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Tartuffe by Moliere: A Reality Show
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
City Garage Theatre
Through November 1
RECOMMENDED:
City Garage’s creative duo of Frédérique Michel and Charles A. Duncombe are long-established dab hands with Molière, so abundantly so that despite their reliable pedigree, I feared that Tartuffe by Moliere: A Reality Show would perhaps be too much yet again of the same thing. Yes, but no. Their joint adaptation and translation, employing an approachable vernacular, she directing and he producing and designing, balances with sophistication the deeply embedded rhythmic requirements of the foundational text and of an authentic staging with the need to highlight clearly the playwright’s unfortunately uncanny relevance to our own hypocritical times.
Referencing a more recent past that still expresses a sense of period remove (allowing fabulous ‘50s design gestures, including marvelous goofs on Parisian couture by costumer Josephine Poinsot), Michel and Duncombe imbue the familiar plot and characters with fresh repartee and a soupcon of mid- 20th century dash. It’s less a deconstruction (and even less “a reality show,” other than a few out-of-sync video bumpers) than an attempt to realize the essences of the material in all its eccentricities and individuality of style by means of a reimagining of the language, not unlike how jazz improvisation can meander far from the melody while never losing the basic sense of the tune.
While Molière remains ever insightful, the extended plot developments demand some indulgent patience, largely remedied by the unrelievedly breakneck delivery of the dialogue, which retains just enough traces of stilted (yet rushed) rhetoric to feel faithful to the aged cadences of the original. Michel’s penchant for a playing style that doesn’t gibe with more conventional norms of depicting psychological behavior can in some ways position her as the anti-Antaeus, though there certainly should be room in a diverse theater scene for such divergent thespian approaches.
At this point for me, Bo Roberts’s face has become so inextricably identifiable as a trademark Orgon that it was expected even before he took the stage. And speaking of entrances, Tartuffe (George Villas) takes as long to appear as Harry Lime (50 minutes in), as everyone talks incessantly of him before we get to meet the man himself. Villas, so novel in City Garage’s Neil LaBute show, The Break of Noon, earlier this season, makes a virtue of his natural astringency, deflating the pomposity from his nefarious invoker of moral rectitude, playing the hypocrisy as the engine of the long con he is grifting. For all the subterfuge and deceit, Tartuffe is as much the rational man as the passively ineffectual intellectual brother-in-law Cléante (briskly underplayed by David Frank).
New to the troupe, Chelsea Militano proves a wily surprise as an Elmire who starts out a bikinied bimbo, only to prove the sole character capable of decisive action and control. And no classic comedy would be complete without some over-the-top zaniness, here provided with violent flamboyance by J. Carlos Flores in drag as the all-knowing housekeeper Dorina, a Lupe Vélez caricature that provides a manic version of the subversive stereotypes long ago limned so covertly by Stepin Fetchit (and what an impressive counterweight to the Stage Manager-like omniscient humanity Vivis Colombetti brings to what is essentially the same role in Mojada).
Tartuffe by Moliere: A Reality Show, City Garage Theatre, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica; Fri.-Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; through November 1. (310) 453-9939, citygarage.org (link: Brown Paper Tickets). Running time: two hours, 10 minutes.
