Nerds at the museum

Buntport’s ‘Coyote. Badger. Rattlesnake.’ a hilarious showdown inside a diorama

Most of us regard the dioramas that populate natural history museums as dusty, static moments in time that we hurry past on the way to the IMAX show. In Coyote. Badger. Rattlesnake, the Buntport Theater reimagines one such frozen tableau as a battleground of sorts, where four humans haggle over the three eponymous critters on their way to profoundly funny revelations.

Buntport’s reprise of this show features the familiar faces of Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Erin Rollman and Erik Edborg, who wrote and directed it alongside the fifth Buntporter, SamAnTha Schmitz and guest artist Ellen K. Graham. Together, they’ve imagined a rather tiny world where a stupendously nerdy pair of museum dioramists (Colonna and Duggan) fuss over a prairie-scene display that they’re rebuilding.

The show opens on just the vertical backdrop — the painted background that blends into the 3D scene on the ground. As the show progresses, two stagehands (Rollman and Edborg) bring out pieces of the exhibit between scenes, and it’s not long before their silence is broken by their own bickering. How long, we wonder, will it be before the world of the play crosses paths with the world of the theatre?

While Duggan as Carroll does her usual brilliant job of bringing the funny to every line, Colonna as Glenn plays an excellent foil to her over-the-top laments about the state of the diorama. Someone has spilled some pebbles into a little fucking pile! Who did that? It was Edborg’s character – the first nod to the collapse of the wall between the techs and the actors. Glenn just shrugs: “Wasn’t me.”

In a Godot-like manner, the main thing we’re wondering about is Cecily, the coyote. Part of her face was damaged, which Carroll blames on Glenn for bringing a breakroom bagel into the space. This makes as little sense to Glenn as it does to us, but the upshot is that Cecily has been sent off to a top taxidermist named Dr. Fauts for repair, and her return is subject of a lot of handwringing by Glenn and Carroll.

Erin Rolland and Erik Edborg play the stagehands.

So too does the incorrect placement of the badger, Mitchell, by the stagehands. (The snake is Langdon, BTW.) By placing it at the wrong time, it sets off another round of distress on the part of Glenn and Carroll, who are starting to think that they’re not alone. And when the stagehands late become unable to keep their backstage bickering down, it sets up the final breakdown and a triumphant and very funny reveal.

For all its silliness, Coyote has a wonderfully inventive build, both in the script and in the gradual construction of the set. Glenn may have become accustomed to being hounded and harassed by Carroll, but eventually she seems to accept him as someone as equally concerned about the diorama as she is. Although at first he may be a bit more willing to accept “good enough,” Glenn comes around to Carroll’s belief that everything matters.

The other build is with Edborg and Rollins, whose task at bringing out the parts of the diorama grows from silent industry to a more detailed exploration of their own relationship and beliefs. They, too, will confront questions about how good a job they need to do, ultimately aligning more with that of the dioramists.

I don’t want to read too much more into it, because Coyote’s primary goal is to make us laugh, and it does plenty of that. And in Buntport’s small black-box space, the comedy is amped up further by the proximity to the characters. Oh yes, they are right in the audience’s face, leaving little room for error. This seasoned quartet of actors are more than up for the challenge, and it’s clear their familiarity with each other over years of doing shows together really adds to the magic.

Theatre doesn’t get much purer than this: the creators and writers are the actors, the set is minimalist, the sound and light bare bones. What we’re left with here (and with most Buntport shows) is the joy of the players-to-audience connection, where the words are everything and which were written specifically for these actors — and no one else.