Based on. An adaptation of. After. Inspired by.
When these words precede the title of a new production of a classic play or the name of a long-dead writer, chances are good you’ll be in for a ride. Now two shows drawing from Molière — Red Bull Theater’s revival of “The Imaginary Invalid” and the Taylor Mac play “Prosperous Fools,” both running through June 29 — illustrate, with widely diverging degrees of success, how far that ride can go.
In “The Imaginary Invalid,” Jeffrey Hatcher compresses the plot of Molière’s three-act comedy, from 1673, into a 90-minute romp, and rewrites the jokes but preserves the essence of the story and characters.
The production, now running at New World Stages, reunites Hatcher with the director Jesse Berger, with whom he had cooked up marvelously funny takes on Nikolai Gogol (“The Government Inspector”) and Ben Jonson (“The Alchemist”). Happily, lightning can strike thrice.
Aside from nods to “Les Misérables” and Édith Piaf, the play’s structure is intact, and still revolves around the hypochondriac Argan (Mark Linn-Baker). The doctors administering the treatments he constantly requests (all played by Arnie Burton) appear to have graduated from Quack U. “All these things they do to you, it’s like you donated your body to science but they couldn’t wait,” Argan’s no-nonsense maid, Toinette (Sarah Stiles), tells him.
He does not listen, of course — though Molière and Hatcher aim their arrows at Argan, they also skewer profit-driven snake-oil peddlers and greedy bad agents.
Much of the plot involves efforts to fleece or deceive Argan, and much of the production is shamelessly focused on making the audience laugh. Which it does, thanks to a company of expert farceurs who look to be tremendously enjoying themselves — like “Oh, Mary!,” this show understands that perfect silliness requires perfect execution.
John Yi (“KPOP”) is sneakily effective as a goofy suitor, and Burton, as always, pulls out all the stops in triplicate. Linn-Baker and Stiles (a Tony Award nominee for “Tootsie” and “Hand to God”) are especially well-matched, he as a wide-eyed nincompoop and she as the clever servant who always runs rings around her masters in classical French theater.
(It’s worth noting that last month, the Molière in the Park company presented a new translation of “The Imaginary Invalid” by Lucie Tiberghien, who also directed, that was also fairly faithful to the original’s spirit.)
Casting actually is the brightest light of Taylor Mac’s shambolic “Prosperous Fools,” which just opened at Theater for a New Audience. More specifically, one piece of casting: Sierra Boggess, who delivers a master class in precisely calibrated comic acting as a glamorous humanitarian named ####-### (the name is warbled “as if a choir is heralding the appearance of an angel,” according to the script).
Boggess has kept busy since her breakthrough in 2007 in Broadway’s “The Little Mermaid,” and still she feels like a revelation here. (Not unlike Jonathan Groff unexpectedly coming out as an electrifying Vegas-style showman in “Just in Time.”) Her character swans into a gala-slash-ballet premiere for a ballet company in a fabulous gown bearing the faces of the poor children she helps, and Boggess nails a fantastic mix of narcissism, grandeur and arch irony.
Unsurprisingly, ####-### is not in Molière’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” which Mac claims as an inspiration for “Prosperous Fools.”
Neither is the rest of the show, aside from wide-ranging swipes at the manipulation of cultural signposts. More broadly, the 1670 play was a so-called comédie-ballet and Darko Tresnjak’s production incorporates dancing, music and comedy — “Prosperous Fools” adopts Molière’s satirical approach, now transposed to the world of contemporary arts philanthropy.
Instead of a 17th-century nouveau riche bourgeois trying to gain the cultured aristocracy’s approval, the show centers on Artist (Mac), who is embroiled with the practical and ethical challenges of creation when the high arts in the United States cry for funding.
Much of the humor has to do with administrators and artists kowtowing to rich benefactors like $#@%$ (Jason O’Connell), a “real-estate petroleum mogul who makes pharmaceutical heroin out of endangered species.” The artistic director Philanthropoid (Jennifer Regan) is ready to debase herself for some of his millions, while Artist appears ready to hold some kind of honorable line. But when the boorish, blustery $#@%$ (pronounced “as if a censor buzzer has just gone off”) asks that Artist pretend to be Wallace Shawn and read from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” well, out comes the costume.
Using Shawn in this manner is a jab at easily digestible cultural icons, put in bold font by an impersonation that involves a cartoonish outfit making Artist look like a little person.
Doing this once pokes fun at both $#@%$ and Artist. Repeating the Shawn gag over the course of the show, as Mac does, the butt of the joke is not a billionaire’s crassness or an artist’s groveling, but Shawn. What exactly is the point of that? Molière at least knew who his targets were.
The post Casting Is the Brightest Light of Two Molière Shows appeared first on New York Times.
