Winning Game

The Huntington's exquisite Marivaux

by Carolyn Clay

THE GAME OF LOVE AND CHANCE, Written by Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux. Adapted and directed by Stephen Wadsworth. Set design by Thomas Lynch. Costumes by Martin Pakledinaz. Lighting by Peter Kaczorowski. With Francesca Faridany, Margaret Welsh, Nicholas Kepros, Michael Medico, Paul Anthony Stewart, and Jared Reed. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through October 5.

The course of true love never did run smooth, but in 18th-century French dramatist Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux's intricately frenzied The Game of Love and Chance it does run like clockwork. Of course, the tick is upper-class romance, the tock its bumptious-servant counterpart, and never the twain shall cross. (Coming in 60 years: the French Revolution.) They do, however, cross-dress in this Upstairs, Downstairs of the heart by a playwright French theatergoers place right up there in the pantheon with Molière, Corneille, and Racine.

That notwithstanding, it has taken American adapter, director, and 18th-century-opera-and-theater specialist Stephen Wadsworth (he directed Handel's Xerxes for Boston Lyric Opera) to make Marivaux a sudden staple of the American stage. Prior to Wadsworth's taking up his cause, the playwright was apparently considered too rarefied, too French, for these shores. The Game of Love and Chance is Wadsworth's third Marivaux outing (it, as well as The Triumph of Love and Changes of Heart, debuted at the McCarter Theatre), and this elegantly playful Huntington Theatre Company staging would make even a Francophobe want to see them all.

Written in 1730 for Paris's Comédie-Italienne, the play marries commedia dell'arte harlequinade to Age of Enlightenment subtlety. The set-up is stock: Silvia and Dorante have been affianced by arrangement. This being the Enlightenment, however, they (unlike the dad-matched couples of Molière) have something to say about it. In order that the young folks might become acquainted, Dorante is to visit the estate of Silvia's father, Orgon. Both Silvia and Dorante come up with the notion of changing places with their respective servants in order to do some spying on the betrothed, the better to judge his or her character. Only Orgon and Silvia's brother Mario know about the double switcheroo.

When Dorante shows up disguised as his valet, he swoons on contact for Silvia disguised as her maid. And the attraction is mutual (Dorante gives his valet name as Bourgignon; clearly Silvia thinks he is beefcake Bourgignon). Each, however, believes the other to be socially inferior, therefore unhaveable. Meanwhile, the hoity-toitied-up servants, Harlequin and Lisette, have a gay old time putting on airs and are also mutually smitten. It takes three delightfully mannered acts, and no small amount of lovers' angst, class commentary, and arguable cruelty amid an opulent setting, to sort things out.

The Huntington production, as is so often the case, looks gorgeous. The grass is green, the gravel crunches, a real dog scampers, and elaborately accoutered folks eavesdrop at the open windows of Orgon's convincingly upscale manse. (The set design is by Thomas Lynch.) This is no museum painting, however. The artistry of Wadsworth's approach is evident in the mix of classic and contemporary: the prose is precise but not stiff (and leavened by the occasional anachronism); the situation-generated suffering and upheaval are hilarious but touching. And the performances are, for the most part, impeccably stylish, even when the characters are quite strung out.

My one quibble is with the Harlequin of Jared Reed, whose overbroad impersonation of his aristocratic master jars. Obviously Wadsworth wishes to retain the commedia-borrowed clown's buffoonish roots; the fancily-gotten-up valet wears his traditional diamond-patterned motley beneath his brocade coat. But unlike Margaret Welsh's outspoken and earthy but hardly ridiculous Lisette-in-lady's-clothing, Reed's Harlequin makes such a boorish comic spectacle of himself that it's hard to believe anyone, much less the savvy Silvia (who, admittedly, finds him "obnoxious"), would buy this cross between Amadeus's Mozart and the title character of La Bte. Reed's an antic, nimble comic, though, and his Harlequin is both sympathetic and interestingly menacing when stripped down to his trickster self.

Elsewhere the balance of slapstick and formality is exquisite -- I've seldom seen such polished nose-to-nosing and knocking about. As Dorante, sighing and seething in his borrowed livery, Paul Anthony Stewart is effeminately dashing in the manner of the day. But the Meryl Streepish Francesca Faridany, as a Silvia hellbent on achieving love at the expense of logic, has the better part. The actress marries comic agitation to a natural imperiousness. And she's so ecstatic at bringing her swain off his familial high horse and to his knees that you forgive the slight sadism of the act. Lending support, Michael Medico is a good-naturedly haughty Mario, and Nicholas Kepros is a masterpiece of deadpan understatement as Orgon.

More Marivaux, please.