DENVER — Put six talented, educated people in a room to brainstorm a play, and eventually they may get to thinking about the book 19th-century writer Alexandre Dumas checked out of the library but failed to return.
Then, within the space of six weeks, they come up with a full-length production: “Musketeer,” which opens Buntport Theater’s eighth season.
The six-person Denver theater ensemble is known for its original, quirky and intelligent plays. Truly, the company gets an “A” for inventiveness and attempts at highbrow humor. For six people to write, direct, perform in and stage a show like this in six weeks is impressive enough that even if every bit doesn’t quite work, you’re willing to forgive. In the case of “Musketeer,” some exchanges between characters are mundane and too long, and a running gag or catchphrase may become repetitive. One wonders what the result would have been if the writers/actors had had more time to tighten and hone the material.
The show’s premise is simple enough. Dumas based some of his popular book “The Three Musketeers” on “Les Memoires de M. d’Artagnan,” by Sandraz de Courtils. According to records kept by the Marseille library, Dumas checked out that book in the 1800s and never returned it. In 2002, an avenging librarian named Charlotte (Erin Rollman) discovers this discrepancy and decides she wants the book back — and she’ll stop at nothing to get it.
The year 2002 is significant because that’s when then-French president Jacques Chirac had Dumas’ body exhumed from his hometown of Villers-Cotterets and moved to the Pantheon in Paris, the resting place of the nation’s heroes. This sets the stage for our three contemporaries, Simone (Hannah Duggan), Edgard (Erik Edborg) and Gilbert (Brian Colonna), who, dressed in musketeer garb, are charged with the task of walking Dumas’ casket along the countryside to Paris.
The librarian tracks them down and presents the laid-to-rest Dumas with a way-overdue fine. It all borders on the absurd, farcical and oftentimes nonsensical, as the action shifts between 2002 and 1844 (the year “The Three Musketeers” was published), at which time our 21st-century librarian meets the same actors, this time as the fictional musketeers Aramis (Duggan), Athos (Edborg) and Porthos (Colonna). Dumas is played by Evan Weissman. Buntport regular SamAnTha Schmitz is offstage for this production.
To say the set is spare is an overstatement: Its centerpiece is a casket on wheels. But we follow the story by the ingenious use of scrim — a flat, translucent panel onto which both scenery and narration are projected. Suddenly our heroes are in rural France, or at a cafe, and audience members never get mixed up about time sequences because they are reminded about which year it is on the screen.
The show is crafted around components of 19th-century “swashbuckling novels” — intrigue, adventure, romance, plots and subplots — combined with a generous dose of histrionics, duels and desperate situations. Even the act of moving the casket through the countryside is a nod to swashbucklers, whose adventures and enemy encounters most commonly occurred along the high roads.
You’d think a librarian would be more enamored of a legendary author from another century, but this one is dogged in her determination to retrieve the book, like a pit bull that won’t let go. One scene is even reminiscent of Glenn Close’s character in “Fatal Attraction.” Still, we don’t really know if the librarian has a deep, enduring love for the book or if she is just the most anal-retentive, rule-abiding librarian the world has ever known, literally willing to risk her neck for her principles. It’s a one-note concept mixed with swashbuckling swagger, banter and bravado, a peppering of literary high-jinks and a dash of slapstick.
Buntport Theater has a corner on intelligent, irreverent and experimental original pieces. Clearly, the actors have a lot of fun doing it, and the audience has a great deal of fun watching.
-Karen Goodwin , August 14, 2008 , Daily Camera