Because nobody speaks French, except the French or Moliere in Spite of Himself

Hamish Linklater as Frank and Jenn Gambatese as Elainte wrestle with their conflicting emotions in The School for Lies.

From time to time during the Classic Stage Company’s production of The School for Lies, David Ives’ verbaliciosly hilarious reworking of Moliere’s The Misanthrope, you can see the characters becoming aware of themselves as characters in a play and that they don’t much like it.

Being characters, that is.  If they have any sense, which a few of them actually do, they like the play they’re characters in. But it’s baffling for them, and often frustrating, to find themselves at the mercy of a demonically logophiliac playwright.

Looks of consternation, incredulity, bemusement, irritation, shock, and occasionally out and out terror but even delight and amusement will cross their faces as Ives’ puns, and jokes, and cockeyed rhymes come bubbling out of them.  You can almost hear them thinking, “I can’t believe he just made me say that” or “I can’t believe he’s going to make me say this” or “I can’t believe I’m saying what I’m saying!”, depending on what point in a line it dawns on them that what’s coming out of their mouths isn’t something they’ve thought of themselves or something they even want to say. 

It takes a little while for even the smartest and most sensible of them to catch on to what’s happening.  No doubt they start the play thinking they are real 17th Century Frenchmen and women of the sort Moliere turned into comic types for his farces and satires, like The Misanthrope. 

In fact, if they were going to wake up to the realization that they were characters in a play, they would have reason to expect it would be that play.

After all, they have the same names as the characters in The Misanthrope.  They’re caught up in a plot that shares elements with the plot of The Misanthrope.  And for goodly stretches they are allowed to speak actual lines from The Misanthrope or at least close enough for jazz, a musical form they’re probably familiar with, despite its not having been invented yet, since they know about rock and roll and know why calling somebody rock and roll is a compliment, as in “She exalts my soul! She’s single malt! She’s rock and roll!”

You can see how a character who thinks he’s a 17th Century Frenchman, hearing himself carried away by words like that, might begin to suspect something funny’s going on.

The character who delivers that compliment, in spite of himself, is Frank, a young Frenchman who has returned home after several years in England.  His name is presumably a nickname for Francois he picked up from his friends across the Channel but it’s also a statement of intent.  Frank has come back to France determined to insult the entire nation one citizen at a time.  Sick of the constant hypocrisy and double-dealing that he sees as the defining traits of “polite” society, he’s relentlessly and ruthlessly impolite.  Asked---and even when not asked---he delivers his frank opinion of everyone and everything, and since he has a pretty low opinion of everyone and everything, few people are glad to hear what he has to say or are impressed by his frankness---few people outside the audience, that is.  Frank is extremely witty, whether reciting lines written for him by Moliere, carried away by rhymes forced on him by Ives, or just speaking for himself.  Frank is played by Hamish Linklater who lets us see in Frank’s darting, intelligent eyes Frank frantically trying to out-think the two playwrights who are trying to make him their ventriloquist’s dummy.

But Frank meets Celimene, a beautiful young widow, and discovers to his shock and dismay that he can’t hold a low opinion of her.  Or actually that he can but that it doesn’t get in the way of his falling passionately in love with her.

For her part, Celimene, played by a golden and glowing Mamie Gummer, doesn’t have time for either Frank’s initial antipathy or his sudden romantic turnabout.  She’s distracted by a ruinous lawsuit that she’s likely to lose and by three ridiculously foppish suitors who happen to be ridiculously wealthy and well-connected and who have each promised to save her from financial disaster in return for her hand in marriage. 

Celimene has no intention of marrying any of them, but she’s willing to use them for her own ends, manipulating their affections in the hope that they will help her before she has to turn down their proposals.

On top of this, though, she’s still grieving for her husband, lost at sea two years before, with whom she is still mournfully in love.

But then she’s told that Frank is ridiculously rich (He isn’t.) and that he has influence at court (He doesn’t.) and she quickly figures that if she can manipulate Frank, she can give the three fops the brush off.  So she starts to encourage Frank’s love, with results that surprise her.

As soon as she begins pretending to be in love with Frank, she realizes that, in spite of herself, she’s already and truly in love with him.  This shouldn’t be a problem, except that even though she loves him, she doesn’t much like him, and even if she did, she can’t bring herself to be unfaithful to her dead husband’s memory.

Things are further complicated by Celimene’s cousin, the innocent and pure-hearted and ridiculously honest Elainte, who, in spite of herself, has fallen deeply, madly, and ferociously in lust with Frank.  This leads to one of the play’s funniest scenes in which the demure  and dainty Elainte, played by an appealingly wide-eyed and squeaky-voiced Jenn Gambatese, attempts to wrestle Frank into seducing her.

Meanwhile, Frank’s best friend, Philante, who is in love with Elainte, dashes frantically about looking for help trying to woo her while trying to live down (or live up to) his sudden and (we presume) undeserved notoriety as a closet transvestite, the three fops parade in and out, vying with each other to look most ridiculous in Celemine’s and the audience’s eyes, Celimene’s best friend, Arsinoe, schemes to ruin Celimene’s chance at happiness, because scheming to ruin people’s chances at happiness is what she does, and a dutiful but increasingly frustrated servant attempts to serve tray after tray of canapes that no one seems to think of as finger food so much as flinger food.

The air above the stage is often full of flying hors d’oeuvres.

If you’re familiar with The Misanthrope, you can see that Ives has allowed himself to stray from his source material.

But The School for Lies is more of an homage than an adaptation.  It’s Ives’ play, not Moliere’s, although Ives makes sure to stay true to Moliere’s spirit as much as he can.  One of the ways he does that is with his use of rhyme. 

For some reason, 17th Century French theater audiences were fond of rhymed couplets.  Tragedy, satire, or farce, plays were expected to be in rhymed verse, and Moliere was good at giving audiences what they wanted.  But, Ives has noted, the form jars on modern ears.   It worked back then because, as one of his characters tells us in a short prologue, those plays were written in French, adding as if it’s a rare dialect of Klingon, which nobody speaks anymore, except the French. 

So, while The School for Lies is in verse and Ives uses rhymes, he uses them in his own fashion.  Mostly he couples them, but then sometimes he spaces them out.  He uses them internally, so that they pop up and pop out within lines, and he uses them fast and furiously, letting one come tumbling in after the other until they’re in danger of piling up, with one rhyming word rear-ending the one ahead of it (“That kook’s a duke?”).  He uses rhymes to punch up thoughts and he uses rhymes as punchlines.  Often the rhyme is the joke.  He uses rhymes to show how funny it is that some words rhyme and he uses them to show how funny it is that some words don’t (like “leisure” and “amnes-yer”). He uses rhymes to slip things like anachronisms past the audience and he uses anachronisms (for example, rhyming “hell” with “LOL”) just for the sake of the rhyme.

It’s a lot of fun, but the verbal games threaten to take the play totally out of itself.  There’s plenty of breaking of the fourth wall anyway, as characters step out of scenes to address the audience and, sometimes, to talk to each other as characters trying to figure out what the heck is going on.  The School for Lies plays very close to the line of Marxian absurdity (as in Groucho, Chico, and Harpo) but then veers away to play close to another line, that of Pythonesque absurdity from which it then makes darts at the Brechtian and Becketian, not to mention the Wodehousian and even, just to keep things shaken up, the Shakespearean.

What keeps the play grounded not exactly in reality but in a world where real human feelings matter is, besides Ives’ intelligence and self-restraint, director Walter Bobbie’s light but skillful touch as he steers things up to those lines and then back at just the right moment and by his cast.

When I first saw scenic designer John Lee Beatty’s nearly monochromatic set---sort of a cream with the faintest hint of strawberries---I thought, Well, this is pretty but maybe a little too cool for farce.  But the stage is very quickly warmed up by William Ivey Long’s crayon bright costume designs and then, and even more so, by the pure, radiant, human likability of the very talented cast, particularly his two leads.

Out of all his characters, Ives plays the fewest games with Celimene.  She’s the one he allows to speak most like herself and as herself, as opposed to as his puppet.  And Mamie Gummer makes the most of it.

As I said, Gummer glows.  Against a darker background, they wouldn’t have had to light the stage.  And she’s a remarkably intelligent and subtle actress for her age.  (She’ll turn twenty-eight in August.)  Emotions and thoughts ripple and dance lightly across her face.  Nothing is forced, nothing is false.  She makes Celimene a real person, in spite of herself, and I mean that as Gummer plays her Celimene can’t help being a decent person with real feelings despite her intention and need to be a cold-hearted and cynical manipulator of other people’s feelings.  If anything, Gummer’s performance is a little too natural, a little too sincere, and she seems to be in danger of fading out of this play to reappear on some stage across town where they’re doing Chekhov or one of Shakespeare’s more melancholy comedies.  But whenever that appears to be happening she snaps back in a second with a born comedian’s forceful determination to get her fair share of the laughs.

Hamish Linklater as Frank is never in danger of fading.   His Frank can be bitter, biting, mean, melancholy, brittle, and brutally…well…frank.  But dressed all in black, tall and goofily handsome, with a rich light barritone voice that he can use to give some of his more outrageous speeches the suggestion of song, Linklater is an infectiously good-natured and solid presence throughout.  

The supporting cast, led by the cute but surprisingly lusty Gambatese, is a match for the leads.  Holm Lee is a hearty and affable good sport as not a cross-dresser, he swears, Philante, and Alison Fraser reaches just the right note of cackling meanness without turning the scheming Arsinoe into a dyed and over-rouged Wicked Witch of Versailles.

As Celimene’s trio of ridiculous suitors, Frank Harts, Rick Holmes, and Matthew Maher are individually funny in their respective vanities. Harts’ Clitander is vain of his influence at court.  Holmes’ Oronte is vain of his (non-existent) talent as a poet.  And Maher’s Acaste is vain about his stupidity---seriously.  He is just smart enough to know he isn’t smart but he can’t think of any reason why he is enjoying success in life as a courtier and would-be lover except that being stupid must be a valuable personality trait that needs to be cultivated.  Together the three make up a riotous triptych of Vanity ad absurdum.

But special mention must go to  Steven Boyer, who doubles as Celimene’s prim, proper, and fussy butler---he’s the unfortunate bearer of the soon-to-be airborne canapes---and Frank’s not the least bit prim, proper, or fussy manservant.  Boyer steps neatly back and forth between the two roles until Ives decides to make him---one of him---aware of the predicament all the other characters have been dealing with throughout the play.  It’s a moment that brings down the house.

The School for Lies continues through May 22 at the Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th Street, New York, NY.  Click here for tickets or call (866) 811-4111 or (212) 352-3101.

Photos by Joan Marcus, provided by the Classic Stage Company.

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First time I saw a picture of Mamie Gummer I thought, “She looks like a young Meryl Streep.”  When you see her onstage, the resemblance is even more striking.   Turns out, there’s a reason for it.

Comments

[Claire Helene]

Oh man, I'd love to see this. Sounds like so much fun!

[Batocchio]

I'm sorry I can't see the production. I adore Molière, whose plays are hilarious and slyly profound when well done. The Marx Brothers is a great comparison. Seeing a brilliant production of The Miser as a teenager was a pivotal experience for me.

I also appreciate that Ives (a funny guy) credits Molière, but re-titled his play. Years ago, I saw a production of The Miser that was set in the 80s – and rewritten! Charles Keating does not stand on a desk and make a speech in Molière's play! The production had a few laughs, but no charm or soul. The playwright should have written a new play, and said "inspired by Molière," or something, rather than pissing on a great work. I've also seen a version of The Inspector General that adds a bad opening scene to the play – and this version is sold by either Sam French or Dramatist Play Service, Inc. These are grievous crimes, true, but I feel the worst for the unsuspecting souls who encounter such a bastardization and don't realize the real thing is so much better.

Then there's Bulgakov's play, Molière. The RSC filmed a version that isn't easy to come by, but I'm happy to see someone posted it on YouTube.