Tartuffe, or the Hypocrite

The world’s great playwrights are a pretty serious bunch. From the blood-soaked tragedies of Greece to the existential nightmares of Pinter and Beckett, the classics tend to deal overwhelmingly with death, doom and despair.  Even Shakespeare’s comedies seem to be overshadowed by suicidal young lovers, Scottish sociopaths and indecisive Danish royalty. The great comedians tend to find themselves overshadowed by more “serious” playwrights.

With his canon almost absent of tragedies, Molière is the exception that proves the rule. As central to the national identity of France as wine, croissants and surly waiters, Molière is the class clown of the Western canon. With anarchic glee, he thumbs his nose at the melancholy, the maudlin and the morose. It’s not that he’s frivolous. He’s just more fun. And lucky for us, he’s one of the lucky few who live on night after night in theaters all over the world as audiences discover his genius again and again as if for the first time.

I’ve been fortunate to act in, direct or dramaturg several of Molière plays. And I never turn down the opportunity to see one done well. From the baggy pants clowns of Sir Peter Hall’s brilliant The School for Wives to the avant garde food fight of Ivo Van Hove’s controversial staging of The Misanthrope, Molière productions rank among some of my favorite evenings spent in the theater.
 
Tartuffe is his masterpiece. Banned for five years and controversial for centuries, it is a comedy with a very serious heart that is never afraid to be funny. Even with a dangerous target firmly in his sight, Molière’s weapon of choice is always a joke, a comic bit, a sight gag. This classic comedy is filled with stock characters that can trace their roots back to the birth of theater and find their offspring on TV sitcoms. But Molière takes these stock characters and rounds them out, gives them breath and sets them loose in some of the best plays ever written.

Triad Stage has not done Molière before. We are dedicated to the modern drama and this marks only our second production of a play written before the mid 19th century. Our acting style is realistic and we tend to avoid the artifice of theatrical verse. Molière’s rhymed couplets can be Dr. Suessian unless rendered into English by the most masterful of hands.

While traveling in Paris this winter I saw a Molière play that shocked me with its contemporary, realistic presentation. No puffy 17th century gowns were in sight. And the language (or as much as my two years of high school French enabled me to understand) seemed direct. If I hadn’t known it was Molière, I could have been watching a great new play by some up-and-coming comic genius. And that started me thinking—what if we did Tartuffe as if it was written yesterday? It is an experiment in re-thinking a classic while attempting to stay true to its original spirit.
 
And yes, I know France no longer has a royal family. But like a great politician, I never let the facts stand in the way of what I want to say.

 

Preston Lane