First a few words about Alexis Piron, who wrote La Metromanie, the comedy from which David Ives has adapted Metromaniacs for the Red Bull Theater. Let’s start with a question: Does the name Alexis Piron mean anything to you? Not to me, either, not up until my entering the Duke on 42nd Street.
Perhaps Alexis Piron should have been familiar to me, but it was only in the theater that I learned he was a 17th century French playwright very popular at the Comédie-Francaise until the early 19th century who doesn’t seem to have maintained his acclaim. Certainly none of his works are listed for the 2017-18 Comédie-Francaise season.
Piron was born in Dijon in 1689, which is to say 16 years after Moliére died, and when he got himself to Paris hoping to become a belles lettres man, he eventually graduated from copyist to a Comédie-Francaise playwright composing in the ultra-popular Moliére mode.
He was—as he apparently demonstrated when he was active and definitely as Ives presents him—a rhyming-couplet dandy. With a lovable twist: As the words “la metromanie”—more or less meaning rhyming fools, as were apparently rife during the period—suggest, he was not only joining the compulsive couplet-renderers but having a hearty joke on them.
It was a literary stance that didn’t necessarily endear him to peers. It’s not an inaccurate guess that La Metromanie served as the single most blunt affront that rendered his contemporaries (count Voltaire among them) out of joint. Put another way, “So could it be this unrelieved affront/ Was at the time considered his most blunt?”
From where I sat at the Metromaniacs performance, Piron retains his ability to test the patience of a spectator, whether a competing poet or not. To my way of thinking, the rhymes coming at patrons from set designer James Noone’s version of an upper-class drawing room could either be taken in, and on, as endlessly delightful or unceasingly dizzying. They’re like buckshot fired from an assault-rifle.
In a program note, Ives—fast establishing himself as today’s Richard Wilbur for his translations of various French favorites—reports that he was first drawn to the minor(?) Piron classic by its title alone. Further inebriated by it on an initial reading, he decided to have a go at Piron’s send-up of, at the time, the adored poems by, supposedly, a provincial poetess called Mademoiselle Malcrais de La Vigne but actually by Parisian scamp Paul Desforges-Maillard.
As Ives delved into his version, he admits he took enough liberties so that his Metromanics has to be classed as a genuine adaptation and not a strict translation.
Here then is the tale of aspiring young poet Damis (Ives veteran Conrad Conn) about to present a new rhymed-couplet play while friend Dorante (Noah Averbach-Katz), longs for poetry-swooning Lucille (Ives veteran Amelia Pedlow) and while Dorante valet Mondor (Adam Green), passing himself off as Dorante while also narrating, cozies up to Lucille’s maid Lisette (Dina Thomas), who in her turn is pretending to be Lucille.
A head-spinning plot, no? As Bertolt Brecht says in The Rise and Fall of Mahagony, “Oh don’t ask why, oh don’t ask why?” The simple answer is: because this is French farce featuring a satirical target not necessarily in synch with today’s prosaic concerns. Indeed, the rapid-paced Metromaniacs chicanery can be so confusing that Ives has one of these compulsive rhymers say something that must reflect his honest response to the assignment he’s given himself: “There are still some plot points I don’t understand.”
Amen to that and to those buckshot couplets that had me tired out by the end of the short first act. Others around me (many of them evidently appreciative students) were visibly and audibly beguiled and remained that way through the short second act as well. Or put another way, “While others seated near me were enthralled/I began to feel a little mauled.”
This is not to blame director Michael Kahn, a longtime expert at this sort of farrago, or his cast, including Adam Lefevre as Lucille’s addled father, Francalou, and Peter Kybart as Damis’ conniving uncle Baliveau. Given the baroque—if not rococo by 1736—material, there may be no other way to go about acting in the dashed thing. And they’re all braced for the challenge.
One wily Piron turn of events (or is it Ives at his most inventive?) occurs at the very end. There’ll be no tattling here, but a last Francalou zinger aimed at the 18th-century metromaniacs does hover over the frenzied action like a comic drone. Ticket buyers can and do leave The Metromaniacs laughing.
The Metromaniacs opened April 22, 2018, at The Duke on 42nd Street and runs through May 26. Tickets and information: redbulltheater.com
