Playwright: Moliére,
translated by Richard Wilber
At: City Lit Theatre at Edgewater Presbyterian Church, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr
Phone: (773) 293-3682; $18-$24
Runs through: April 13
Contrary to schoolroom interpretations, Moliére was not attacking religion when he wrote Tartuffe. Nor was he attacking religious hypocrisy, although those who practice not what they preach receive their share of censure. Moliére's ridicule was aimed at zealots unable to distinguish between fact and fiction—folly that makes them easy prey for con-artists looking to exploit their gullibility, whether through the vocabulary of medicine, education or theology.
Ensuring that the audience understands this distinction is the first challenge in modern presentations of the 1669 satire, the second being a plot relying for its progress on a society where the Church, the King and the clan patriarchs exercised far more power over the conduct of individual citizens than in ours today. And then there's the language—rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, rendered with delicious accuracy in Richard Wilber's translation, but foreign as Faeroese to most American actors.
This City Lit production is fortunate to have found an assemblage of farceurs trained in classic declamation, enabling them to retain control of their text even when Kevin Theis' direction mandates emotional expression of Looney Tunes proportions. This exaggeration is not gratuitous, however. Opting to emphasize the seductive qualities essential to a successful swindle, Page Hearn plays the villainous title character with such infectious charm that the repugnance professed toward his more carnal schemes—among which are his attempted assaults on his patron's wife and daughter—might appear almost unfounded if he were not instructed to leer and chortle like The Joker to remind us that he's a bad 'un.
Shannon Colbert and Robert Kauzlaric (the latter born to wear fashions of this period) make a suitably impetuous pair of lovers, with Elise Kauzlaric and Will Schutz as their equally perplexed parents. Martha Adrienne (recently seen as Lady Bracknell in The Importance Of Being Earnest) projects a bantamweight feistiness as the imperious Mme. Pernelle and Don Bender contributes avuncular commentary as the wise Cléante, while Jonathan Nichols' quartet of supernumeraries display daffily-distinct personalities. But it is Jan Blixt's Dorine who dominates the stage—rendered giddy in itself by Rebecca Hamlin's loop-the-loop set decoration and Thomas Kieffer's rococo-palate wardrobe—with timing and delivery of road-runner swiftness and precision.