Tartuffe

If John Lithgow weren't the star of this show it wouldn't be worth seeing. He is. It is. See it. When you grow up you can tell people at cocktail parties you saw him before he was. Which won't be true, actually, because he is already. Which is why he can carry a whole production.

This is not to say that everyone else is poor. True, the show tends to drag when Lithgow isn't on stage; but when he is, everyone sparkles. A play is more than the sum of the parts; with Lithgow there to set the pace, everyone improves.

Pace is the problem. Richard's Wilbur's rhyming translation has far too many end-stopped lines for any but experienced actors to read naturally. The conversation at the beginning of the play, before Tartuffe's entrance, had a sing-song quality that made it hard to follow. Throughout the evening the rest of the characters tended to lapse into a regularity more faithful to the translator's iambics than their own emotions.

But playing with Lithgow, most distinguished themselves. Laurence Senelick's Orgon never quite crystalized by himself; but he was hilarious as Tartuffe manipulated him. Elizabeth Cole's Elmire, competent with others, was delicious in the arms of the hypocrite. And even those who didn't speak to him, spoke more naturally in Tartuffe's scenes.

Part of the credit for this must go to director George Hamlin. He uses Lithgow well. Characters with nothing to say are always given something to do. The blocking is sufficiently fluid to keep the production from seeming a series of tableaux. When any of the actors give the others something believable to react to, they have an easy time of it. And throughout the production reasonably clever touches are evident which the actors simply couldn't pull off.

Hamlin had one basic problem he didn't solve, however. Comedy involves the exposure of human follies. It works by undercutting. In the plot of a play, the fool is defeated (but not destroyed) by his own errors. But the actors can also get laughs from line to line with little changes of tone and double-takes. Ideally, these two levels of revelation are linked. In this production they often weren't.

A lot was funny in Hamlin's Tartuffe, but not too much was comic. Many of the lines that got the biggest laughs were those who the actors stepped just slightly out of character where the polished diction and movement collapsed into purely American shock or embarassment. So the laughter was more at the incongruity than at an aspect of the human comedy Moliere was revealing.

It might be argued that comedy must involve a collapse of measured behavior. But the breakdown is possible within the style. If you don't believe it, see Lithgow, Norma Levin, as Mariane, and James Shuman, as Valere, also managed their humor without many extraneous notes. Their love scene was lovely.

Pollviane Oxenreider played Dorine. Mariane's maid. She's not a commediene, but a ham. If you like that sort of thing, however, she's a very energetic one.

Daniel Seltzer appeared briefly, disguised as Ben Franklin. He was funny.