Popular indie company opens its 25th season with today’s launch of a five-year, $2.65 million capital campaign to purchase its building

For 25 years, the five members of Denver’s quirky, creative and accidentally entrepreneurial Buntport Theater collective have not stopped working long enough to look up. If they had, they might have noticed before April that their landlord had hung a for-sale sign on the warehouse where they have created and staged 55 fully original plays and musicals since 2001.

“That’s how we found out,” said ensemble member Erin Rollman. “Brian (Colonna) walked in and said, ‘What the (bleep)?’”

The dramatic backstory here is worthy of its own stage play.

Over the past 25 years, Buntport has transformed its one-third of the 10,000-square-foot building at 717 Lipan St. into a trusted home for its absurdly smart and funny stage inventions like, say, “Kafka on Ice.” That one title pretty much says it all about both the company’s aesthetic, and its singular place in the local and national theater ecology. But the company canon also includes more than 500 one-off performances of long-running “live sit-coms,” recurring children’s stories and more.

“I think they went bankrupt,” Rollman said. “They disappeared in the middle of the night.” Then came the for-sale sign.

Owner Jimmy Katsaros put a deal together to sell the entire building to a housing developer – but, not so fast. Back in 2001, a heroic Buntport friend (and attorney) named Ryan Christ insisted on the inclusion of a right-of-first refusal clause in the lease – and Buntport just exercised it.

That’s right. Buntport is opening its 25th season with today’s launch of a five-year, $2.65 million capital campaign to purchase the entire building and open it up as an arts hub for the entire community just south of downtown Denver.

This is one case where what’s good for the company is good for the larger community as well, “and that’s the most exciting part of all of this,” said ensemble member Erik Edborg. Buntport is essentially tripling its physical size, which makes room not only for additional storage, a wood shop, meeting room, sewing room and a kitchenette, but also a large new rehearsal room will be made available at low cost to small companies in desperate need of a place to play.

Buntport’s existing theater will also have more room to grow now, and plans are in the works to create housing for visiting artists in a home the company owns across the street.

The capital campaign is called “Buntport’s Big Ask,” of which $1.1 million already has been committed. That puts them 42 percent of the way there. Only, gulp, $1.54 million to go.

“Certainly, that number makes me want to poop right now,” Colonna said.

Method to their madness

You have to understand that, as artists and humanoids, the Buntport Five – Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Edborg, Rollman and Samantha Schmitz – are a band of adorable goofs who insist that all of this is accidental – the 25 years of critical success, the 150 awards, the 300,000 audience members, the 125 visiting artists. That they have no real ambitions or particular business acumen.

They’re being self-deprecating, to be sure. But, then again … are they?

When they first realized the neighboring business had been abandoned, they were most excited by the copy machine that was left behind. “We’ve never had a copy machine!” exclaimed Colonna. “Everyone wants a copy machine!” exclaimed Edborg.

Duggan called the phone number taped to the front of the machine and was told: “The gentleman who bought it has not paid us for it, but we will be pursuing legal action with him. So I guess you have a copy machine.”

You can bet the rest of that day was spent with cheeks pressed against glass and vision-threatening strobes of copier lights. Because when you are a Buntporter, that’s how you celebrate acquiring a $2.65 million building.

‘I’m 50!’

Last week, Duggan became the third Buntporter to celebrate her 50th birthday, with the youngers only a year or two behind. She got to decide where the group would celebrate, and she chose, without guilt or guile: The Olive Garden. Not because she loves it. Because she’s never been. Why not? 

At both sides of 50, Colonna says, these endlessly creative storytellers “are in the prime of our working lives.” They just aren’t feeling any lingering grand professional national aspirations. Never have. Next year, they are finally taking one of their hit shows to New York. Not off-Broadway. To Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.

Acquiring the building is pretty good assurance that the collective will likely stay intact through retirement, which for them means some long-sought stability. A small sense of comfort and security that is generally unheard-of for members of small, self-starting arts groups.

These ones just really want to try the bread sticks.

But there was one prevailing and shamelessly altruistic motivation for all this that they will cop to.

“What really pushed us to look into buying the building was everybody got excited by the idea of helping other people,” said Edborg.

No, really.

Opening the new space to other companies will immediately help to ease the growing problem of smaller arts organizations having a place to perform but not a place to rehearse. Take the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company, which has been on a tear of late staging some of the most compelling plays of the year. Its actors have rehearsed in a church, in a supporter’s living room, in the lobby of a buddy’s office and in a church. 

“We’re kind of the rehearsal-space nomads of the theater community,” said Managing Director Mark Ragan, whose company will become the first official tenants of Buntport’s new backstage rehearsal space in just three weeks.

“The whole idea of having a permanent rehearsal space that you can use – one that you’re paying another feeder company for, and thereby helping them to pay down their own loan to purchase the property? There couldn’t be a more perfect solution,” Ragan said. 

A singular origin story

Here’s the thing about the Buntport Theater collective: There’s nobody like them. Not in Denver. Not in Colorado. Not in the United States. In 1998, seven Colorado College friends decided to form their own theater company. Not to “do plays.” To do their own plays. Without a designated playwright, director or boss of any kind. Everyone in the company is equal. Everyone is paid the same. Everyone writes. Everyone builds the sets. Everyone takes out the trash.

Contrary to what I have asserted in print before: They do not shower together. (That was literary license.)

Buntport has cultivated a feverishly loyal audience base by creating collaborative works ranging from political satire to absurdist comedy, all with rigorous intellect. The company’s name is a mangled reference to the Bush presidential retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine.

They are now only five because, apparently, the only way out is to have children.

It is impossible to overstate how rare it is for a fixed ensemble to move through their entire adult lives making art together, through life changes, financial challenges and shifting relationships. The average lifespan for new theater companies in Colorado isn’t even two years. It often isn’t even two shows. Colonna is sure that the 2001 version of him would never have believed he’d still be making theater with his friends in 2025. They’ve certainly made it through an unexpected confluence of ephemeral circumstances.

Buntport made news a decade ago when all of them became full-time employees of the company, each earning equal salaries of $30,000 a year. Today, their princely pay is $43,000 before taxes. That might make Buntport something of a collectivist utopia, but still, that is an insane way to live. According to a recent study by a financial website, you would need to make $65,000 just to cover the basic costs of living for a single person in Denver.

“It’s just so expensive to live in Denver right now,” Colonna said. “I can tell you that we wouldn’t make this theater company if we were starting out now. It would just be impossible.”

So how do they do it?

“None of us have kids,” said Rollman, “and we are all living in housing with somebody else. Hannah is living with lots of somebody elses.” Added Duggan: “I think the only way anyone in the country can truly make ends meet is with a double income.” Some of them got lucky and bought houses before the market exploded. (Anyone remember HUD homes?)

As a group, they look out for each other. They check in to make sure no one’s credit cards get out of control. And when life hits one of them hard, they help each other out.

“We talk constantly about our pay structure,” Colonna said. “The truth is, it’s a struggle every year.” 

How do they do it?

Buntport has gone its own way from the start. And now it is, to its own greatest surprise, showing a way forward for others. At a time when the neighboring, venerated Curious Theatre has put its historic Acoma Center home up for sale in a risky attempt to get out from underneath its debt, Buntport is bucking the trend by, in Colonna’s words, doubling down.

“I think this is good news for the entire Colorado theater community because, from the pandemic on, all we’ve had to confront is bad news,” said Ragan. “What Buntport is doing is amazing and wonderful.”

Buntport mounts about three shows a year while also partnering on a variety of creative side projects with other arts organizations including Stories on Stage, the Denver Art Museum, Augustana Arts and more. Buntport also hosts film, visual art, dance, meetings, workshops, birthdays, weddings, funerals and more. Schmitz figures the average Buntport audience member visits the warehouse six to 10 times a year.

But how does this company work? Unlike all others, starting from the ethos of writing and performing all of its own work. That’s the hardest kind to market and sell. But Buntport only spends about $1,200 to mount a new show. That is not a typo.

They can do that only because Buntport is the rare company that truly is its own nonprofit business – meaning their largest expenses are not show-specific. They are collective costs, like salaries. And in a world where a $100 theater ticket is no longer uncommon, Buntport remains committed to a “pay what you can” pricing structure, which generally means about $23 per ticket. 

Buntport’s operating budget is about $300,000 a year, said Schmitz, a figure that will grow to $550,000 for the duration of the capital campaign because, for the next few years, the company will have to raise money both to operate as usual and pay down the capital campaign simultaneously.

Schmitz says it takes about $10,000 a month to keep the doors open. And now those doors are going to be open to a lot more people. That, Edborg said, means something.

“To me, the message here is that you can make your own stuff, even if it seems like there are no other resources out there,” he said. “Yes, it will be hard, but you can do it – and not necessarily in the way that it’s traditionally done.”

The $1.54 million task at hand, Colonna said, “is pretty exciting. It’s just daunting.” But If this experiment is successful, he added, “it will be proof that theatermaking in Colorado is strong and flourishing.”

And that makes Rollman a little emotional.

“People might think it’s cheesy, but I’m genuinely the most excited about the way that we can positively impact other theater companies and other artists,” she said.

“I think, in the end, this community is what we all have. That’s what is going to get us through anything. And I think people still need and want to be together in a physical space watching and sharing stories. That’s what it is to be human. And I think that’s what this is about.”

Colonna: “It does sound cheesy when you say it.”

Rollman:  “Thanks, Brian.”

Edborg: “It got me, Erin. … It got me real good.”

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Email him at john.moore@denvergazette.com.

At Buntport/What’s next?

• What: ‘Edgar Allan Poe is Dead and So is My Cat’

• When: Oct. 31-Nov. 16

• Written and performed by: Brian Colonna, Hunnah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Erin Rollman and Samantha Schmitz

• Showtimes: 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 10

• Where: 717 Lipan St.

• Tickets: Name your price

• Info: 720-946-1388 or at buntport.com

Donate to ‘Buntport’s Big Ask’

Go to buntport.com/2025/10/capital-campaign