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Noises off
Trinity gives Molière the backstage treatment
BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
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With its delicious comic premise of threading a story around rehearsals of three Molière farces, Trinity Repertory Company’s The Molière Impromptu could have gotten away with being a blooper reel of slammed doors and pratfalls. But this world-premiere theater piece doesn’t settle for ready laughs alone. Although Rinne Groff, who wrote last season’s The Ruby Sunrise, is credited with having "translated and adapted" the texts, much of the connective tissue she provides is storytelling red meat. Actual slapstick is used once, and wide-eyed expressions of surprise are as showy as the commedia dell’arte masks. But what carries us along is the nail-biting employment peril the actors of these frolics seem to be in. The set-up is that actor/playwright/manager Molière (Fred Sullivan Jr.) and his rag-tag company are about to entertain their king with a make-’em-or-break-’em performance. We’re told that they lost the patronage of Louis XIV’s brother; that sent them roaming the hinterlands, and now the company is back in Paris, dead broke. Cue the tense music. Molière became the posthumous father of the court-established Comédie-Française and its high comedy, but before that, he and his troupe did spend more than a dozen years trudging the provinces begging for low-comedy laughs. And the yokels liked yuks. So in The Molière Impromptu, we get the best of both worlds. That the company would be this ill-prepared for a command performance is a lot to swallow, but we’re amiably distracted from the glare of that plot flaw. The heart of the play is its opening scene; the rest is elaboration. In the tradition of the backstage story-within-a-story, an aspirant to Molière’s troupe wanders onto an empty stage and, thinking he’s alone, improvises a routine. Moreover, Andy Grotelueschen’s Michel is full of the joy of theatrical transformation. He slips on a mask and spins around, as hunched and busy-fingered as Sganarelle, Molière’s stock low-class character. A delightful visual rim shot is that the background music, which began when he stepped on stage in awe, stops when he opens the suitcase he was carrying and turns the hurdy-gurdy off! Director Christopher Bayes, who heads the movement and physical-theater training program of the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium, keeps this sort of poignant/comic carousel spinning throughout. Molière is the most significantly dizzied of the players, of course, and Fred Sullivan is adept at conveying simultaneous emotional highs and lows. Groff gives the character plenty on which to hang approach-avoidance anxieties. And Angela Brazil as Molière’s long-suffering wife manages an apt balance between being wary of and tolerating such narcissism. The court peacocks, whose hypocrisies Molière loved to tweak, are represented by Count La Thorillière, a pink-and-white explosion of frilly ruffs and pretentiousness. Timothy Crowe, who later has a walk-on as the king, plays him with snaky smile and reptilian eyes. But it is the theater that is the center of the play, so the actor characters get even more of a working over. Brecourt (Stephen Berenson) is a flowery, self-described, and self-impressed "thespian." La Grange (William Damkoehler) is always inserting concern for social betterment into improvisations of the peasants he plays. The hyper-nervous Mademoiselle Du Croisy (Janice Duclos) is in the company only because it can’t do without her husband, who’s zestily played by Stephen Thorne. In the second half, the players try to save the day with a traditional exercise they’ve honed on the road. They improvise comic bits, lazzi, based on Molière’s rough scenario of Le médicin malgré lui, using stock commedia characters. Sullivan/Molière is the woodcutter/doctor who helps Grotelueschen’s character win the hand of his love, a devilish, nose-ringed goth-snarky Rachael Warren. As a wet nurse constantly blotting her chest, Phyllis Kay is wrapped in ample padding and wry humor. Rounding out the troupe are Du Parc, whom Mauro Hantman furnishes bone-free arms for a silly walk, and Mademoiselle Béjart, Molière’s world-weary former mistress, whom Cynthia Strickland flavors with a spicy savoir unfair. Since The Molière Impromptu is about Trinity Rep’s work as much as it is about the genius of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, the company has pulled out all the stops, Bayes adjusting them only where necessary. The result is a medley of farce and feeling that’s pretty sweet.
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