Director Rick Lombardo issued a lordly decree that designer Kristin Loeffler redecorate the tiny New Rep theatre so that it resembles the stage in the 17th-century Palais Royal, and instructed his 'Tartuffe' cast to identify with performers in Molière's troupe and incorporate the conditions under which the troupe performed into their own interpretations of the roles in the classic comedy. Does this 'concept' work? Does it inspire the designing and acting talent to do their best work, does it enlighten as well as amuse the audience? Does it serve the play? I say 'yes!' on all counts, and a delighted Newton audience agreed. The physical aspects of Lombardo's production -- Emily Dunn's rich costumes, the glittering chandeliers overhead, John Ambrosone's smoky golden 'candlelight' that directs attention to the players but includes the audience as an acknowledged presence -- even, at crucial moments, as co-participants-- create a world that is as seductive as it is instructive.
Bringing actor Shelly Bolman as King Louis XIV and Lea Antolini as his queen in through the transformed house and ordering all of us to rise respectfully and stand until the royals settle into their elegant stage side armchairs and condescend to give us permission to sit is a very effective way to illustrate the power structure behind the play's plot. An actor -- Paul Farwell -- impersonates the outraged dignity of a grave Prince of the Church, sitting very visibly adjacent the stage as a hostile auditor eager to point out any offense in Molière's lines and whispering his censorious counsel in the king's ear. Farwell looks a little like Cardinal Law on a very bad day, and when he is offended, he's scary. This is a neat way to incorporate the historical importance of this work of Molière's into the playgoer's experience of it. We are shown censorship in action-- the actors' imaginative reconstruction of how speaking truth to power must feel when the power is in the very same small room, unwilling to be amused.
The New Rep ensemble recreates the lines of tension that defined Molière's position within his troupe and his troupe's within the Sun King's territory. Michael Poisson begins as Molière, on stage with his actors in clownish face paint, loosening up or marking through bits of business while Rachel Harker as his lovely young wife demonstrates to wealthy male patrons that she, at least, is loose already. The fourth wall is down: the actors define the world of the play as one in which the audience is all-important, and beg to be allowed to amuse, instruct, and please us. When Louis overrules the Cardinal and authorizes a performance of the banned 'Tartuffe', Poisson grovels in gratitude as Molière and then assumes the leading role of Orgon, the patriarch upon whose good will and fairness his whole household depends absolutely.
Deena Mazur pays homage to commedia style as Orgon's mother, an old puritan who longs to mortify the flesh of those who are still capable of pleasure. Madame praises Tartuffe, and contorts herself into a very pretzel of disapproval when confronting her son's amiable second wife Elmire (Harker) and his doll like daughter Marianne. Marianna Bassham is almost a mechanical doll; repression and neglect has so bereft the girl she is playing of self-expression that she hovers near paralysis much of the time. A glimmer of hope, a soupcon of attention, and Marianne will suddenly light up, glowing with energy and joy. The next moment her father issues a command, and the daughter doll collapses into a heap of weeping. Colin Stokes, as Valere, the suitor Marianne hopes will cherish her, and Ted Hewett as Damis, the son whose patrimony Orgon threatens to bestow on his pet saint, the hypocrite Tartuffe, play with slapstick panache two young men negotiating their way through a minefield of conflicting codes.
The codes aren't the only minefield: Lombardo has chosen Richard Wilbur's translation, and Wilbur's tricksome rhymes are patterned through the characters' speeches, loaded with the potential to add sparkle, to dazzle or to explode the sense of communication altogether. I confess I adore rhymed verse-- in sonnets, in odes, in hymns, in plays. The actor who can make sense and live relationships while juggling verbal fireworks wins my loudest applause -- I am in awe, I quiver with aesthetic delight and grovel with gratitude. Hail the Cleante of Diego Arciniegas, Master of Verse! His elegant rhyming makes platitudinous good sense an exquisite aesthetic experience.
The Dorine of Jennie Israel is an opposite case. Dorine is a mere servant, but she speaks her mind unabashedly. Israel has her setting her employer straight by crashing through rhymes and manners as if she were a high powered Therapist or a Consultant. This is very attractive. Israel's Dorine acts just the way a modern audience wants a woman to act, and we love her. But my inner aesthete keeps whispering that this court-framed production would be better served by a Dorine constrained by her corset, the rhyme scheme, and the historic 'reality' that any of these men she is giving lip could legally beat her senseless, or toss her in jail and throw away the key.
As for the Tartuffe of Richard McElvain, I simply surrender. McElvain's performance is pieced together from God alone knows what bits of ancient theatrical business and modern political reference, and quilted atop that by curlicues of self satisfaction. What could be more appropriate for a multifaceted hypocrite, the master of masks? In McElvain's deftly baroque performance, most of Taruffe's conning behavior and manipulative tones are assumed by the character to get what he wants. But some of these effects we may think of as produced by the 17th century comic actor who plays the role, purely to entertain us, his audience. McElvain doesn't enter until well into the play, and we must deduce the frame player behind the role of Tartuffe in mid performance. I deduce a tactful virtuoso, who embroiders as richly as possible while staying strictly within ensemble outlines -- he's not the star, Molière is. The jaunty tilt of McElvain's Pinocchio nose, the practiced grace of his mooching, his sidelong lecherous glance from beneath chastely lowered eye lids, his lilting lisp and Germanic growl -- all outrageous, delicious, hilarious -- but all understated, all with plausible deniability. Truly, a Tartuffe for the ages! At the very least, the best of the dozen I've seen.
Lombardo's framing device seems to me to a very satisfying way to deal with the script's real difficulties-- difficulties that have to do with how a modern American audience perceives what 's at stake in the play. Like most plays written before 'modern' times, Tartuffe has a plot that hinges on a father 's absolute control of all the resources of his extended family, which includes the power to beat or starve his dependents and to give or sell his children to whomever he chooses. Even though in much of the world today fathers still have this power, American audiences have trouble 'getting' it, and dealing with it emotionally. Whatever defense mechanisms made it possible to contemplate forced marriage in the context of comedy are no longer in place. Americans believe axiomatically that any romantic couple can elope, just as they believe that any individual can-- and should-- earn a living. Adding King Louis, who holds the same power over Orgon/Molière as Orgon holds over his family, and the Cardinal, whose claim as pipeline to a Higher Power is analogous to Tartuffe's, to the New Rep stage picture makes that power visible and and in an important sense impersonal. Stressing the actor-employer and layman-pastor relationships rather than the daughter-father one taps into vulnerabilities we still share with Molière. We all feel the chill potential of disapproval: unemployment, poverty, prison. We've all seen abuse in the name of care.
Lombardo's 'Tartuffe' worked wonderfully for me and for most-- but it also generated some critical backlash. In pre show publicity the New Rep's 17th century framing proved the sort of 'hook' newspapers are eager to swallow, baited with photo opps a-plenty. The explanatory quotes that went along with the eye-catching pictures tempted a few reviewers to critique the rationale rather than the reality. They came to the production with preset notions about how Lombardo's concept ought to work, based on their concepts of 'historically correct Molière'. But this show wasn't 'historicized' for history's sake, but to sharpen satire which can still bite us where we live.
I 'd like to point out -- no one seems to have mentioned it so far-- that not only is our nation's economy currently a-crumble thanks to the con men at Enron, but that even the specifically religious con in 'Tartuffe' is red hot relevant right now, right here in Boston. The priest who is on trial for the molestation of more than a hundreds minors carried on for a quarter century, even as his victims and their parents amassed overwhelming evidence of his transgressions. Church authorities stood with the priest, not laymen. When he professed to be repentant and 'cured', they sent him out to prey again. The shocking universal isn't Tartuffe, the con man. He's a sick joke. The shock is the propensity of pious men -- like Orgon -- to mistake their own fallible judgment for omniscience, and the propensity of authorities to listen only to voices who tell them what they want to hear.