Theater Review: Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid,” Presented by the Red Bull Theater

Argan, the title character in the Red Bull Theater’s The Imaginary Invalid, gives a whole different dimension to the term “health nut”—a hypochondriac whose ailments require three physicians and so many magic elixirs of dubious benefit that he’s lucky any one of these doesn’t kill him.

Fortunately, this Off-Broadway adaptation of the uproarious 1673 comedy by the French genius actor-playwright Moliere—playing at New World Stages at 340 West 50th Street through Sunday—will relieve the symptoms of any audience member who’s badly in need of laughs.

The Red Bull, in existence for roughly two decades, takes its name from a leading playhouse of Shakespeare’s time that sorely tested the patience of the Stuart monarchy—and, while delving into the Bard and his contemporaries through fully mounted plays as well as staged readings, will also venture elsewhere in the realm of classical theater, as, to great effect, here.

Working from a new translation by Mirabelle Ordinaire, Red Bull artistic director Jeffrey Hatcher has streamlined Moliere’s three-act structure to 80 minutes without an intermission, rendered in colloquial English.

At the same time, Red Bull artistic director Jesse Berger has put together a show that remains true to the spirit of the original, including elements that appear repeatedly in Moliere’s work: a screen where characters hide and eavesdrop; doors opened and slammed as characters chase each other on and off stage; a saucy maid far smarter than her deluded employer; a daughter and her boyfriend who must convince her father not to give her away to a loathsome suitor; and, presiding over the madcap household, a paterfamilias not only cuckolded (and about to be swindled) by his much younger wife, but in the grip of an absolutely unreasoning obsession.

Moliere used his last farce to poke at a longtime bugaboo: quack doctors. (He suffered his fatal illness mid-performance in the lead role, leaving many in his audience, much like Redd Foxx, thinking that coughing blood was part of his act.)

Creating a massive opening for such medical mountebanks is the aging Argan (with veteran stage, film, and TV comic actor Mark Linn-Baker as masterful with dialogue as with demanding physical comedy). So convinced is Argan that lack of feeling in his buttocks foretells worsening health that he requires the strenuous ministrations of a trio of doctors (all played, hilariously, by Arnie Burton, who deftly differentiates each).

Argan’s plan: marry his daughter Angelique to a doctor so he’ll have free healthcare for the rest of his life. The problem is that the lucky fellow (played with panache by Russell Daniels), the son of one of Argan’s current physicians, is an unprepossessing specimen—dressed in a child’s sailor uniform barely able to contain his porky physique, and even less skilled (and far more squeamish) than his father about the healing arts.

The cast not only maintains a breathless pace but obviously delights in feeding off each other’s energy while playing this assembly of deceivers, both well-intentioned and, in the case of the doctors and lawyer on hand, out-and-out charlatans—sometimes even breaking character by dissolving in laughter onstage at another character’s antics. In addition to the above-named actors, also worthy of note are:

*Sarah Stiles, stealing scene after scene with merely a sly grin as the servant Toinette;

*John Yi, lending musical accompaniment as well as generating chuckles as Angelique’s handsome but dim-witted suitor, Cleante; and,

*Emily Swallow as Argan’s gold-digging second wife.

In the enormous enemy dispenser brandished in this farce, properties designer Laura Page Russell has fashioned the New York theater world’s most explosive weapon of mass eruption.

I have favorably reviewed other Red Bull productions before, notably Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, and Ben Jonson’s Volpone. But none were as rollicking from start to finish as this one.

I was thrilled to watch this theater group for the first time since the pandemic. Argan is the type who today would be gulled by Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, not to mention new medications approved by Robert Kennedy Jr.’s FDA.

Rather than sink into dismay over the fools and frauds who are multiplying in the current political environment, the Red Bull has adeptly supplied appropriate therapy in the form of Moliere’s boisterous mockery.

Theater Review: Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus,’ Presented by the Red Bull Theater Co.

Coriolanus is not one of the more extensively performed tragedies of William Shakespeare. Not only is its hero highly problematic, but his blunt speech is nothing like the poetic, philosophizing tone of Richard II or Hamlet. There isn’t even a mesmerizing villain like Iago in Othello.

Nevertheless, the Red Bull Theater Co.., if it hasn’t presented here a play for all ages and places, has certainly found one with resonance for 21^st century America. Its production of Coriolanus, which closed a week and a half ago at the Off-Broadway Barrow Street Theater, offers, in the Roman Republic, a scenario that has sounded awfully familiar this past year: income inequality, civil disorder, charges of treason, and a neophyte political candidate with abundant ill-advised words and precious little self-awareness.

Attending a performance only a week and a half after the Presidential election, as rumblings occurred about the Electoral College, I confess to being almost jolted out of my seat by the following passage from the Roman tribune Sicinius Velutus: “Let them assemble,/And on a safer judgment all revoke/Your ignorant election.”

But, just in case the audience still didn’t notice the contemporary application of all of this, director Michael Sexton uses present-day props: a ballot box that is smashed, and a candidate for high office who wears a red hat.

That candidate is Caius Martius, a Roman general who, after a resounding victory over his country’s longtime foes, the Volscians, is given a new honorific—Coriolanus—and the assurance that he will have the inside track on the republic’s highest title: consul.

Dion Johnstone exudes, in equal measure, the vigor that leads men to follow him anywhere in battle and the contempt that leaves him hopelessly unmoored when he is persuaded to try to transfer that charisma to a political environment marked by pandering and manipulation. This soldier is as out of his element in a civilian atmosphere as another one of Shakespeare’s commanders: Othello.

Stephen Spinella and Merritt Janson imbued Sicinius and fellow tribune Junius Brutus with cunning and cowardice. (Their fear was something to behold when Coriolanus, turned on by the citizens that once hailed him, goes over to the once-loathed Volscians in an attempt to destroy the republic.) As one of their adversaries in the Roman Senate, Patrick Page deftly handled the role of Menenius, an old political hand who watches the rabble he once steered now overturn his work of a lifetime.

Though Coriolanus is set in the testosterone-fueled worlds of politics and the military, actresses appear to good advantage in this production—not only because the casting is as often gender- as well as race-neutral, but also because the female cast members bring to the surface the enormous dignity of their characters. Chief among them are Rebecca S’Manga Frank as Coriolanus’ wife, Virgilia, and Lisa Harrow as his mother, Volumnia, who precipitates her son’s tragic death by appealing to a deep reserve of mercy that only a parent can reach.

Over the past several years, I’ve come to rely on the Red Bull troupe for throwing a searchlight on the contemporary world with its productions of Jacobean theater. (See my reviews of Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling.) In those plays, such subjects as greed and sexual power relationships came in for sharp treatments that did not stint on the plays’ complications. Now, with the Bard, it took on something of unexpected relevance in this election year: a caustic would-be plutocratic leader interacting with the lower classes.

Theater Review: Sheridan’s ‘School for Scandal,’ From the Red Bull Theater Co.

Perhaps the Red Bull Theater Co., which specializes in Jacobean theater classics, offered a break from its usual bloodthirsty fare, in the form of The School for Scandal, which closed this weekend. But though bodies are not stabbed, many a character's reputation lay murdered in the company’s revival of this scathing 1777 comedy of manners by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

At the end of a life in the rough-and-tumble worlds of the theater and politics, this Anglo-Irish playwright lamented: “It is a fact that I have scarcely ever in my life contradicted any one calumny against me ... I have since on reflection ceased to approve my own conduct in these respects. Were I to lead my life over again, I should act otherwise.” Sheridan seemed well aware of the potential price he and others prominent in society might pay, though, when he wrote this satire at age 26.

Toward the start of this sprightly production at the Off-Broadway Lucille Lortel Theater on Christopher Street, music and sound designer Greg Pliska made wickedly effective use of "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter." It came just as the green-wigged Mr. Snake was just about to fire off an innuendo-filled missive that will leave a victim open to public ridicule. Truman Capote and Perez Hilton couldn’t have plunged into the job with more gusto.

Snake is also on hand when his ally in calumny, Lady Sneerwell, emerges from behind a screen after having just defecated. The screen here foreshadows its more comic (and more famous) use later in the play. But the scene was also a graphic signal to the audience that it was in for some dirty business for the next two hours.

In her youth, Lady Sneerwell tells the toadying Snake, she had been so wounded by “the envenomed tongue of slander” that nothing now gives her more pleasure than “reducing others to the level of my own injured reputation.” At the moment, she has an even more powerful motive for deadly social skill: she wants to destroy the feelings of young, virginal Maria for the wastrel Charles Surface—a man who, despite herself, she covets.

If any playwright can be regarded as the missing link between Moliere and Wilde, it is Sheridan, who was heavily influenced by Restoration Comedies of the late 17^th century. Like his theater forebears William Congreve and William Wycherley, he found rich material in the sexual mores of the English aristocracy. Besides Snake and Lake Sneerwell, these include the choleric, jealous Sir Peter Teazle; his flighty, far younger wife, Lady Teazle; the hypocritical Joseph Surface and his rakish but good-hearted brother Charles; the would-be poet Sir Benjamin Backbite and his equally odious uncle Crabtree, both vicious gossips; and Mrs. Candour, one of the deadliest in the entire “School,” with a kindly manner concealing a vicious tongue.

The names of these and other characters are the kind of broad clues that theatergoers used to receive about characters. Several of these figures are, in fact, not much more than caricatures. In a play filled with such characters and plot devices that are stock features of farce (e.g., an aging city husband and his far younger country wife, a hiding place under constant siege, etc.), much depends not only on original qualities that the playwright can bring to the table, but also the talent and energy of the director and cast reviving it.

Sheridan had a special talent for dialogue that economically evokes character ("If you wanted authority over me, you should have adopted me and not married me" is all we need to know about how Lady Teazle saucily taunts her husband for their age difference), that surprises and delights (“Now you’re going to be moral and forget you’re amongst friends,” says Lady Sneerwell to Joseph), or that rises to the level of an aphorism (“The world is so censorious that no character escapes," according to Mrs. Candour).

Among a uniformly fine cast, several actors stood out. Mark Linn-Baker earned widespread attention three decades ago for appearances on the big screen (My Favorite Year) and television (Perfect Strangers). But stage aficionados have come to know him as one of the most versatile and dependable character actors in New York, where he has appeared in You Can’t Take It With You and Twentieth Century. The role of Sir Peter might not have been in as high-profile productions as those, but Baker made the most of the opportunity to play this querulous husband all too fearful that he has made a dreadful mistake in marrying so late in life.

Two veteran actresses, Frances Barber and Dana Ivey, brought consummate skill to their roles as particularly deadly female gossips, Lady Sneerwell and Lady Candour, respectively. And Christian Conn brought dollops of shape-shifting, sometimes frantic energy to the proceedings as Joseph Surface.

Marc Vietor directed with aplomb, never letting the pace slip throughout.

The Red Bull Theater occupies a very special niche among Off-Broadway venues, as I noted, for instance, in this review of its production of The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, a few months ago. Yet I have not been disappointed yet in any of their shows, and The School for Scandal is no exception to the rule.

Theater Review: Middleton and Rowley's 'Changeling,’ From the Red Bull Theater, NYC

Astonishing disparities between characters’ exteriors and interiors lie at the very heart of The Changeling, the 1622 tragicomedy by English playwrights Thomas Middleton and William Rowley that closed this past weekend at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on New York's Christopher Street. Though only one character in the play was identified as such in the 17^th century, at least a few others reveal themselves in ways that startle, shock and, ultimately, silence theatergoers as much today as then.

Kudos to the Red Bull Theater troupe once again for bringing attention to a drama that, for all its unusual qualities, is rarely performed (and, for that matter, not even read an awful lot in college English courses). It is strong stuff, a product of an era of brief, uneasy creative freedom that saw London theaters satisfy audiences’ yen for violence, sex and barely veiled criticism of the privileged. (The theater, in existence for a little more than a decade, takes its name from a leading playhouse of Shakespeare’s time that sorely tested the patience of the Stuart monarchy—and, like so many similar venues, was closed by the authorities when the Puritans, under Oliver Cromwell, controlled the government.)

I have seen two prior productions from the company: John Ford’s tragedy ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore last spring and Ben Jonson’s satire Volpone nearly four years ago (see my review of the latter here). Both shows impressed me, so I was looking forward to this production. I wasn’t disappointed.

Helen Mirren, Brian Cox and Stanley Baker performed in a 1974 telecast of the tragicomedy for the BBC’s "Play of the Month” (found in this YouTube clip).  Even sterling performers like these, however, could not prepare viewers for the visceral shock experienced at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

It all traces back to Jacobean theater—essentially, the two decades (1603-1625) that roughly corresponded with the reign of King James I, and which upped the quotient of murder and mayhem served by Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. Revenge dramas were pushed to the point where they became dramas of horror; illicit love figured far more prominently; and dramatists became far more interested in staging their works in foreign locales such as Spain and Italy—perhaps partly as a veiled attempt to examine their own society, particularly its corrupt court and aristocracy.

These elements can be found aplenty in The Changeling. The plot is driven by Beatrice-Joanna, a privileged Spanish lady who quickly decides that she must have the young, attractive visitor Alsemero. The problem is that she already has a fiancé, Alonso de Piracquo. But she is so willful and unscrupulous that she is even willing to use the servant of her father Vermandero, De Flores, to murder Piracquo.

But she doesn’t expect the enormously steep price exacted by De Flores, whose ugliness is so pronounced as to provoke her never-ending scorn: Not all the gold she can give him, or social status, but her virginity. Dreading that he will expose her role in the murder plot, she yields to his advances, then is amazed to find herself in a passionate affair with him. His willingness to do anything for her—even present her with the finger of the dead Piracquo, attached with all his dying strength to his engagement ring—excites her ("The east is not more beauteous than his service"), leading her to carry on with De Flores even after she can now marry the original object of her scheming, Alsemero.

“Our eyes … are rash sometimes, and tell us wonders / Of common things, which when our judgments find, / They can then check the eyes and call them blind,” Beatrice-Joanna tells Alsemero. It’s a warning not heeded by nearly all the males in the play, who cannot believe that a physically lovely woman such as Beatrice-Joanna could be so morally hideous. She has come a long way from the woman in prayer glimpsed outside a church at the start of the play.

As many of their Jacobean theater peers did, Middleton and Rowley employed a subplot, a kind of funhouse mirror on the main action. This, too, involves a deceptive female: Isabella, the much younger wife of Dr. Alibius, who runs an insane asylum. While toying with two men who have faked their way into the Bedlam-like institution, she still rejects their advances, in counterpoint to the decline into adultery and murder of Beatrice-Joanna. (Rowley, known for his comic roles, is believed to have contributed most heavily to this portion of the play.)

Director Jesse Berger used the grim set, carefully contrived by set designer Marion Williams, and the matching dark period clothing from costume designer Beth Goldenberg  to evoke the atmosphere of manipulation, madness and murder. But he was best at coaxing vivid performances from his cast, especially the women. Especially worthy of note are Sara Topham, who captured Beatrice-Joanna in all her caprice and moral deterioration; Michelle Beck, who embodied Isabella in all her sly amusement; and Kimiye Corwin, who depicted the maid of  Beatrice-Joanna, Diaphanta, in all her earthiness and vacillation over pleasing her lady, even if it meant yielding to her trick of bedding the latter’s husband on his wedding night lest he discover that his bride is not a virgin.

Among the males, the ones who appear to best advantage are Christopher McCann and Andrew Weems as the jealous Dr. Alibius and his put-upon but lecherous assistant in running the madhouse, Lollio, and Manoel Felciano as disfigured, obsessed, plot-galvanizing De Flores.

Theater Review: Ben Jonson’s ‘Volpone,’ From The Red Bull Theater

Inveterate diarist Samuel Pepys took a break from his tiring duties in England’s naval bureaucracy to attend a performance of Volpone. The Restoration man of the world rated the performance highly:  “the best I ever saw, and well acted.”

Most of the other works by Ben Jonson do not approach the high standard set by this 1607 satire, but Pepys might have been more correct than not about this one classic. As wondrous as Shakespeare’s comedies can be, none could approach the fierce bite of Volpone. Remarkably, Jonson’s jaundiced vision of a society gulled, and defined, by greed has only gained in currency, as evidenced by the fallout from the Global Financial Crisis.

More often than not, it’s become the practice of modern companies to stage Jonson’s contemporary, friend and rival, William Shakespeare, in modern rather than Elizabethan dress. The modern age takes this to an even stronger extreme in the case of Jonson: They not only junk the dress but the text. Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1967 film The Honey Pot took the skeleton of the play—a rich man, with the help of his equally cunning servant, convinces a group of people that he's dying, and that a small monetary offering from them will secure his bequest them his far larger fortune—but the results did not match the promise of the writer-director’s earlier illustrious resume (e.g., All About Eve and A Letter to Three Wives). Larry Gelbart’s 1976 play Sly Fox updated the action to San Francisco in the late 1800s.  The one production I saw onscreen that retained the Elizabethan time period was Maurice Tourneur’s 1941 French film, based on a screenplay by Jules Romains, with an uncredited assist by Stefan Zweig.

New York’s Red Bull Theater, now in its 10^th year of staging classics, stuck with Jonson’s early 17th-century dress and Venetian setting in their production, which closed this past Sunday. In this case, the setting might be even more important than the period garb. The Italian city-state resembled the United States of the early 21^st century in being a national force facing increasing challenges to its military and commercial sway. At the same time, it was reaching simultaneous heights in art and decadence. 

As faithful readers might recall from this prior post, I have been a great fan of Jonson’s satire for awhile, but I had never actually seen it performed on stage till now.  That’s why, when I heard the Red Bull Theater was putting it on, I had to rush down before it closed.

 

By staging the production without updated accouterments, Red Bull trusted the audience to draw its own conclusions about similarities between the Baroque Venice and our time. At the same time, in the Off-Broadway venue at the Lucille Lortel Theatre down by New York's Christopher Street, it created a sprightly, sumptuous production that still allowed viewers to absorb one of the most remarkable texts in the history of English theater.

Clint Ramos’ costume designs were marvelous (particularly for Michael Mastro’s merchant-on-the-make, Corvino), and the sets—principally, Volpone’s bedroom and a Venetian courtyard and courtroom—sprang to life at the hands of John Ardone.

Director Jesse Berger skillfully accentuated the farcical elements in this classic: the  lightning-fast maneuvers of Volpone and his equally grasping manservant, Mosca, to keep each of their three targets continually on the hook without disabusing the others of their illusions; the hearing-impaired mistakes made by the elderly Corbaccio (played by Alvin Epstein, with droll skill); and the way that the Englishwoman, Lady Would-Be Politic (a delicious Tovah Feldshuh) mounts an alarmed Volpone, in her attempt to enjoy his favors while there’s the slightest touch of life in him.

Stephen Spinella (perhaps best known to theatergoers for his role in Angels in America) made of Volpone more than simply a wizened wizard of wiliness. He transformed him a kind of comic counterpart to Richard III, a figure of boundless energy who, in his zestful scheming, made the audience complicit in his crimes. He was especially effective in the scene in Volpone’s bedroom, where this aging character jumped up and down with youthful energy, attempting to seduce with gilded rhetoric and shameless exhibitionism the pretty young wife of one of his targets. Cameron Folmar gave Mosca a flair for the smoothly plausible lie that complemented his boss’ grandiose greed.

 

The names that Jonson gave his characters—shorthand for their most marked traits—fall principally into the animal (e.g., Volpone, fox; Mosca, fly; Voltore the lawyer, vulture) and heavenly (Celia, the beautiful, virtuous wife of Corvino, the heavenly one; Bonario, good) kingdoms, with precious little room in between. His play, in the highly accomplished hands of the Red Bull Theater, became a still-relevant warning that when it comes to greed, it isn’t hard at all for man to fall into the depths.