The queer theatre group Grapefruit Lab partners with indie band Teacup Gorilla for a no-two-shows-the-same experience

There’s a different opening set every night for Grapefruit Lab’s hybrid performance Whiskey from Strangers. On the night I went it was the one-time-only appearance of Deva Yoder, a laid-back singer/songwriter whose music is described as “folk at its purest and most beautiful” in a quote on her home page, and I’ll happily go with that.

Between songs — delivered at the front of a set that was nothing more than a drum kit, two electric guitar set-ups and a kiddie pool — she took a look around and told us how she’d never been there before, how nice it was and how she’d like to come back and experience more. In retrospect, the slightest tinge of a promo might have crept into that statement (“Tell your friends!”) but it really didn’t matter.

She was right: Audience members were warmly greeting each other, smiling, hugging and holding hands, while those who had come alone might well have thought, as I did, that Deva had channeled exactly how we’d all been feeling. “May you resonate,” she’s sung in the chorus of the previous song. By accident or design, Deva had captured the entire spirit of the evening.

The main event, “Whiskey from Stranger,” was an album-release concert for Teacup Gorilla — Sondra Eby on drums, Daniel Eisenstat on guitar and Miriam Suzanne on bass. It was at the same time a scripted enactment by real friends in real time in real surroundings, where the audience was more than happy to play its part as a friendly cohort of fans.

The enactment was exactly the kind of casually error-prone gathering you’d expect from a band who are together not because they want to hit the big time but because it’s such a big part of who they are: making music together interrupted by long bouts of shared daydreaming to the point where the daydreaming becomes the thing, and the music — as catchy and appealing as it might be — is the catalyst.

Photo: Kenny Storms

The blue plastic kiddie pool plonked right in the middle of the stage provided a wet spark for a series of prepared yet inevitably scattered presentations on subjects ranging from an urban myth about a night swim to where the “old Denver” has gone in the face of all the manic real estate development.

Far from being cut short to get back to the running order, the constant sidetracks the conversation took ended up becoming the very substance of the play. Which could be said to be about personal change in all its forms — in gender, sexuality, body, religious beliefs, responses to what’s happening in your surroundings, the place you choose to live, the place you choose to relocate to. These explorations were sincerely felt yet casually digressed from without hesitation, just as you imagine happening if the band were half-rehearsing in their basement studio on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

There was plenty of humor in the casual openness with which the band members responded to the aleatory twists and turns of the dialogue, whose only real reference point might have ultimately been what was in the kiddie pool.

In one scene, the magnetic pull of the pool fomented an interaction between band members not of words but of movement — a sidetrack from the album release proceedings for sure, but a mesmerizing one nonetheless. By the end, we were pretty much back where we started, albeit with things to ponder we may never have looked at quite in the same way before.

Erin Rollman, one of the theatre-making humans who comprise Buntport Theatre Company, was on the creative team that developed the show. As a guest presentation, “Whiskey from Strangers” definitely rhymes with the devised theatre that Buntport makes, primarily through the smart, funny and surprising ways it puts the play in “play.” It takes you places you’ve never been before with a kind of invisible wink, and you may find yourself laughing all the way there.

Post script: A favorite moment was right at the beginning when the precarious division between the tightly scripted enactment and the real-time happenings was breached. Daniel’s shirt had gotten wet, and he said to no-one in particular “Anyone got a shirt I could have?” It had clearly been intended as just a gag, but a woman in front of me eagerly dove into real time (such as it was), took off the shirt she was wearing over her dress and handed it to him.