Le Misanthrope

MOLIERE is one of those playwrightes who, like Wilde and Shaw, delight us with their wit and surface polish rather than any deep probing into the darker recesses of human nature. His plays give the impression of following some ideal of classical form which, however, is never allowed to choke off a good opportunity for laughter or propaganda, for horseplay, music or flouncing epicene behavior. The words dance in intricate patterns of couplets and sextets; the uncomplicated nature of each character is pinned down in his opening lines and does not go off in any unpredictable direction for the rest of the play. The action consists mainly in a series of tightly controlled battles of wit, each of which gathers force at swift pace, peaks, and then subsides to make way for the next demonstration of argumentative virtuosity. In Shakespeare we find ourselves in a dense forest, think with the odor of vegetable combustion and overrun with luxuriant undergrowth. Moliere places us on a manicured, perfumed lawn to follow along a box-wood maze of clipped hedges.

Producing Moliere is always a hazardous adventure. He originally wrote his plays for the Hollywood aristocracy at Versailles which demanded a more ethereal and intellectual theater than a modern audience is apt to prefer. The language carries the entire weight of the play, and the actors must do a virtuoso job of speaking the couples so that they do not lapse into a sing-song monotony. The current Lowell House production of Le Misanthrope overcomes most of these difficulties with a competence which occasionally turns into a braven assurance, and lets some of the funniest lines ever written break through the cold classical form to tickle and outrage it.

Le Misanthrope was written at the time when Louis XIV had gathered the entire French aristocracy in his monkey court at Versailles to gibber and not at each other and indulge in gratuitous palace intrigues while he ran the country with a free hand. Although the setting is not Versailles, the characters in the play are all part of this glittering, shallow society, where conventions enforce a routine dishonesty, friendship and courting are reduced to foppish displays, and love is overwhelmed with calculation. In this setting we meet Alceste, the misanthrope, who is repelled by all the vanity and hypocrisy he sees around him and doggedly asserts his own righteousness. He is, however, madly in love with Celimene, an incorrigably trivial coquette who likes to play her string of courtier suitors off against each other by deceiving each one into thinking that he is her true love. The plot thickens into a series of brilliant verbal battles and intrigues between the suitors and between Celimene and her lady rivals. She is finally exposed, and the courtiers, including Alceste, go their own way and leave her to probably only a moment's regreat of the whole preceeding.

WHAT IS TRUE of Moliere's dexterity of form applies equally to his action. What really counts for power, in the action and comedy both, is that each speech shall genuinely grapple with the one before--by rebuke, question, contradiction, or misunderstanding--all this with a view of building up in a few minutes to a pungent, funny and recognizable human situation. Every step must be swift, unforced, and in itself worth hearing. The actor has to infuse his couples with a skillful variation of tone and inflection to bring this off. When he is successful, the dialogue attains the bellylaugh level and is made all the more funny with the extra wallop of an unexpected rhyme. When he falls, the dialogue lapses into dry monotony which is about as pleasurable to the audience as chewing on sand.

This production veers between these two poles. Some scenes, like the tea party at Celimene's house, are brilliantly timed and break up the house. The orgy of mutual sighing and foppish introduction at the beginning of this scene is particularly effective. But, almost every actor has his moments of dull delivery. George Patterson, playing Alceste, says his lines in the most professional manner, but particularly during his extended harangues he does not display a wide enough range of emotion to keep them from being flat and rhetorical. Sarah Hunter, as Celimene, and John Daley as Alceste's friend Philinte have the same problem, although they both improve considerably as the play progresses. The stay of the show is Ken Demsky as Acaste, the foppish rival for Celimene's hand. Kathy Clinton, who does a good overall job of direction, has wisely ignored Richard Wilbur's advice in his play Acaste as blatantly epicene. His waving handkerchief, stacatto monkey laugh, and feigned expression are the comic highlight of the evening.

MUCH OF THE credit for this successful evening has to go to Richard Wilbur. A poet himself, with an amazing felicity with rhymes and the kind formal but colloquial verse that both he and Moliere write, he has breathed life into what otherwise would be a theatrical corpse. Moliere deserves some credit, too. Le Misanthrope is not only a poignant and funny critique of society; it is also a study of the critic of society as well. If Alceste has a raging for the genuine, which he truly does, the final irony of the play is that he himself is a fake. He is a jealous friend, a jealous and self-indulgent lover, and his "frankness" in the famous scene where he criticizes Oronte's sonnet owes something to the fact that Oronte is his rival for the hand of Celimene. He is hard on everybody but himself, and overlooks his own transgressions of the ideals he imposes on others. Seemingly a giant among the moral pygmies of the court life, he is the ultimate butt of Moliere's humor.