One of the things I love about Buntport is how the company comes at a subject from a genuinely original, sideways angle. Dramas based on Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers are usually romantic swashbucklers. But the Buntporters, who create their scripts through a collaborative process, were more intrigued by news stories from a few years back that told the kitschy yet oddly touching tale of Dumas’s body being exhumed and transported from the cemetery of his native village, Villers-Cotterêts, to Paris for burial at the Pantheon. The coffin was accompanied by actors dressed as Dumas’s characters and greeted in Paris by a white-robed woman on horseback representing Marianne, the spirit of France. President Jacques Chirac then read a solemn tribute to the author, who some critics considered too popular to be truly literary. And for this production, the troupe also fixed on a second fact, which they admit they found in Wikipedia: Dumas based his famous novel on a book he’d checked out of the Marseilles Public Library and never returned.

From this juxtaposition, we get a contemporary librarian named Charlotte (like all librarians who aren’t named Marian), who has noted the overdue book and is determined to get it back from Mr. Dumas — a feat that involves waylaying the coffin, confronting the three faux musketeers escorting it, and eventually engaging in a very lively duel of wits with the deceased author himself. In the course of all this, Charlotte is transported back in time to the carriage ride during which Dumas first read his library book, pondered its shortcomings and began to conceive of his own deathless characters. These scenes, in which the author transmutes tendentious dross into fictive gold while arguing with Charlotte about the virtues of logic and order versus those of romance and invention, are among the most delightful of an altogether delightful evening.

As regulars know (the company is starting its eighth season), Buntport achieves its effects in large part with low-budget but highly ingenious staging. A large wooden box serves as both Dumas’s coffin and his carriage. Borrowing the technique from former college classmate Thaddeus Phillips, Buntport also makes brilliant use of video — and the borrowing is particularly appropriate, since Musketeer explores issues of originality and the debt all artists owe their peers and predecessors. Three large screens in the center of the playing area show us the shelves of Charlotte’s library; placid green scenery moving past Dumas’s carriage; Charlotte and Dumas squished together inside the coffin, arguing. Many of the onscreen images are very beautiful: tall, waving grasses, radiant skies. Through a trick of light and perspective, characters leave the playing area, cross behind the screens and seem to enter a magic zone, becoming elegant silhouettes.

There are terrific bits of dialogue as well, as when the three people walking the coffin to Paris discuss their lives and why they’ve taken on this job. Gilbert tells the others he plays Porthos for children’s birthday parties, where he duels with balloon animals. Simone wants to go to cooking school, and comes up with a wistful description of the process of making fish quenelles. (Dumas himself was a well-known gourmet.) And Edgard was once in love with Charlotte and isn’t yet over it.

All of the actors — Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Brian Colonna, Erin Rollman and Evan Weissman — are versatile, funny and expressive. Weissman makes Dumas preternaturally good-natured and unflappable, while Rollman brings schoolmarmish precision to the role of Charlotte. And Andrew Horwitz’s music adds zing to the event.

Despite the production’s many strengths, the plot isn’t entirely satisfying. There’s a jolting contrivance toward the end. And although Charlotte’s onetime affair is intriguing, it never becomes a significant part of the story, and neither she nor Edgard changes or develops as a character. Still, Musketeer is enjoyably nutty and farcical, with duels erupting at the drop of a hat, slapstick humor and absurd running jokes. And there are serious ideas here as well: questions about the artistic process (one of Dumas’s own characters asks him to slow down and put more thought into the writing), as well as a growing understanding that poor Charlotte may be the guardian of these texts, but she can never understand the life throbbing inside them, a life that continues to enthrall readers more than a century after their creation. Watching this daring, imaginative work, we’re reminded that the process of transmutation from fact to fiction and fiction to art is one that the Buntporters explore every working day of their lives.

-Juliet Wittman, August 14, 2008, Westword

I’ve already seen Buntport Theater’s Titus Andronicus: the Musical twice. But with a few honorable exceptions, theater-going has been pretty dismal this fall, so I figure I’m entitled to a little fun.

As we prepare to file in, we see an eccentrically clad woman in the lobby. She’s commenting loudly on the decor, as well as all the newspaper reviews and award plaques pasted on the walls. She does this with such conviction that it’s a few moments before I realize that she’s Buntporter Hannah Duggan, and the play has essentially begun. The conceit is that a wandering troupe of five actors, led by P.S. McGoldstien, is presenting Shakespeare’s bloody and incoherent Titus Andronicus as a musical. There’s lots of plotting here. Saturninus wants to be king, but the people are leaning toward Titus, conqueror of the Goths, who’s just returned to town with four prisoners: Goth queen Tamora and her three sons, one of whom he rapidly executes. Tamora marries Saturninus, and proceeds to plot revenge on Titus — a revenge that includes having her two surviving sons kill Saturninus’s brother, Bassianus, and rape and mutilate Titus’s daughter Lavinia, Bassianus’s love. More plot twists include the framing of Titus’s two innocent boys for murder; Tamora’s affair with the villainous Aaron, which results in an illegitimate baby; Titus’s attempt to save his sons from execution by cutting off his own hand; and a feast during which Tamora is served pies containing the flesh of her own children — that is, the sons who destroyed poor Lavinia.

Buntport actually gets us through the entire plot, and it’s all quite coherent — or at least as coherent as the original. The troupe uses a board with caricatures and lightbulbs to tell us which of the five actors is playing which of the several dozen characters at any given moment. Evan Weissman gets to act essentially the same role every time: “Someone Who Will Probably Die.” There’s also a chalkboard on which the actors keep track of the death toll. The cast makes inventive use of objects and weird scraps of costume, and not all the characters are flesh and blood. One is simply a hat on a stick, and Tamora’s sons are played by a gasoline can and a car radio, complete with ashtray. The scenery consists of a van that is pushed from place to place in the echoing warehouse space by perspiring members of the cast, while McGoldstien exhorts the audience to encourage them. This van has been painted and outfitted to represent different locations: trees on one side for a forest; a table set with plates and other dining accoutrements that pops down when needed. A stuffed owl sometimes perches on the antenna; naked umbrella spokes poke through the roof and open to reveal little green leaves; during one scene, the windows are awash in fake blood. Though I’ve seen all this before, I’m still struck by the ingenuity of the approach, and the jokes are just as funny as ever. I find myself fixing on amusing little things like the blobs of fake blood on Titus’s bare knees, or the watch on the wrist of a severed hand.

In their approach to their roles, the actors have it both ways: They speak and act with complete conviction while also communicating their awareness of the absurdity of the entire situation. They take a few pokes at Shakespeare. “It’s in the text,” one of them says after a particularly ludicrous exchange. “I didn’t make it up.” Brian Colonna is a marvel of energy and good humor as he darts from place to place keeping the entire show together; Erik Edborg manages to be simultaneously puzzled and full of insane energy; Duggan’s silent response to her mutilation at the hands of her rapists — and her tongueless exasperation when her father exhorts her to speak and tell him who they are — is priceless. Erin Rollman brings all her usual assurance to her several roles, and Evan Weissman punctures the action with a series of howlingly funny mini-characterizations.

It’s the Buntporters’ playfulness that makes coming here so pleasurable. Their work contains in abundance what so few productions have these days: exuberance and life. In this, they remind me of Al Brooks’s days at the Changing Scene: Some of the things I saw in that small, colorful space still resonate in my mind, while I couldn’t forget others fast enough. But the unevenness didn’t matter, because the entire place vibrated with energy and surprise.

There are huge differences between Buntport and the old Scene, of course. Al’s take on theater was profoundly idealistic; he believed in the art form’s ability to subvert and in its powers of redemption. He took big risks but could also be downright silly, putting on the work of almost any playwright who requested it, encouraging his dancers to cavort in the mountains naked while he filmed them. I don’t think the Buntporters are motivated by any idea of bettering society or communicating the lofty significance of art. Instead, they keep saying that their goal is to provide cheap, unpretentious entertainment — and this they certainly do.

Sometimes I wish they were more ambitious, interested in deepening and developing their work, since they are quite capable of transcendence. Instead, they seem content to alternate times of wonder and discovery with evenings that are simply amusing, but always — no matter what they’re doing — making us marvel at the good-humored fluidity of their approach and the imagination that lies at the very heart of theater.

They’re saying that this is definitely, positively, absolutely the last Titus Andronicus. I suggest you get over there.

-Juliet Wittman, December 12, 2007, Westword