SOMETIMES YOU CAN GET WHAT YOU WANT
I have been in a foul mood for the past several days, looking for ways to smash the patriarchy, cursing the unseasonably warm and dry November in my soul and longing to methodically knock a few people’s hats off. Thus I accounted it high time to get to the Boston Center for the Arts to see Hub Theatre Company’s winning production of Jean Baptiste Molière’s Tartuffe. I’m happy to say that for a couple of hours at least, Richard Wilbur‘s witty translation delivered in rhyming couplets by excellent performances lifted me out of my funk, and neither whales nor whalemen were killed in the process.
I knew my companion and I were in for something special as soon as we walked into the intimate Plaza Theatre. Justin Lahue’s elegant set of mirrored pillars and black-and-white tiled flooring evoked an aristocratic setting of an earlier time, but the cast, at eye-level with the first row of seating, sat or stood on the stage, adjusting wigs, applying make-up, and otherwise getting into Marissa Wolf‘s dazzling costumes. Some performed warm-up exercises and stretches; others walked about murmuring their lines and rehearsing their facial expressions and body language. Director Bryn Boice, who brought us both Hub Theatre’s The Book of Will and Commonwealth Shakespeare’s excellent The Winter’s Tale earlier this year, says this transparent exhibit of what is usually backstage activity was an effort to “heighten the theme of pretense, and the blurred lines between performance, truth, and lies.”
Set in seventeenth-century France, Tartuffe tells the tale of Orgon (Brooks Reeves) a wealthy aristocrat taken in by Tartuffe (Jeremy Beazlie), a conman masquerading as a pious mendicant. To the horror of his family, Orgon decides to cancel his virginal daughter Mariane’s (Lily Ayotte) planned wedding to her beloved and handsome young Valère (Robert Thorpe II), insisting she marry the much older and repugnant Tartuffe instead. Orgon also disinherits his son Damis (Patrick Vincent Curran) and signs over all his property to Tartuffe. Oblivious to Tartuffe’s designs on his wife Elmire (Laura Rocklyn), Orgon further insists that Elmire spend time alone with Tartuffe in order to benefit from his religious instruction. While everyone but Orgon is on to Tartuffe’s hypocrisy, the patriarchal society in which they live leaves them all vulnerable to Orgon’s deluded admiration of Tartuffe, no matter how often they insist that the conman is only out for his own profit.
Who will deliver them from this madness? Our hero is a woman of the working class, of course, clever and mouthy Dorine (Lauren Elias) who, as the household’s serving woman, sees and hears everything. She is also smarter than anyone in the aristocratic family she works for, not only alerting them to Tartuffe’s duplicity, but also mediating conflicts within the family and mobilizing Orgon’s wife and daughter to stand up to his sense of entitlement. The role of Dorine seems made for curvy Elias (also Hub Theatre Company’s Producing Artistic Director), whose expressive face adds comic emphasis to the already witty script and whose diminutive height underscores her feisty resistance to the tall and thin villain Tartuffe. Beazlie offers an excellent scheming Iago-like counterpoint to Elias, equally clever but driven by his purely selfish and nefarious motives.
As one would hope, justice (or what passes for justice in the inherently hierarchical society of seventeenth-century France) eventually prevails. May life imitate art, and with just as many laughs along the way!
photos by Benjamin Rose Photography
Tartuffe
Hub Theatre of Boston
Boston Center for the Arts Black Box Theatre
two hours with one intermission
Thurs-Sat at 7:30; Sun at 2
ends on November 24, 2024
for tickets (Pay-What-You-Can to all performances), visit Hub Theatre