Season 8 – Page 3 – Buntport Theater

Two people dressed as musketeers lean on a coffin draped in a blue and white cloth. The musketeer in the foreground has a mustache drawn on her face.

Colorado BackStage- Musketeer

A library book? A library book never returned? Who would have thought such a small premise could turn upside down and sideways keeping the majority of a full house Opening Night at Buntport doubled over in laughter?

A brilliant premise, based on historical fact, knocking down walls of time and space, flying on fantasized wings definitely excites the gears in the Buntport people.

Erin Rollman transforms herself into an uptight, over achieving, conscientious librarian, Charlotte, with a staccato twitch. Taking her librarian duty seriously at the Marseilles Public Library, Charlotte answers the phone with sharp, clipped words while making absolutely certain records remain up to date.

Oh, oh! Major problem. Charlotte discovers a library book over due. To her horror, the book is 187 years and 22 days late. Alexandre Dumas checked out The Memoirs of Mister d’Artagnan June 7, 1844, and never returned it. Something must be done. Dumas based his famous Three Musketeer personalities on characterizations detailed in the missing book. He never got around to returning it. Why should 187 years and 22 days hinder Charlotte from living up to her efficient library training? Fantasies know no boundaries.

Charlotte just happened to read in a local paper, Dumas’ body was being exhumed for the second time to be moved to the Pantheon in Paris.

Of course, she was going to get this book back. Time and space mean nothing when it comes to the imagination.

Buntport set the comedic world a blaze with its collaborative spirit in writing, directing, set design, and costuming. The ingenious set for Musketeer allows the fantasy defying time and space to move easily however, wherever it wants to go with ease. Interestingly enough, there is never any question where the characters are in the clever process.

Hannah Duggan plays Simone who works for her local Chamber of Commerce who also has been chosen to play Aramis. A girl as Aramis? That’s what the other two Musketeers want to know. Duggan plays Simone and Aramis with strong understanding and knowledge, and proves her worth as Simone and Aramis.

Erik Edborg takes on Edgard, an actor chosen to play Athos. Edborg happily and funnily plays Edgard who funnily plays Athos. Brian Colonna takes on Gilbert, also an actor, chosen to play Porthois. While taking his double role seriously, he does so on a merry gallop in carefree abandon.

The three Musketeers have been chosen to walk the wagon carrying Dumas’s coffin to Paris. What a sight for sore eyes this must have been to people living in 2002. In a fantasy nothing appears to be unrealistic. Of course, Charlotte finds the wagon. On her own, she creates an ingenious opportunity be alone with the coffin. By hook or by crook she will get her hands on that library book. There’s only one person to ask, and that’s Dumas himself. With no one is sight she crawls into the coffin. Evan Weissman covers himself in the persona of Dumas creating some very funny scenes.

Buntport adopted the use of video to expand the set to move far beyond the small stage. It works wondrously, especially reflecting scenes inside the small coffin with Charlotte and Dumas in an exclusively tight conversation. Sword fights dance with hilarious Musketeer bouncing moves keeping eyes alert and wide open.

Musketeer should not be missed under any circumstances for its comedic bent, its creativity, and its delicious quality of acting, its video, and its humored laughability. If I had the power, I would insist every creative writing teacher and professor in the Denver Metropolitan arena schedule time for his or her classes to attend a performance keyed to ignite imagination into a flight of fantasy.

An over due library book? Who else but Buntport would have zeroed in on such a tiny thought expanding it to a delectable, delicious, fun-filled production? Your sense of humor calls. Can you hear it? Respond now before the sold out sign flashes into eyesight.

-Holly Bartges, August 21, 2008 , Colorado BackStage

Two men dressed as musketeers pose in front of a giant screen that has video of musketeers fighting projected onto it.

Daily Camera- Musketeer

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

Rocky Mountain News- Buntport’s ‘Musketeer’ a multifaceted work

The word multimedia is overused, basically meaningless and usually a letdown.

So let’s just call Buntport Theater’s new play, Musketeer, multifaceted. Or to streamline things: creative.

The ensemble company, which creates original work, adds to its usual Transformer sets and spot-on costumes a complement of expertly presented, thematically useful video.

As the company has frequently done, it started with a classic work, Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. And if you know the title, you know enough to get by in this time-traveling oddity that takes a few facts and spins them with credulity-defying fiction.

The show opens to the tension-filled instrumentals of Marian the Librarian, and a video of rapid leafings through a book. We’re under a Metro station in Marseilles, where librarian Charlotte (a dogged Erin Rollman) has just discovered that a book has been overdue for 162 years. The book is The Memoirs of Mister d’Artagnan, from which Dumas is said to have cribbed the idea for The Three Musketeers. Charlotte doesn’t care about plagiarism or inspiration. She just doesn’t like scofflaws.

At the same time (and this indeed happened in 2002), the French government has exhumed Dumas’ body to reinter him in the Pantheon in Paris. Three pallbearers dressed as Musketeers accompany the casket through the rolling countryside (portrayed in perfectly timed rolling video): a cheerful tourism official (Hannah Duggan as Aramis, a slightly dour volunteer) and Charlotte’s ex-boyfriend as Athos (Erik Edborg) and an overly confident professional Porthos interpreter (amusingly self-aggrandizing Brian Colonna).

Getting the book back requires a bit of time travel on Charlotte’s part, and she ends up both in the present crawling into Dumas’ coffin (they have a tete-a-tete on screen and stage) and riding with him in the coffin-turned-carriage back in 1844. (Evan Weissman is dapper and flirtatious as the author.)

There are playful bits of comedy tucked in throughout the story, from Colonna routinely unable to replace sword in scabbard to the silent-movie style title cards that remind us “Time and space being of little consequence on an adventure such as this.” Three Stooges swordfighting entertains, and Weissman is given a bit that artfully explains an author’s motivation.

The end, though, fits loosely. It feels as though the company wasn’t quite sure how it wanted to wrap up the tale and was looking for an escape hatch. The gruesome last effect is well done, but doesn’t make much sense, even within the absurd world of the play.

-Lisa Bornstein, August 14, 2008, Rocky Mountain News

A man from the 1800s smiles while reading a book. Over his shoulder there is an annoyed woman in a red shirt and glasses holding a knife.

Westword- Buntport Theater Company skewers other swashbucklers with Musketeer

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

Musketeer

ALL FOR ONE (LIBRARY BOOK)

In 1844, famed author Alexandre Dumas checked a book out from the Marseilles Public Library, based his novel The Three Musketeers on that book, and then never returned it.

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