Bulgakov-Moliere or The Cabal of Hypocrites

Reviewed by Lovell Estell III

RECOMMENDED

Mikhail Bulgakov’s1929 play about Molière’s post-Tartuffe miseries gets a splendid reworking by playwright Charles Duncombe and director Frederique Michel. The play’s real purpose was to protest the mindless censorship and plight of artists in Stalin’s Russia, and in Duncombe’s clever rendering, it becomes a gravid means of satirizing and mirroring our similarly fraught cultural and political milieu.

 We first see a despairing Bulgakov (David E. Frank) in quarters with his lover and secretary Elena (Nili Rain Segal), who is typing a letter Bulgakov will send to the Red Czar, while he feverishly rants about his persecution by the authorities and press (“I’ve had 301 reviews, three are positive”) and soothes his angst with liberal measures of Cognac. After passing out, he is visited by five ghostly characters from his novel The Master and Margarita, who transport him to a dream-world where he takes his seat in an opera box (a slick component of Duncombe’s utilitarian set design), and sees his play performed onstage. It’s a humorous packaging of backstage drama and political satire, where we encounter the puffy, self-obsessed Molière (the outstanding George Villas), and the equally puffy, ultra dandified, P.R.- conscious King Louis XIV (Alex Pike, also excellent), whose bloated sense of majestic eminence – and ineptitude — provide many laughs. Forced to kowtow in order to survive, Molière becomes successful, but his growing popularity is seen as a threat to “good, simple virtue” by religious zealots led by the enigmatic Professor Woland (Nathan Dana Aldrich), whose devilish machinations set in motion the playwright’s undoing.

For Bulgakov, all this works out as a blessing, as he returns home with a renewed backbone, to write his novel with Elena at his side. Duncombe has stitched a lot of thematic motifs about the ills of our times into this epic saga (nearly three hours), but it’s a shrewd piece of writing that’s irresistibly stimulating and funny. Equal credit goes to a superlative ensemble and to the director, Michel, for bold, imaginative direction. Josephine Poinsot also deserves praise for her attractive assemblage of costumes.

 City Garage at Bergamot Station, Building T1, 2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica., Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m. (No perfs May 16-18); through June 1. (310) 453-9939, www.citygarage.org