprising moments. One thing transforms into another, windows and doors appear where once there were none, furniture slides on and off the stage, and mood and meaning are created by the interplay of different media: music, human voices and bodies, still and moving images, concrete objects that shimmer with an undefinable significance. At one point, an actor begins playing the saw. No sooner has the creaky note sounded than it starts to rise and purify, and we realize we’re hearing the haunting sound of a woman’s voice. For weeks, Buntport’s Facebook page sported a request for Mason jars; filled with a variety of things that denote the thoughts and events of Noah’s life – corks, dried leaves, yarn, used tea bags, buttons, seed pods, sticks, bones – these homely objects become a shimmering wall that dominates the set.

The visual metaphors are so luminous and beautiful that I hate to admit that sometimes I don’t quite see why they’re there, or what they have to do with the theme or storyline – a storyline that isn’t, in itself, particularly riveting. Take the man playing the saw. This is a moment of pure visceral pleasure, and interesting thoughts follow about the melding of the mechanical and the human, the artist’s ability to make something ethereal out of something mundane – just as the company does with its canning jars. It’s all very lovely and touching in an abstract sort of way, but what does the saw man have to do with Noah? There’s another, equally inventive moment that works gloriously, however: the joining together of Noah and Opal, done with swaying lights in a way I won’t describe because you just have to see it for yourself.

As actors, the Buntporters have taken a risk with Indiana, Indiana. They’ve set aside their usual hilarious antics and are playing it straight and vulnerable – an approach that reveals just how accomplished they’ve become. Taking on characters that range from the town sheriff to the genial Max (Noah’s son, perhaps?) to a coughing minister (Is he sick? Why doesn’t the script tell us?), Brian Colonna works with quiet assurance and is as good as I’ve ever seen him. Hannah Duggan is nurturing as Noah’s mother and purely touching as Opal. Playing Noah, Evan Weissman dons a mask early on, a weird, puff-cheeked thing, above which the dark line of his hair looks like a cap. He takes it off only once, when Noah and Opal come together, but manages to communicate all of Noah’s passions and regrets from behind this ambiguous mask. And while I never quite figured out what had caused the rift between Noah and his father, Erik Edborg’s profound sorrow as he walked slowly across the stage stilled all my questioning.

Buntport’s low-tech, high-creativity approach has had us seething with laughter often enough. This time, it’s the force behind an evening of quietly hypnotic beauty.

-Juliet Wittman, September 16, 2009, Westword

One of the things I love about Buntport is how the company comes at a subject from a genuinely original, sideways angle. Dramas based on Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers are usually romantic swashbucklers. But the Buntporters, who create their scripts through a collaborative process, were more intrigued by news stories from a few years back that told the kitschy yet oddly touching tale of Dumas’s body being exhumed and transported from the cemetery of his native village, Villers-Cotterêts, to Paris for burial at the Pantheon. The coffin was accompanied by actors dressed as Dumas’s characters and greeted in Paris by a white-robed woman on horseback representing Marianne, the spirit of France. President Jacques Chirac then read a solemn tribute to the author, who some critics considered too popular to be truly literary. And for this production, the troupe also fixed on a second fact, which they admit they found in Wikipedia: Dumas based his famous novel on a book he’d checked out of the Marseilles Public Library and never returned.

From this juxtaposition, we get a contemporary librarian named Charlotte (like all librarians who aren’t named Marian), who has noted the overdue book and is determined to get it back from Mr. Dumas — a feat that involves waylaying the coffin, confronting the three faux musketeers escorting it, and eventually engaging in a very lively duel of wits with the deceased author himself. In the course of all this, Charlotte is transported back in time to the carriage ride during which Dumas first read his library book, pondered its shortcomings and began to conceive of his own deathless characters. These scenes, in which the author transmutes tendentious dross into fictive gold while arguing with Charlotte about the virtues of logic and order versus those of romance and invention, are among the most delightful of an altogether delightful evening.

As regulars know (the company is starting its eighth season), Buntport achieves its effects in large part with low-budget but highly ingenious staging. A large wooden box serves as both Dumas’s coffin and his carriage. Borrowing the technique from former college classmate Thaddeus Phillips, Buntport also makes brilliant use of video — and the borrowing is particularly appropriate, since Musketeer explores issues of originality and the debt all artists owe their peers and predecessors. Three large screens in the center of the playing area show us the shelves of Charlotte’s library; placid green scenery moving past Dumas’s carriage; Charlotte and Dumas squished together inside the coffin, arguing. Many of the onscreen images are very beautiful: tall, waving grasses, radiant skies. Through a trick of light and perspective, characters leave the playing area, cross behind the screens and seem to enter a magic zone, becoming elegant silhouettes.

There are terrific bits of dialogue as well, as when the three people walking the coffin to Paris discuss their lives and why they’ve taken on this job. Gilbert tells the others he plays Porthos for children’s birthday parties, where he duels with balloon animals. Simone wants to go to cooking school, and comes up with a wistful description of the process of making fish quenelles. (Dumas himself was a well-known gourmet.) And Edgard was once in love with Charlotte and isn’t yet over it.

All of the actors — Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Brian Colonna, Erin Rollman and Evan Weissman — are versatile, funny and expressive. Weissman makes Dumas preternaturally good-natured and unflappable, while Rollman brings schoolmarmish precision to the role of Charlotte. And Andrew Horwitz’s music adds zing to the event.

Despite the production’s many strengths, the plot isn’t entirely satisfying. There’s a jolting contrivance toward the end. And although Charlotte’s onetime affair is intriguing, it never becomes a significant part of the story, and neither she nor Edgard changes or develops as a character. Still, Musketeer is enjoyably nutty and farcical, with duels erupting at the drop of a hat, slapstick humor and absurd running jokes. And there are serious ideas here as well: questions about the artistic process (one of Dumas’s own characters asks him to slow down and put more thought into the writing), as well as a growing understanding that poor Charlotte may be the guardian of these texts, but she can never understand the life throbbing inside them, a life that continues to enthrall readers more than a century after their creation. Watching this daring, imaginative work, we’re reminded that the process of transmutation from fact to fiction and fiction to art is one that the Buntporters explore every working day of their lives.

-Juliet Wittman, August 14, 2008, Westword