Sunday, June 07, 2015

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.

27 comments:

  1. Magnum AP11:48 PM

    How convenient! I'm in DC this week for work and was looking for evening things to do.

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  2. Wonderful review! Strange choice to make it so grand guignole.

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  3. The show doesn’t officially open till Monday.


    It's been a long day on the job and I think my brain is fried, I read that as "The show doesn't officially open till Molière."


    Thankfully, I have the next two days off.

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  4. That's just because of your cameo, right?

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  5. BigHank537:41 AM

    Eh, Weapon Brown got there first.

    http://www.whatisdeepfried.com/weaponbrown/

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  6. LA Julian10:08 AM

    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</blockquote.

    This. The shocking thing about Tartuffe is the realization that the archetype "Smarmy Con Artist" has not changed appreciably over centuries. A better way of modernizing the villain would be making him a televangelist.

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  7. edroso10:26 AM

    Ah, great. I did service journalism!

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  8. We had a production of Tartuffe at our local community theater around the time of the Jimmy Swaggert scandal, and the actor imitated Swaggerts' confession to his followers about his sinning when Tartuffe is first cant out in his hypocrisy.

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  9. A better way of modernizing the villain would be making him a televangelist.But that wouldn't necessarily change the emphasis these days. Old fashioned Swaggart-style might recapture the more human scale of the grift. But the ones who have tapped into their followers' voting booths as well as their bank accounts? I know Franklin Graham is a fraud, but I'm still scared of him, because he and his ilk don't simply personally enrich themselves, but also wield real political power. I suspect that sort of thing is why Serrand seemed to have trouble running with the basic con-man angle.

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  10. coozledad11:14 AM

    Tartuffe should be a "success mastery evangelist".


    Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new NC GOP Chair, Hasan Harnett.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tbv_epGB3k



    He was elected just this Saturday.

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  11. Helmut Monotreme11:15 AM

    Has anyone ever done a production of Tartuffe where they portrayed him as Rasputin? It seems like an obvious choice.

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  12. LA Julian11:18 AM

    Prosperity Gospel. The "Prayer of Jabeth" crowd. There are plenty of them who are just in it for the private jets and the mansions and the limousines, even now.

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  13. LA Julian11:31 AM

    There was also originally an implicit "entry into politics" in the original play, since Tartuffe had gained access to the elite by taking over Orgon's life -- not only monetary wealth, allowing him to climb further socially, but home, family authority, and attempting to replace him in bed as well.

    It really is a horror story, but far more Twilight Zone than giallo.

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  14. I wouldn't worry about little Frankie--even the GOP cross-clutchers look at him and turn away. His father ministered to presidents and didn't take many overtly political stands. Little Frankie has it all backwards and can't understand why he gets the pained reactions he does.

    As LA Julian and others have noted, it's the Prosperity Gospel parasites that I find frightening. Whether we're talking Joel Osteen convincing pensioners to give up one meal a week so Joel's Gulfstream G-VII can have hot-and-cold running gold dust, or Benny Hinn convincing people with cancer to take the money they would spend on medical treatments and give it to him so he can "heal" them by remote control--the Prosperity Gospel assholes actively harm people, intentionally defraud those who can least afford it, and damage our society at a most fundamental level without being overtly political. Each should be stripped of all assets and income, then flogged naked through the streets of every village and hamlet on the country while bearing signs confessing their fraud.

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  15. One of my 8th grade drama students presented a paper on Moliere last fall, which she illustrated with this:

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  16. Jesus loves me
    This I know
    'Cause me makes me
    Lots of dough!

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  17. montag25:51 PM

    I've always thought that Moliere's plays, generally, and Tartuffe, specifically, encouraged the most gleeful sort of investment in villainy, where the actors could chew scenery all evening long, render themselves almost as caricatures of villainy, and get away with it, easily, because the character is just so good.

    Tartuffe ought to be one of those prized roles that every actor would kill for, like Hamlet or King Richard III or Lady Macbeth. Maybe the tragedies are always destined to have more popular appeal.

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  18. To paraphrase Pratchett, it's like watching a wasp land on a nettle.

    So many of the marks watch these assholes because they like to hear a
    fellow asshole assure them they'll go to heaven while the queermonauts
    and the sinful women writhe in torment forever. With the PGers you also have the added element of nicely hypocritical greed.

    In fact, I don't think these sorts of scams work on non-assholes. A non-asshole would be repulsed. So yeah, people are being ripped off. But so are the ones who go in for Glenn Beck's Buy Gold/Drink Silver before Obama comes to drag you off to FEMA death camps b.s.

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  19. AGoodQuestion10:16 PM

    Franklin's in an awkward position. In his father's time it was more feasible to cultivate a fandom among conservatives without going full wingnut. Case in point Pat Boone. In the Clinton era his claim to continued fame was doing an album of schmaltzy covers of Dio and Judas Priest songs. Politics pretty much took a back seat. Now he's an outspoken birther who rails against "the gaying of America". FG's just trying to keep up.

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  20. bekabot11:33 PM

    That's Christianity-as-Ponzi scheme, a racket which has been operating for a while now. Those who get in on the ground floor are the Lord's Anointed, and they do fine. The others, not so much.

    "I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread." You'll notice that nothing is said there about grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

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  21. I wanted to become a queermonaut but i just couldnt handle the physics. But i never missed a launch.

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  22. In fact, I don't think these sorts of scams work on non-assholes.

    Sadly, they do. The elderly are particularly vulnerable as they face approaching death and might be running out of money. So they end up giving big chunks of their meager resources to the charlatans in the hope that the money will grease their way to heaven and, maybe, come back to them so they can leave something to their heirs.

    Prosperity gospel preys on the poor, promising them that they should cast their bread upon the waters. But their bread never returns--not even as duck shit.

    It preys upon the sick and infirm, promising them the healing grace of God.

    Maybe some of these people are assholes, but far too many are simply desperate and not too bright. The predators of prosperity gospel hunt them down, take all they've got, and leave them broken and abandoned. I would like to think Jesus would kick Joel Osteen's ass from Texas to the Levant. More likely, Joel would have Jesus crucified again for being such a communist.

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  23. Halloween_Jack10:00 AM

    In fact, I don't think these sorts of scams work on non-assholes. A non-asshole would be repulsed.


    That's a bit too close to the grifter's rationalization that you can't cheat an honest man. Yeah, you can point toward the dog-whistling to racism and homophobia, but by that same token, if some young liberal complains that they were saddled with huge undischargeable student loans and can't get a job that will pay them off, you could say that they should have done their due diligence research before taking this devil's bargain in their desperation to avoid taking a blue-collar job (such as those that are left). Your granny who got ripped off by fly-by-night house painters should have hired people who belonged to a union. And so on. People don't need to be pure at heart to become victims, and in fact it's the basically good at heart who can be made to feel guilty about trying to get ahead a little that are the best marks, because they're too ashamed to try to press charges.

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  24. you could say that they should have done their due diligence research
    before taking this devil's bargain in their desperation to avoid taking a
    blue-collar job (those that are left)...

    They've gone way beyond dog whistling but the only way I would compare the three is if I were another sort of asshole - A libertarian - and either couldn't or wouldn't see the difference between the bigot who gives his money to causes that support bigotry, the student who wants an education and the granny who wants her house painted.

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  25. Thanks for the review. I really wanted to see this production, but I won't be back in D.C. for it. I've yet to see it staged, although I taught in one year during my teaching stint. I'm sorry Serrand succumbed to sillier impulses, but I'd love to see the good stuff. Molière isn't staged (in English) nearly as often as Shakespeare, and finding a good production is harder still. Ages ago, I saw a hilarious and sublime production of The Miser at the Folger (with some of the actors who later became the Shakespeare Theater Company), then a dreadful version by John Strand at Arena Stage. (It should have said loosely based on or inspired by Molière and should have expressly not claimed to be his play; it was set in the American 80s and the spirit of Charles Keating appeared. It was empty shtick, not comedy; none of the characters was likable.) I've directed one of Molière's plays but have only seen a few other productions, ranging from the good (London) to the godawful (Florida).

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