Enter the king — and you can take that literally. The audience is ordered to stand as he walks down the aisle to begin the New Repertory Theatre’s production of the 1664 comedy Tartuffe. Director Rick Lombardo has imagined Molière’s most controversial comedy as a theatrical evening attended by his patron, King Louis XIV, and Louis’s queen, the Infanta Maria Theresa. The New Rep auditorium has been ingeniously refashioned into a period theater by designer Kristin Loeffler, though because of modern fire laws the smoky candles in the footlights and chandeliers overhead (which probably dripped wax on 17th-century viewers) have electric stand-ins.
A priest sits at the side of the New Rep stage, a reminder of the political storms unleashed by Molière’s portrait of the religious hypocrite, Tartuffe, who masks his lechery and greed beneath a pious manner and the largest crucifix ever worn as personal adornment. Halfway through the performance, the outraged cleric takes his leave. Indeed, the characterization of Tartuffe so angered the archbishop of Paris that he vowed to excommunicate anyone who even read the play, never mind paid for a ticket. Tartuffe was banned from public production until 1669, when it became an immediate success.
Lombardo adds a play-within-a-play framework to Richard Wilbur’s witty couplets, introducing the actors on stage in a warm-up, then having them break character to bow to the king when they exit. The broad acting style employed by the cast of many Boston-area veterans suggests a manner of playing that owes as much to the physical slapstick antics of the Italian commedia dell’arte troupe that rivaled Molière’s company as to the Jesuit tradition of declamation in which the playwright was educated. Rather than stressing the dark undertones of religious shysterism, Lombardo has urged his collection of clowns to yuk up the gags.
The story is a simple one. Orgon, the father of the household, becomes so enthralled with the asceticism of Tartuffe that he takes him into his household, promises him the hand of his daughter Mariane, and makes him his heir. While professing his goodness, Tartuffe chows down the best of the food and wine and turns his hungry eyes toward Elmire, Orgon’s juicy wife. After the rest of the household sees through Tartuffe, Elmire lures him into a repeat of a previous seduction attempt, ordering Orgon to watch from under the very table on which his sanctimonious protégé is trying to mount her. Orgon realizes the truth and orders Tartuffe out, only to have the monster turn on him and demand that the family leave what’s now his property. An edict from the king brings a surprise (or contrived) ending that saves Orgon from prison and punishes Tartuffe.
It’s all great fun to watch, though the emphasis becomes skewed here because Michael Poisson, in Molière’s role of Orgon, is so much more boisterous than Richard McElvain’s Tartuffe that Orgon becomes the focus of the action. McElvain works in more subtle fashion, giving his voice license to drop into guttural tones or affect a lisp to display the variety of the character’s multiple guises. It’s a fascinating performance but subdued in comparison to most of the others — with the exception of Diego Arciniegas’s convincing portrayal of Cléante, the rational man. Rachel Harker is a standout as the scheming Elmire, and Marianna Bassham is an adorable Gidget of a daughter. Jennie Israel, as the frothy servant Dorine, and Deena Mazer, as the dragon lady of a mother-in-law, etch equally fine characterizations.
At Molière’s death, the Church exacted its revenge by refusing him burial in consecrated ground. Louis XIV intervened, but the funeral was held by night, with no official rites. Perhaps Molière had the last laugh, however, because Tartuffe has been repeatedly revived from his era to ours, where there’s seemingly no shortage of clerical hypocrisy to be exposed.