Buntport Theater Company is a smart, funny sextet of young theater folks, Colorado College graduates, who write all their own material, dream up ingenious staging and sets and handle all the technical aspects of a production: sound, lights, special effects, costumes. With tongue firmly in cheek, the group takes on the classics, short stories, film genre and creating productions unlike any others in Denver’s rich selection of theater listings.
“Musketeer” promises, in Buntport Theater Company’s words, “to mix true life events and Alexander Dumas’ classic novel ‘The Three Musketeers’ with a lot of imagination and improbable nonsense.” Indeed, it does.
The premise, according to Buntport’s program: Dumas, despite claiming otherwise, based “Three Musketeers” on a book called “The Memoirs of Mister d’Artagnan.” He checked the book out from the Marseilles Public Library. He kept the book. In 2002, Dumas’ body was exhumed from a grave site in his home town to be moved to the Pantheon in Paris, a more suitable burial site for an illustrious French writer. The Castellane Branch of the Marseilles Public Library is in an underground metro station.
These items provide a jumping off point for a flight of fancy, the writers say. “And if we were you, we wouldn’t let little things like ‘how things really are’ get in the way.”
Lights go up on a silhouette of a librarian searching her shelves for a book. It’s Charlotte (Erin Rollman) who realizes that Dumas never returned the above book and, since she knows his body is being moved to Paris, decides to go ask him for it.
Abandon any preconceived ideas about the tale and join her in her journey as, throwing in a spoof of the detective genre, she meets a trio of characters attired in 19th century clothing appropriate for swashbucklers, and eventually the late, lamented writer himself. “I’ll just knock on the coffin.”
These three inept Musketeers plan to push the casket on wheels to Paris. We meet sword-swishing Porthois (Brian Colonna), who owns his fancy costume and is a 19th century re-enactor when he can get a gig. In less grand, on-backwards, government-provided costume is, lanky, bewigged Edgard/Athos (Erik Edborg). Hannah Duggan, as Aramis, is the third member of this goofy crew, who all have big hats, swords and boots.
Evan Weissman plays the writer who created “Three Musketeers,” and is a bit annoyed at being disturbed from his rest. As the casket becomes a carriage, he cheers up and invites her to ride with him. He does produce the somewhat musty-looking volume in question for the persistent Charlotte.
A real strength of Buntport, in addition to dreaming up the story in the first place, is the ingenious way they present a play with multiuse props – a casket morphs into a carriage, sound effects, and in this case, projections and shadowy figures behind a floor-to-ceiling screen on a low budget.
-Sonya Ellingboe, September 2, 2008, Parker Chronicle