TT: The French, they are a funny race

In Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column (which is already available on line) I review a pair of Chicago-area productions of classical French comedies, Writers’ Theatre’s The Liar and the Court Theatre’s Tartuffe. Both are must-see shows. Here’s an excerpt.
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What’s the funniest play ever written? I used to think it was “Noises Off,” but now that I’ve seen “The Liar,” I’m not so sure. David Ives’ English-language adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 1643 comedy about a compulsive liar, was commissioned by Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company and premiered there three years ago to universal acclaim. Since then it’s been making the regional rounds, and I finally caught up with it in the suburbs of Chicago, where Writers’ Theatre is giving “The Liar” a frenziedly farcical production at which I laughed so hard that I was sore the next day.
Unlike Richard Wilbur, whose 2009 translation of “The Liar” is miraculously faithful to both the spirit and the letter of the original play, Mr. Ives has given us a free “translaptation” (his word) whose comic effects arise in part from his use of contemporary language squeezed into the tight mold of rhyming couplets: “I? Wed some shrew? Obscene, oblong, obese?/And not the fair, the fine, divine Lucrece?” By wedding his verbal prestidigitation to Corneille’s mistaken-identity plot–to which he’s added the additional complication of a pair of identical twins–Mr. Ives has come up with a play in which the laughs flow freely and joyously.
William Brown, one of Chicago’s best directors, deserves much credit for ensuring that “The Liar” flies down the tracks at the speed of lunacy….
Improbable as it may sound, two very different productions of 17th-century French comedies are simultaneously playing in Chicago, and both of them are memorable. The Court Theatre, which led off its two-play Molière Festival last month with “The Misanthrope,” has now upped the ante with a modern-dress “Tartuffe” that is–amazingly–even better than its splendid predecessor.
Like “The Misanthrope,” this “Tartuffe” is being performed by a mostly black cast, and Charles Newell, the company’s artistic director, has chosen again to use Richard Wilbur’s supremely elegant verse translation of Molière’s ever-relevant tale of a monstrously hypocritical preacher (Philip Earl Johnson) who cozens his way into the family circle of Orgon (A.C. Smith), a gullible gent whose wife and fortune he covets with like intensity. As always, Mr. Wilbur favors dry wit over knock-down comedy, but his version of “Tartuffe” is more than funny enough to lend itself to the raucous touches of physical comedy with which Mr. Newell has salted his staging.
Yes, there’s a racial angle–Tartuffe is white, Orgon and his family black–but Mr. Newell doesn’t stress it. The focus is on class, not race, and though you’re free to interpret Tartuffe’s motives as you please, this production is not political in any crudely obvious way….
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Read the whole thing here.
A trailer for The Liar: