Now that we’re living in the #MeToo age, there’s a great big world of fun to be had with Molière, of all people. Lucie Tiberghien, founding artistic director of New York City’s Molière in the Park, looks to be leading the way with her streaming The School for Wives, which features—get this for an inspiration—an all-women cast.
That directorial plot ploy alone—Tiberghien also directs—turns the 17th-century French playwright on his head. Or maybe, more precisely, Tiberghien’s notion turns Molière fully right side up. Molière—ever the scourge of foolish, women-dismissing men—never retreated from sending out a dolt of a certain age with a lust for some young thing who already had her eye on a swain of her own age. Eventually, the lovers end up together, of course, and the old goat ends up with meringue on his face.
The School for Wives has Arnolphe (Tonya Pinkins) thinking he’s kept Agnès (Mirirai Sithole) locked up and innocent so that he can wed her when the time is right. How innocent is she? She’s so innocent she thinks babies are pulled from the ear. That’s innocent, all right, but she’s not so inexorably innocent that she doesn’t catch the eye of roving Horace (Kaliswa Brewster) and fall for him lock, stock and baguette. Needless to say, he returns the ardor. Oh, those ever romantic French citizens.
Finding himself foiled, Arnolphe dispatches retainers Alain (Corey Tazmania) and Georgette (Tamara Sevunts) to help him get unfoiled. He also hopes to attain desperately sought succor from friends Chrysalde (Cristina Pitter) and Enrique (Carolyn Michelle Smith, and a Notary (Smith, doubling). More than that, he thinks to subordinate Agnès once and for all by schooling her as a potential wife with a how-to guide that includes maxims setting out how a woman must obediently maintain her supposedly inferior place.
That for sure isn’t what develops over the five brief acts that Molière allots his iambic-pentameters rhyming couplets—every last one gracefully, neatly, and mockingly translated by Richard Wilbur, the premier gentilhomme of Molière translators. That definitely isn’t what transpires as set out by a Parisian actor-playwright who was thinking about women’s liberation long before the term came into vogue. Do keep in mind, of course, that for him a woman’s beneficial marriage remained the ultimate goal.
Tiberghien submits her School for Wives in what is becoming the familiar online way during our theater-deprived, Zoom-dominated time. The actors, though maskless, are properly distanced socially. Wherever they are at diverse points on the globe, they’re videoed and superimposed over common atmospheric backgrounds. The sets here are courtesy of Lina Younes and animated by Emily Rawson. Arnolphe and cohorts often look as if they’re congregating on New York City streets where artistic mash-ups of brownstones prevail. There’s one rather delectable sequence where Arnolphe is looking through an aquarium where cartoon fish go about their business.
As for masculinizing Pinkins and the others playing men, the tactic is penciled mustaches and, in some instances, goatees. Perhaps the add-ons aren’t applied with grease pencils but are concocted of mascara. Otherwise, the cast members appear in colorful costumes provided by Ari Fulton, who, since all cast stalwarts appear in close-ups, has emphasized head gear. They’re lighted by Marie Yokoyama.
The seven members of the ensemble are all having a grand go at their roles, never caring to venture—in the instances of those playing men—beyond the more elementary attacks on their character’s psychological composition. This is far from a besetting sin, as Molière himself was never interested in traveling far from stereotypes prevalent in his society. These are types, it has to be conceded, always prevalent in most societies.
Pinkins, as Arnolphe, exuberantly leads them all. It may be that she and the other quasi-cross-dressers are relishing the opportunity to send up men they’ve encountered over the years who’ve behaved toward them in annoying Molière-like manner. The only time the performers get in trouble—and this is more Tiberghien’s problem than theirs—is when they’ve been instructed to talk over each other. These patches are hardly improvements on the sparkling Molière/Wilbur couplets.
N.B.: The production comes in collaboration with the French Institute Alliance Française, which means French subtitles, a welcome opportunity for English speakers who speak French to bone up on vocabulary.
The School for Wives was livestreamed October 24, 2020, and will remain online through October 28. Information and streaming: moliereinthepark.org
