Welcome back to Dramaturgy 101! This month, we’re excited to revive Encore’s adaptation of The Three Musketeers, originally written for our 2014/2015 season by Matt Heap and Encore’s Artistic Director, Susan Keady. This production, like several of our other mainstage works this season, focuses on the power of stories and the art of their telling and retelling. This adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel blurs the lines of reality and story through its narrator, an older D’Artagnan, retelling his past adventures.
Dumas’ The Three Musketeers adapts the historical court of Louis XIII, who ruled France from 1610 to 1643, into an adventure story of mythic proportions. Like his Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, Dumas’ legendary Musketeers, Athos, Aramis, Porthos, and D’Artagnan, are based on historical figures from the 1625 France. Dumas, nearly 200 years later, uses these characters to tell a story of political intrigue, warmongering, and the growing class tensions in France at the end of the Ancién Regime. In the 1840s as in the 1620s, France experienced widening class disparities, increasing authoritarianism, and the growing unrest among the disenfranchised, particularly the working classes. Dumas’ novel follows the (imagined) story of the (historical) Cardinal Richelieu arranging to blackmail (historical) Queen Anne and the Duke of Buckingham into revealing their (possibly historical) relationship, thus, starting a war with England and allowing the Cardinal to secure his power over Louis XIII, his court, and the nation at large.
The novel builds political and social criticism into a thrilling adventure that has since been adapted hundreds of times into other novels, plays, films, and television plots. In fact, Dumas’ own story was based on Memoires de Monsieur d’Artagnan written in 1700 by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras. Dumas even cites the semi-fictionalized novel, written 75 years after the historical D’Artagnan would have lived, in his original introduction to The Three Musketeers as his inspiration for his own story.
This script, like Dumas’ original novel, recognizes the power of storytelling and retelling in creating these larger-than-life characters, like the Three Musketeers (and D’Artagnan), who seem to step out of their original stories and into the cultural consciousness. The script reimagines the D’Artagnan of Dumas’ story as an older man buying himself time before his imminent execution by telling his captors stories of the musketeers’ early days. “Just think—,” one of the guards says in response to D’Artagnan’s offer, “we’d be heroes if we had a new musketeer story to tell!” And a new story they receive, indeed, complete with all the adventure and intrigue of Dumas’ work, though considerably more comedy and even more sword fighting, Encore’s The Three Musketeers builds on the characters and world of the original story. With the help of a royal but ferocious dog, a nervous mayor, a reluctant mime, three strong female leads, and a crew of insurgent villagers, the Three Musketeers (and D’Artagnan) foil Cardinal Richelieu’s latest evil plot.
We hope to see you at the second weekend of Encore’s The Three Musketeers, running March 6th-8th at Thomas Jefferson Community Theatre. En garde!
Performance Dates and Showtimes:
Friday, March 6, 2020 at 7:30pm
Saturday, March 7, 2020 at 11am and 3pm
Sunday, March 8, 2020 at 3pm
Photos by Rebecca Pfeil.
Blog contribution by 2019/2020 Production Apprentice Kyla McLaughlin.
Edited by Shannon McCarthy & Parker Nelson