The parking lot is full, and cars line the curb on both sides of the street. Inside, people throng the lobby. A couple is being turned away at the front desk: “I’m sorry. We’re all sold out.” When I first visited this place a few years ago, there were seven or eight people in attendance, including myself and my friend. Now word must be out that this is the place to be on Saturday night: Buntport Theater, the opening of Kafka on Ice.

We find seats and settle in to clip-cloppy, ’30s-style music that sounds like the Charleston. We’re going to be close enough to the action to see the sweat shine on the actors’ faces. There are rows of chairs on all four sides of a green square of artificial ice – not gleaming ice-rink stuff, but something that looks like ancient linoleum, scratched and scuffed.

What on earth do these people at Buntport think they’re doing? Franz Kafka is a melancholy figure, a Prague-dwelling German Czech, steeped in the history of his time, the creator of a dwindling, despairing art. Not noisily or grandly despairing, but art that’s a kind of falling away, a hopeless whispering, the toneless song of Josephine the Mouse Singer, the silent melting of flesh from bone in The Hunger Artist, an art of terror, self-loathing and wordless longing for what can never be attained – and all of it limned in that precise bureaucrat’s prose. Kafka’s best-known works include a novel about a man tried for an act he doesn’t even know has been committed – let alone by him – and ultimately executed. Another describes a castle from which it’s impossible to escape. And then there’s the long short story called The Metamorphosis, which almost every high school student knows and which begins, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

But all of these cheerful Saturday-night people haven’t come here to explore the sorrows of old Europe. They’ve come for a good time. And the Buntporters aren’t exactly known for their worshipful treatment of the classics. But then, they’re not known for denigrating or nullifying or being plain dumb about literature, either. So what are we going to see?

The bouncy music stops. In the darkness that follows, we hear the scritching of a pen on paper, like the sounds of a skate blade on ice. Under the sudden illumination of a single, bare lightbulb, we see Kafka, played by Gary Culig, writing at a desk. Within minutes, the rest of the cast has skated on in impressive unison – yes, wearing real skates – and the show takes off.

Kafka on Ice is part biography. It tells Kafka’s story, about his fear of his overbearing father, his unhappy love life, his friendship with Max Brod, the way in which Gregor Samsa’s predicament represents his own. But it also deals with the way a work like The Metamorphosis changes over time, as it passes through the minds of friends, readers, critics, fellow writers, teachers and tricksters like the Buntport gang. So at one point you have the great novelist Vladimir Nabokov (played by Erik Edborg) arguing that, contrary to some critical opinion, the insect in The Metamorphosis is clearly a beetle, not a cockroach. Then there’s a teacher (a hilarious performance by Erin Rollman) trying to communicate the idea of symbolism to her bored class while peeping periodically at her own cheat notes. The lights go out, and a voice reads a passage aloud in the darkness, bringing clarity and focus to the words. When the lights return, we watch a schoolboy cross the stage with his satchel on his back, reading as he walks.

The Metamorphosis goes through several transmutations: It’s played as farce, as an experiment with objects, as grinning, dancing musical comedy.

Buntport has its own way of dealing with Kafka’s life story. The writer’s meeting with his first love, Felice, is shown as a scene in a silent movie. She falls cutely about on the ice, while he, Chaplin-like, attempts to rescue her – all to the accompaniment of a plinking piano.

This show is anything but Kafkaesque. It’s lighthearted, giddy and goofy. As written, the climax of The Metamorphosis begins with a heartbreaking scene in which Gregor is drawn from his seclusion by the haunting sound of his sister playing the violin. In Kafka on Ice – which has earlier referred to Kafka’s thoughts on his own Jewishness – he hears the violin solo from Fiddler on the Roof.

Buntport creates an Alice in Wonderland world where objects take on their own life and shrink and grow at will. The city of Prague is represented by a pop-up in a book. Gregor Samsa is at one point a glove puppet, seconds later a remote-controlled mechanical toy, and finally, a costumed actor.

There are some really beautiful moments. Kafka sends Felice one of his stories to read; in her hands, it unfurls into the paper figure of a man, and she dances with it. “The writing does quite well with her,” observes Kafka. When Kafka proposes to another love, Milena, his words are made of light, flowing over the rows of audience members, across the ersatz ice and away up the walls. Her response is a calligraphic “Yes.”

I have a couple of quibbles. Every now and then, the script is repetitive. Culig is a good actor, but he has an endearing, vulnerable quality that doesn’t feel quite right for Kafka. Brian Colonna’s Max Brod is pinch-faced, squeaky-voiced and very amusing, but too much of a caricature – both as performed and as conceived. The real Max Brod was far more than a leech who took advantage of Kafka’s fame; he was also the author’s longtime friend and loyal advocate. But all six actors do well. Erik Edborg has to stifle his insanely anarchic instincts to play Kafka’s heavy-handed father, and it works. Evan Weissman’s turn as the charlady (in a uniform that’s pure French maid) is a hoot, as is Hannah Duggan’s determined yet perplexed expression every time she skates across the stage with a flour sack in her mouth (don’t ask). As for Erin Rollman, I don’t have words to describe her performance. She’s a brilliant comic universe unto herself.

All of which explains the crowd in the lobby. It’s safe to say that no one else – anywhere – is doing theater like this.

-Juliet Wittman, October 14, 2004, Westword

Buntport Theater has fun with one-acts and paper props

Now that Buntport Theater has come of age and is attracting reliably positive reviews and large, enthusiastic audiences, the six company members have revived one of their earlier works, an evening of one-acts titled 2 in 1. The first piece, “This is My Significant Bother,” is a dramatization of nine stories by James Thurber; the second is an explication of the Cliffs Notes explication of Beowulf (it makes sense when you see it — sort of). These are both slight pieces, but they’re clever and entertaining, and the sets and costumes are as inventive as ever. It’s pretty much impossible not to have a good time at Buntport.

As the evening begins, four actors — Brian Colonna, Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan and Erin Rollman — are lying on a large bed, their left arms in perfect alignment on the coverlet, their hands conspicuously wedding-ringed. They manage to stay absolutely still as the audience arrives and settles in. Perhaps they’re asleep. One of the evening’s pleasures is the way the actors manage to move swiftly and soundlessly during blackouts, so that we’re always slightly surprised at where they’re each standing or sitting when the lights come on.

Although he apparently labored over their composition, Thurber’s stories are sketches rather than fully developed character studies or descriptions of events. They have the wistful, unfinished quality of his New Yorker cartoons, along with a misogyny so self-deprecating that it almost seems forgivable. If his women are all-powerful, soulless harridans, well, his men are pretty silly, too, and sometimes downright irritating. (Although, in a fable Buntport doesn’t attempt, it’s only the male of the species who’s capable of seeing a unicorn in the back garden.)

“Significant Bother” is not intended to be laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a sincere and gently humorous homage to Thurber.

A husband manfully protects his wife from a spider but cowers under the bedclothes when he hears a bat. A woman stands up in court and insists she deserves a divorce because of her husband’s habit of holding his breath. In one of the most absurd and amusing pieces, a police officer finds a woman seated in a car while a man crawls on the ground in front of the vehicle; they are trying to ascertain whether a human being’s eyes will glow in the headlights as a cat’s or dog’s would. In another car scene, this time inside the car, a couple fights over whether Greta Garbo is a more important cultural icon than Donald Duck and bickers about where to stop for a hamburger, the wife insisting that the eatery must be a cute one. Meanwhile, the car is emitting a threatening and unidentifiable noise. Yet another husband orders his wife into the basement so that he can kill her and make off with his stenographer. Wise to his plan, she gives him orders on how to accomplish the deed. All of this is interspersed with interesting renditions of such ’30s songs as “Makin’ Whoopee” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” And the bed that anchors the play (in the very last scene, a man painstakingly smooths the sheets while his ex-wife discusses his failings with his wife-to-be) is manipulated by the Buntporters with their usual sangfroid, becoming by turns a car, a platform, even a cellar.

Perhaps the most interesting and unexpected piece is a mood story about a doomed love affair called “Evening’s at Seven,” which is told through a series of lighted tableaux separated by patches of darkness. It’s touching, original and sophisticated.

For the second play, the cast appears in front of a backdrop of text wearing dark-blue maintenance men’s outfits and tool belts that hold an arsenal of paper props. They proceed to act out the story of Beowulf, interspersing the action with textual commentary — and their own acerbic comments. In case you’ve forgotten, this Old English poem concerns the predations of a monster, the monster’s dam (or, as the Buntporters have it, “dam mother”) and a dragon. As always, the props are inventive; in this instance, they’re made entirely of paper. Beowulf’s army consists of a string of paper cutouts worn across Edborg’s chest like a bandolier; streams of paper representing blood from a wound are helpfully and multiply labeled “blood,” just as the paper crown bears the legend “crown.” The paper dragon is a thing of wonder. Periodically, we hear a voice reading from Beowulf itself and — though you’d need to know Old English to understand the words — the power and beauty of the text makes itself felt through all the loony shenanigans.

The acting is terrific, as always, though it concerns me a little that both Colonna and Edborg act so much from the neck upward. I’d like to see their voices and impulses coming from deeper in the body. In addition to the cast, Matt Petraglia, SamAnTha Schmitz and Evan Weissman helped create 2 in 1.

I’m getting tired of saying this, but if you haven’t attended a show at Buntport yet, you should. You won’t see anything like it anywhere else.

-Juliet Wittman, May 6, 2004, Westword

Speaking as someone who was terrified of the telephone when I was a child because I couldn’t understand how the voices of people I knew could get trapped in this black plastic thing, I am very grateful to Buntport Theater Company for explaining how a television works: Little fairy people are trapped inside the box and act out all the shows and commercials.

In Idiot Box: An Evening of Sketch Comedy, five Buntporters illustrate this theory with a series of sketches. There’s a lot of danger in the premise. To begin with, it could lead to a show that’s unbearably cute. And skits featuring game shows and other standard television fare have been done. And done and done. Apparently every time a Saturday Night Live writer runs out of ideas — clearly a frequent occurrence — he comes up with such a scnenario. It’s inevitably lame, because there’s no way of mocking a genre that comes across like a parody of itself in the first place. But Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, Evan Weissman and Brian Colonna, who (with SamAnTha Schmitz and Matt Petraglia) created Idiot Box and also perform it, avoid these traps. They’re very good actors and deft, witty writers. No skit goes exactly where you think it’s going; no flight of lunatic fantasy is too ridiculous to be undertaken; no joke gets belabored past the point of funniness. The whole evening is light and stylish, and the group is smart enough to stop the entire proceeding while you’re still rocking with laughter and wanting more.

There are, of course, takeoffs on standard TV fare: a cop drama, a game show, a reality series, the Food Network. These are punctuated by scenes in which we see the fairies — only their silhouettes are visible behind a transparent white screen — warming up, arguing, making shadow puppets and discussing whether work in the microwave business wouldn’t be less stressful and more satisfying. Then there’s the sound of someone channel surfing — the idiotic bursts of dialogue, laughter, music and impassioned selling we’re all so familiar with — and another skit begins.

In a dating-game show,

a horrified Evan Weissman is paired with a sluttily oozing and squeakily singing Erin Rollman as “another couple you can look down on.” Edborg gets in shots at arrogant chefs, along with some cogent allusions to current events, in “Cooking With Stalin.” There’s a takeoff on nature shows featuring daring Australians handling snakes and alligators, only here the two Australians are terrified of anything resembling untrammeled wildlife. “Birds,” says one of them. “You can’t trust them.” In a Sesame Street-style show, song, metaphor and action are used to teach kids how you find a clitoris.

Where the lines aren’t that strong, the characterizations are. When the characterizations flag, a clever or audacious comment comes to the rescue. Duggan shines as the female half of a cop team and as the gum-chewing girlfriend of the pathetic, mindlessly violent host of The Bully Show. Evan Weissman is a convincing straight man with a hilarious repertoire of hapless expressions. Brian Colonna is so filled with delight at his (or perhaps it’s her) own cleverness in the game show that he can’t stop patting himself on the back — and we can’t stop chortling every time he does it. As comedians, Edborg and Rollman take things right to the edge and then over it. Why is Edborg imitating a chicken behind that scrim, and is he really going to lay an egg? How does Rollman come up with these insane characters? All her bits are funny, but one of them takes the cake: a monstrous adolescent who’s just won a science fair with her world-conquering board game, Monopolize Your Risk. This girl is such a bullying, self-satisfied, evil, lisping little megalomaniac that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but you do know you can’t take your eyes off of her.

-Juliet Wittman, December 18, 2003, Westword

Buntport’s version of Shakespeare’s forgotten yarn strikes a bloody good note

Titus Andronicus has always bothered Shakespeare scholars, some of whom simply refused to believe that the great man actually wrote the blood-drenched monstrosity. In his famous Tales From Shakespeare, Charles Lamb noted that Titus was “not acknowledged” by the critics whose assessment of dates he used, “nor indeed by any author of credit.” Later thinkers reluctantly acknowledged Shakespeare’s authorship but have suggested that Titus was a rewrite of an older and much worse play. Others, defending the tragedy, pointed out that there are lots of corpses in Hamlet and King Lear, as well as spurious gore, and that Greek tragedy is full of rape, murder and cannibalism. Harold Bloom, on the other hand, believes that the play is an intentional parody, a Shakespearean sendup of rival playwright Christopher Marlowe. In any case, almost nobody stages Titus these days. Audiences are too apt to titter at the forgettable merry-go-round of posturing, declaiming characters, betrayals and counter-betrayals, and the cascade of murders and mutilations.

But the folks at Buntport Theater have figured it out. They’re presenting Titus Andronicus as Titus Andronicus! The Musical. Why has no one ever thought of this before? It means that when Titus is told he can save the lives of two of his sons by chopping off his hand (don’t ask — it wouldn’t make sense even if I gave you more context), we get a stirring masculine trio as he, his brother and another (currently unendangered) son compete for the honor of self-mutilation, complete with stirring choruses and natty little rhythmic steps. “Nay, come, agree whose hand shall go along,” says evil Aaron, who has set this all up, “for fear they die before their pardon come.” And when Titus, having killed the wicked Tamora’s wicked sons, makes plans to bake their heads and serve them in pastry to their mother, he flourishes a knife in his remaining hand and musically debates the recipe in a zesty French accent.

This is Titus Andronicus as staged by Professor P.S. Goldstien — aka Brian Colonna — and four actors, out of the back of a van that occupies Buntport Theater’s cavernous and otherwise empty playing area. Each actor plays more than one of Titus‘s several dozen roles, and there’s a helpful placard with pictures, names and lightbulbs that get turned on and off during the action so you can figure out who’s playing whom at any given moment. There’s also a chalkboard to track the corpses. This doesn’t mean you can actually follow the twists and turns of the plot — it’s hard to do that in any production — but it does give you a broad idea of what’s happening, which is all you really need.

The van is tricked out with immense ingenuity. One side is painted like a forest, the other like a building. Canvases slide up and down inside the door, platforms are pulled from the side and back. Periodically, the entire cast gets together to push the vehicle from one place to another. They do this with energy, élan and high good humor, so that a fall or mishap becomes part of the performance.  It isn’t just that Buntport’s is an interpretation of an inexplicable piece of our literary inheritance (and for all its lunacy, it is an interpretation). It’s that the approach to the work — the collaboration and improvisation with which it began — is valid theater in itself. You see the way the group has chosen to present a particular speech, but you also see how the actor speaking it stumbled (or strolled) into his interpretation and what he now feels about it. There’s Shakespeare’s text, and there’s also Buntport’s commentary — overt or implied — on that text.

Objects take on a life of their own. In the night scenes, a stuffed owl perches on the van’s rearview mirror. When someone comments that “the leaves are green,” several skeletal umbrellas, their spokes covered with leaves, unfurl. Blood spurts, dribbles and pools. Tamora’s sons, Demetrius and Chiron, are represented by a gasoline can and a car radio; their speech comes courtesy of Erik Edborg, who acts as their puppeteer. Later, the human-flesh pies speak, too.

Buntport Theater is the creation of several graduates of Colorado College — Brian Colonna, Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman, Matt Petraglia and Samantha Schmitz — who create their theater pieces collaboratively. Colonna, Edborg, Duggan and Rollman are the performers in Titus, along with Muni Kulasinghe. You want to see them at work, because this production is clever, inventive, and one of the funniest evenings of theater around. It’s also definitive. Which means you’ll never have to go see Titus Andronicus again.

-Juliet Wittman, February 13, 2003, Westword