Molière & Menotti

Clockwise from left: Amber Gray, Matthew Broderick, and David Cross in Tartuffe. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.)

As Tartuffe, the titular character of Molière’s most famous comedy, Matthew Broderick is so preternaturally calm that he barely seems to be breathing. Nothing unsettles him; without blinking an eye, he absorbs any threat to his power over Orgon – who takes him in, offers him his daughter in marriage and even makes Tartuffe his heir –and simply applies to it a nonsense logic that makes you think of the discourse in Through the Looking-Glass. Tartuffe is a scam artist who uses Christian piety as both a façade and a weapon to control the credulous – Orgon and his ridiculous mother, Madame Pernelle. Broderick takes Tartuffe’s cold-heartedness literally: he’s so unmoved that he might have the body temperature of a reptile. The text tells us that Tartuffe enjoys good food and sex, but even when Orgon’s wife Elmire, in an effort to expose him while her oblivious husband is watching from under the table, comes on to him, he responds greedily to her overtures but there’s no evidence in his face or his tone that she’s given him an erection. We’d swear there was nothing remotely human going on under those Puritan bangs if we didn’t see the way his machinations turn Orgon’s family’s lives upside down.

The New York Theatre Workshop production, directed by Sarah Benson from a new version by the prolific playwright Lucas Hnath, is somewhat haphazard, but I enjoyed it more than almost all of the others I’ve come across. (I have pleasant memories of a revival at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada with Brian Bedford in the early eighties.) It’s the only bona fide repertory item among Molière’s collection; this version opened in New York just after another one, which I missed, mounted in the library of the House of the Redeemer with Andre De Shields. Directors get charged up by the relevance of the play to their era; as with all great satires, its targets are just as readily available to the audience of any other time and place as they were to their initial audience, in this case in Molière’s Paris. Yet Tartuffe is a notoriously tricky piece to pull off because if the play hasn’t dated, its eighteenth-century comic style is certainly exotic. So are its Alexandrine couplets, which the American poet Richard Wilbur, in his peerless translation, converted to iambic pentameter (much closer to the rhythm of the English language, as Shakespeare knew). Hnath has kept the verse but he’s been free with both meter and rhyme as well as inserting contemporary turns of phrase, including common obscenities, and all of these choices tend to grate on the ear. You don’t mind hearing actors dressed in eighteenth-century clothes and wigs sounding like twenty-first-century Americans, and Enver Chakartash has turned a merry hand to the costumes. But the more the hard-boiled, pragmatic maid Dorine (Lisa Kron) announces that they’re all fucked, the more wearisome it becomes.

There’s nothing special about the scenic design by dots or about Benson’s staging, but it moves fast (two hours without intermission) and there’s a matter-of-factness in the actors’ playing of the text that is much easier to take than the extravagant high-concept editions that most directors seem to go in for. Aside from Broderick’s, the strongest performances are by David Cross as Orgon and Amber Gray as his long-suffering but patient second wife Elmire, who, along with her brother Cléante (played with understated skill by Francis Jue, so good in Yellow Face last season) and Dorine, provides the reasonable balance that a Molière play always entrusts to one or more characters. Kron, falling back on the language Hnath has given her, overdoes the maid’s sarcasm and insolence; all of her scenes come out pretty much the same. Bianca Del Rio, who plays Madame Pernelle in drag, is rather similar too but she gives her line readings some tang without boldfacing them. The implacable Pernelle is one of Molière’s more amusing caricatures, a woman whose very existence personifies confirmation bias centuries before psychologists invented a term for it. Even at the end of the play, when even her son has acknowledged that Tartuffe is a scoundrel, she continues to believe he’s a well-meaning Christian who is being persecuted for his virtue. Emily Davis gets some laughs out of the role of Orgon’s timid daughter Mariane. Ikechukwu Ufomadu plays her fiancé Valère as well as two smaller roles that require him to reappear in back-to-back scenes in different outfits; he makes a comic virtue out of his quick changes. The only really bad (i.e., amateurish) acting comes from Ryan J. Haddad as Mariane’s belligerent brother Damis.

Benson does something between acts with the ensemble miming a tennis game that doesn’t work at all, and after delivering a refreshingly speedy Molière she pads out the ending with a superfluous song and dance. I found the flourish at the end of Hnath’s script extraneous too. Molière imposes a happy ending on his play the implausibility of which is part of what makes it fun to watch: just as Orgon is about to lose everything to the devious Tartuffe and go to jail for some ill-advised financial dealings, the offstage King of France pardons him and imprisons Tartuffe instead. This was the playwright’s way of paying tribute to Louis XIV, who loved theatre and was unfailingly generous to Molière and his players. Hnath tries to make a satirical joke out of the King’s favoritism, which isn’t necessarily a bad idea but here it just seems like a slap at Trump that hasn’t been thought through.

In the published edition of his translations of Molière’s comedies, Richard Wilbur makes a convincing case for viewing Tartuffe as a play of authentic depth. (He compares Orgon’s blindness to the real virtue and vice of the people around him to Lear’s.) I wonder if anyone will have ever have the courage and the imagination to put Wilbur’s reading of this play on the stage. That’s something I would dearly love to see.

Albert Rhodes, Jr. and Joyce DiDonato in Amahl and the Night Visitors. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes.)

Gian-Carlo Menotti’s hour-long opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, with a libretto by the composer, was written to be performed on television, and its premiere production, in December of 1951, marked the debut of NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame, one of the many high points of literacy and broad-based artistic outreach that distinguished TV in the fifties and early sixties. Amahl became a Christmas perennial, first broadcast live and in black and white, then in color and eventually on tape. The narrative is a take on the Nativity story, presented in traditional fairy-tale form. Amahl is a poor, crippled boy who lives with his widowed mother; they are visited by the three wise kings following their star to the stable in Bethlehem who knock on their door seeking warmth and shelter for a few hours. The role of the Mother was created by Rosemary Kuhlmann; the last time the opera was televised, in 1978 (after a decade-and-a-half hiatus), it was filmed in the Holy Land and Teresa Stratas sang it.

This beautiful one-act opera, by an American composer who was popular in his time but has been mostly forgotten in ours, is being revived at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center in a playful, intimate, free-flowing production by Kenny Leon starring Joyce DiDonato as the Mother. (I call Menotti American because that’s how he presented himself, but he was born in Italy and retained his Italian citizenship all his life.) The lyric soprano Stratas gave a deeply felt, expressive reading of the role, but the mezzo-soprano DiDonato – whose biographical note in the playbill names this as her favorite opera and playing the Mother the fulfillment of a lifelong dream – is even better. Like all the finest opera stars of the twenty-first century, she is in the Stratas tradition, a great singer who is also a brilliant actress. She performs the quartet with the Three Kings, “Have You Seen a Child?” – the most gorgeous piece of music in the opera – and the moving scene where she is tempted to steal some of the royal visitors’ gold while they sleep with indelible poignancy. Amahl is played by the twelve-year-old African American Albert Rhodes, Jr., who has appeared as Young Simba in The Lion King but plays the boy without a trace of Broadway showmanship. He sings the role with a genuine freedom of vocal expression that it's easy to believe Menotti would have loved. Rhodes and DiDonato are both charming and touching together. The Three Kings are Phillip Boykin (as Balthazar), Todd Thomas (as Melchior) and Bernard Holcomb (as the childlike Kaspar). All three give robust performances of tremendous warmth, but Boykin – a memorable Crown in the Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess that starred Audra McDonald – sings magnificently.

Leon has directed the opera with heartfelt simplicity; it’s the kind of staging that feels so spontaneous that it belies the skill with which it was mounted. Two pianists reside upstage, just below the conductor, Steven Osgood: Nathaniel LaNasa stage left and Riko Higuma stage left. Behind them is a cyclorama on which the star-filled sky is projected. Derek McLane is the scenic designer; he and Leon go for the feeling of handmade magic and they capture it.

When the small Mitzi Newhouse stage is crowded with the shepherds’ chorus, dancing the appropriately natural-seeming choreography of Ioana Alfonso, it’s bursting with energy. Emilio Sosa’s costumes are one of three instances where Leon’s production reaches beyond the New Testament setting: the shepherds display a range of costume pieces that create a sort of patchwork that stretches across the millennia. The others are Rhodes’s plaits and the alteration of Amahl’s original line to his mother when he sees the Kings at the door, “One of them is Black!” In this version two are Black and so, of course, is Amahl himself, so he tells her, with the same tone of wonder, “One of them is white!” It’s a good joke that acknowledges the distance between the opera’s premiere three-quarters of a century ago and our current era while confirming its timelessness – and without making a big deal of it.

I recall watching Amahl and the Night Visitors when I was a child, so I was delighted to see so many children in the audience at the early Friday evening performance and hoped they were taking it to their hearts as I did. It conveys the best kind of magic – the theatrical kind. At the top of the show the only other musician, the superb oboist Jesse Barrett, a tall, elegant man who has the face of a wizard in a fairy tale, steps down the center aisle to play the first music of the evening, to Amahl. That was the first time I cried but it wasn’t the last.

Note: You can see most if not all of the TV transcriptions of Amahl and the Night Visitors on YouTube; you can also see several other Menotti operas. The film of The Medium, with its powerful central performance by Marie Powers, is available on DVD. Inspired by the Lincoln Center Amahl, I’m planning to hold a little Menotti revival in my living-room before the month is out.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movie.