BUT NOW HE'S PREACHIN' JUST TO BUY JELLY ROLL.

Kia and I saw the Dominique Serrand production of Tartuffe at the Harman at a preview on Saturday. The show doesn’t officially open till Monday. I am aware of and appreciate the controversy over reviewing preview performances, so I’ll forbear to judge what may be changed by the opening, and tread lightly regarding the performances, which I will say are all of high professional quality (especially in the handling of verse and comic business). I will discuss the concept, though, which was apparently settled by the time the show was mounted at Berkeley Rep.

We've all seen plenty of productions of established properties that might be deemed Dark Reimaginings. These have ranged from the brilliant, e.g. Throne of Blood, to the asinine — the worst example of which, for me, was an off-off-Broadway Midsummer Night’s Dream long ago which began with Theseus and Hippolyta simulating intercourse and had the actor playing Bottom portraying all the other Mechanicals with finger puppets. (I didn’t stick around to see what he did with Pyramus and Thisbe.)

Serrand is no tyro; he has apparently has had a long, distinguished career of squeezing extra juice of classics, and has clearly studied Tartuffe carefully, as you can tell by his sometimes laborious underlinings.

By now even people who haven’t read Tartuffe know it has something to do with religious hypocrisy and the ease with which it can upend real moral order. If you have read or seen it, you know that Moliere’s great achievement is to make the inversion as believable as it is absurd. From the outset we see that Orgon, the paterfamilias, has been not only been taken in by Tartuffe, but unhinged by him: he describes Tartuffe’s professed asceticism, and the lesson Tartuffe has apparently encouraged him to take from it: “…he weans/ My heart from every friendship, teaches me/ To have no love for anything on earth;/ And I could see my brother, children, mother,/ And wife, all die, and never care — a snap.” (This is from the old Curtis Hidden Page translation; David Ball’s adaptation, used in this show, is smoother.) Meanwhile Tartuffe is sponging off Orgon to beat the band, and has bigger game in mind.

Everyone else knows Orgon’s been had, but he never wavers in his faith until the famous scene in which Orgon’s wife Elmire conceals him so he may hear Tartuffe, who has already indirectly propositioned her, respond to her pretense of interest and fully reveal his hypocrisy (“The public scandal is what brings offense/ And secret sinning is not sin at all”). By then it’s too late, and Tartuffe has already swindled Orgon out of all his possessions. He is restored later, in a scene that Moliere added under what is generally thought to be royal compulsion, though audiences usually appreciate the relief.

This relief Serrand seems to begrudge, and in a big way. He keeps the ending, but makes it clear that Orgon’s family is dispirited and lives even after Tartuffe’s arrest in fear of him — so much so that they pile furniture against the front door of the house and slump dejectedly as the curtain falls.

In fact, though everyone besides Orgon knows Tartuffe is a fraud, throughout the play most of them seem frightened of him — even the typically sensible maid Dorine, even while she is insulting him, shivers like a menaced damsel. As for Orgon’s daughter Mariane, she’s so horrified by the prospect of the forced marriage to Tartuffe her father has arranged that she goes into a kind of Ophelia swoon — with bandaged wrists suggesting a suicide attempt, yet.

Steven Epp plays Tartuffe, rightly and very well, as someone who would give normal people the cold creeps; his blissfully bald-faced lying has an incandescence that suggests an inspired artist of deception — indeed, he really is a mystic of an evil kind, which is a great illumination of the character. But this alone can’t explain the quaking desperation he inculcates in the family.

The idea, insofar as I can guess, is to make Tartuffe represent the entire looming evil of false religion, something bigger than one man. To (I suspect) help put this over, Tartuffe is given servants who wordlessly louche about the stage like runway models on Seconal, sometimes physically accosting characters, sometimes just exuding sybaritic menace. One of them doubles as the process server Loyal, playing him like a Willem Dafoe villain. (Everyone cowers at him, too.) And though he’s doing fine just with the lines, Epp is occasionally directed to do movement-class erotic creeping along the floor, and a little door on his shirt sometimes opens to reveal his nipples. He’s not just a horny fake preacher — he’s the snake in the Garden of Eden.

Maybe I’m dense, but I think the great thing about Tartuffe is that he is a man, and that he can achieve as much mischief as he does, despite having been basically hauled in off the street, by fastening on the willful gullibility of a single bourgeois and playing it for all it's worth. We’ve all known leeches; sometimes they show unexpected resourcefulness in deception, and while it doesn't make us like them it changes our estimation of them. Tartuffe’s resourcefulness is of such a high order than when he manages to get away with his first seduction of Elmire, it’s like Richard III turning the tables at the end of Margaret’s big speech: The surprise is not completely negative. Like all the great comic villains (and some of the ones in tragedies) he’s got enough élan vital to make it interesting. We don’t necessarily have to identify completely with the dupes. In fact that may be why Moliere didn’t put Tartuffe’s comeuppance in the first version: why deprive him or Orgon of their just desserts?

Lest I make the show sound like a bore, be notified that it has great energy, some brilliant stage pictures, and lots of laughs. I wasn’t kidding when I said Serrand knows the play. The scene in which Mariane and her boyfriend Valere exchange insincere professions of unlove, and the one in which Dorine keeps coming up with ways to sass her master without getting socked, are especially successful, demonstrating that everyone involved knows what kind of human beings and human frailties they’re dealing with, at least when Tartuffe and his minions aren’t around.