Tartuffe

Reviewed by Bob Verini

RECOMMENDED:

South Coast Repertory’s Tartuffe is something to witness, in every sense of the phrase. Audacious and thought-provoking, maddening and enlightening by turns, it’s a worthy addition to the venerable company’s anniversary celebration in its categorical refusal to follow a conventional pathway to the classic that kicked off SCR operations a half-century ago.

Most productions of Molière’s satire are framed as quasi-Restoration comedy or knockabout farce. But director Dominique Serrand (formerly affiliated with the late, lamented Theatre de la Jeune Lune) takes a violently different tack in this tale of the charlatan holy man who bewitches, betrays, and nearly destroys gullible bourgeois Orgon (Luverne Seifert).

Serrand’s set, executed with local designer Tom Buderwitz with forthcoming engagements in Berkeley and D.C. in mind, is practically a character in itself: a vast, two-storied ivory anteroom whose little décor touches – gold crucifixes and a holy-water font – instantly evoke a household torn between opulence and piety. David Ball’s adaptation, meanwhile, is rhymed but intermittently and raggedy, the syntax thick with contemporary flavor. (In this version, the last line spoken is “Shut your mouth, brother.” Try shifting that into iambic pentameter.)

Behaviorally, the production plays the subtext on the top. It’s not as radical a reconstruction of a text as Belgian director Ivo von Hove’s A Streetcar Named Desire, for instance, which brought us into the Kowalski bathroom to observe Blanche’s nude sauna. But it’s in the same anything-goes avant garde vein.

Thus, whenever Tartuffe is in a fit of lust or religious mania, as often as not he takes to the floor in Pilates-inspired contortions. (The performance is an extraordinary set of physical feats offered by longtime Serrand collaborator Steven Epp; this is one Tartuffe who truly terrifies.) Orgon’s son Damis (Brian Hostenske) throws himself about the room and off the walls in inexpressible rage at his father’s follies. Daughter Mariane (Lenne Klingaman) responds to betrothal to Tartuffe with a set of mournful Delsarte postures straight out of Lillian Gish silent melodramas. Orgon’s wife Elmire (Cate Scott Campbell) revs up Tartuffe’s motor by walking over the holy man, supine as usual, in her hoop skirt to afford him the best possible view. He’s even assigned a pair of silent acolytes, to carry out his bidding while executing outré poses.

When such tactics “click” with the text and the moment, the results can be magical. For example, the usually boring scene between raisonneur Cleante (Gregory Linington) and Tartuffe – boring because at the end of it, neither character has budged an inch – is rendered brilliant by putting the gent on a prayer mat to make his appeal, while Tartuffe and the two creatures try to seduce him with their hands. This stunning dramatization of the conflict between reason and lust is the single best sequence I’ve witnessed in a play all year, hands down – no pun intended.

Of course, when you swing for the fences, you’re going to whiff as often as you connect. Tasteless and obvious effects abound. No effort is made to create any family feeling among the characters, and class distinctions are carelessly attended to as well. Seifert tosses most of his potent scenes away, while Suzanne Warmanen’s all-knowing housekeeper strains and bellows to zero comic effect. Marcus Dilliard’s lighting takes us from night to day to the following dawn, but Serrand high-handedly doesn’t care whether we can see faces through much of the gloom. And I wonder, would adherents of any religion other than Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, tolerate the fast-and-loose parody of their rites and iconography that Serrand gets away with here? I truly doubt it.

Then there’s the ending, in which Serrand suggests that the defeated Tartuffe will actually have the last laugh, because religious fundamentalism is a threat from which reasonable folks will always have much to fear. I say “Serrand suggests” because nothing could be further from Moliere’s intention in sending the fake holy man to his doom. But of course nowadays a text — at least one by a dead author with a powerless estate – is often considered nothing more than an Etch-a-Sketch for the director to scribble on as he or she will.

Interestingly, there exists in the world a number of absolutist, fundamentalist regimes in which theocracy is a threat not just to its citizens’ comfort, but to their very lives. Anyone got the balls to set Tartuffe in one of those countries? Anyone? Bueller? Nah, I thought not.

Anyway, you should let South Coast’s Tartuffe have its chance to delight, annoy, or provoke you. Go see it, or be damn’d.

South Coast Repertory, 665 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa; Tues.-Wed. & Sun., 7:30 p.m.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 7:30 p.m. (no evening perf June 8); through June 8. (714) 708-5555, www.scr.org