They are, instead, a cavorting band of experimental actors, skilled in the ways of physical theater, acrobatics, and creative movement, but less sharp when it comes to improvising dialogue. Thus we see some lovely swordplay (with, incongruously but appealingly, a little karate thrown in), and some daring acts of climbing, leaping, balancing, and riding a zipline across a pond. But we hear lines like ``The rent -- I'd really like it," and ``Is your master not OK?" Dumas may not have been Moliere, but he wasn't a goofy American teenager, either.
The dialogue might pass muster if it wove itself into a more comprehensible plot, but ``Musketeers" feels more like a series of theater games than a play. That's to be expected, given how the company creates its work through collaborative improvisation and movement exercises. The company tours its more finished works around the world, after developing them for years; lighter summer fare like ``Musketeers" is developed in about a month, and you can feel the difference.
That's not necessarily bad, but it tends to make the experience less profound. For about an hour, the cast leads the audience, willy-nilly, around the barns and pastures and stables of Double Edge's converted dairy farm with a lot of panache but little discernible point. ``To England!" ``To France!" ``To La Rochelle!" And off we go to the creek or the pond, but who knows why?
And yet. That pond. Lit by torches, with an ethereal, towering woman in gauzy white gliding mysteriously across, this little patch of water becomes an ocean of dreams. We may not be quite sure who she is, why she's being pursued by some even more ethereal knights -- giant puppets of white gauze -- or where she's going. But, having once seen her, we will see her forever in our minds.
