Theater Review: “The School for Lies,” Adapted by David Ives from Moliere’s “The Misanthrope”

Were Moliere (1622-1673) alive today, it’s easy to imagine him producing something like The School for Lies. To be sure, David Ives has taken a few liberties with The Misanthrope, the French comic genius’ uncompromising satire on an all-too-easily compromised society, but they’re fewer than you’d think.

I managed to catch Walter Bobbie’s sterling staging of this comedy earlier this month, just before it closed, at New York’s Classic Stage Co. The sprightly production was not only endlessly amusing in its own right, but made a persuasive case for mounting this adaptation elsewhere.

All the major characters in this comedy retain their original French names except for the protagonist: called Alceste in the original, he goes by the name of Frank (as in brutally frank) here.

Moliere and his company, the Troupe du Roi, first mounted The Misanthrope at the Theatre du Palais-Royal in 1666. As he did with other works, Moliere molded his protagonist partly on himself, a middle-aged man frustrated by his much-younger paramour’s endless flirtatiousness with other men. Adding even more realism to the proceedings, he cast his wife as the flirt. That bit of double-stunt casting didn’t make this five-act comedy in verse popular in Moliere’s lifetime, but in the centuries since it’s been recognized as one of his finest attempts to stretch French comedy beyond its enormous indebtedness to the Italian commedia dell’arte form.

Ives and Bobbie eliminated the concept of the cuckolded middle-aged man, but Moliere’s central conceit—of a man who practically goes out of his way to create enemies—was effortlessly embodied by Hamish Linklater, who strode around the stage like a mad stork. (Even his hair--the most unruly male top this side of Barton Fink--got into the act.)

Though he has what friend Philinte calls “a preternatural gift for being blunt” (he calls two people he meets “a doormat” and “a bedpan”), Frank is struck uncharacteristically mute by the sight of the glamorous Celimene, and she proves more than a match for him in wit. “You mimic rigor mortis so intently,” she teases as he remains stuck in his verbal stupor.

In a society where candor is punishable as much by law as by custom, Frank’s blunt dismissal of an abysmal poet makes him the target of a lawsuit. Celimene has her own troubles with the law, something this widow hopes a wealthy, well-connected suitor can help her with. Philinte’s fraudulent suggestion that Frank is an aristocrat leads to an amazed outburst from her (“This kook’s a duke?”) and an affair with the delighted misanthrope.

You may or may not recall Mamie Gummer’s name, but her face has the distinctive imprint of her mother, Meryl Streep. I can’t tell you whether she has her legendary parent’s skill with Berlitz-style pronunciation, but, having seen her a couple of seasons ago in the Roundabout Theatre’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, I can say that she displays similar range. While she played a sheltered 15-year-old convent girl all too ripe for seduction in the former, she makes the worldly Celimene here at first amused, then astonished by a man as alien from her world as it’s possible to get.

Bobbie shows a similar sure-handed touch with other cast members, notably Alison Fraser as Celimene’s viperfish frenemy, Arsinoe (“I never gossip, dear—I just report”). Outside of casting, not all of Bobbie’s or Ives’ creative decisions work so smoothly. There’s a routine with a servant, for instance, that wears out its welcome after, oh, the 12th repetition. In addition, Moliere might have protested the decision to soften his depiction of Celimene as a heartless coquette, as well as to substitute a more upbeat ending than his own ambiguous one.

But on the crucial questions—Does it make us laugh? Does it make us think—there’s no doubt that the playwright would have been pleased, as Ives’ clever introduction puts it, by the batter whipped up from Moliere’s ingredients. Even in other instances in which the play departs from what Moliere wrote, he would notice how it pays homage to several of his other texts.

Ives’ title, for instance, not merely takes its cue from Frank’s declaration that society is a school for lies, but also echoes later Moliere classics such as The School for Wives and The School for Husbands. Moreover, the play’s conclusion, in which a character resolves the plot that does not grow organically out of the text, echoes a similar deus ex machine in Moliere’s Tartuffe.

I hadn’t been to the Classic Stage Company since I saw Amy Irving nearly a decade ago in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. Bobbie and Co. have made it more likely that I’ll be back again soon because of their work on The School for Lies.