Sunday Evening in Central Park: Extant Arts Company presents Molière's "The School for Wives" at the Mineral Springs

This evening we had the pleasure of seeing the Extant Arts Company's utterly charming and extremely funny production of Molière's The School for Wives with a cast filled with skilled comic performers, led by the rubber-faced clown David Berent as Arnolphe.

Directed by Greg Taubman, this fast-moving adaptation, translated so gorgeously by Ranjit Bolt (first produced by London's The Peter Hall Company in 1997 under the direction of the great Peter Hall) that it makes Molière's rhymed verse seem totally natural and possessed of wonderful pleasures in English, especially when employed by the expert nine actors in the Extant Arts' ensemble tonight.

While the audience sat on a giant gray outcropping of rock (boulder? we should have paid more attention in geology), the characters appeared in a kind of natural stage shut off from the hubbub in the nearby Sheep Meadow, Le Pain Quotidian, and other parts of Central Park on a weekend. This was a great setting for what proved to be a witty, laugh-out-loud performance of Molière's comedy.

Arnolphe is a man with a pathological fear of being cuckolded and an outsized contempt for husbands who are cuckholded. Feeling that a wife who's an ignorant idiot would be less likely to stray, he takes an orphaned girl as his ward and places her in an isolated house without any real education at all. Arnolphe plans to marry Agnes, whom he thinks will be too stupid to cheat on him because it just wouldn't have ever crossed her simple mind.

Unfortunately for Arnolphe, Agnes -- delightfully played by a sprightly, well-cast Jocelyn Vammer -- meets Horace, the confident, handsome son of his old friend, who doesn't know the girl he pines after is Arnolphe's intended bride. Arnolphe can't compete with youth, passion and (it seems) true love; Agnes is not as stupid as Arnolphe thinks -- the playwright seems to be saying no woman could be -- and, well, as in any farce, complications ensue.

Although there's plenty of wit in the lines of gorgeous text -- we'd thought Richard Wilbur had done a nice verse translation, but Ranjit Bolt's is truly splendid, allowing the actor to move with ease through the rhyming dialogue -- and lots of amazing physical comedy on the part of the principals, especially David Berent (as the play went on, he got sweatier and more disheveled. That was partly the result of the heat and humidity, but though the actor may have been more physically uncomfortable, this only added to the audience's fun at seeing Arnolphe get his comeuppance and perhaps learn his lesson.

Also amazingly adept at physical comedy were the acrobatic and very funny pair playing the married couple who are Arnolphe's servants and ineptly in charge of keeping Agnes away from the world's temptations. Nika Ezell Pappas as Georgette and Zane Johnston as Alain work together, and with the other actors, in precision that is as taut as their actions are loose-limbed and their expressions are comically and swiftly varied. They add a lot to the fun of this show, which is staged without a slack moment by director Greg Taubman.

Molière’s comedies seem to work as well as Shakespeare's in outdoor productions -- we also really enjoyed the Bent Quill Players' A Doctor in Spite of Himself last year in Prospect Park -- but a lot depends on comic timing and natural delivery of the lines, originally written in seventeenth century French. We had both in the Extant Arts Company's performance.

David Berent makes the sexist, arrogant fool Arnolphe into someone totally loveable, and that trick may be the key to making the unfolding events in The School for Wives a pleasure to watch. He avoids the mistake of turning Arnolphe into a buffoon; Berent's character is extremely complex and ultimately sympathetic. It's hard not to feel pity for his unfolding nightmare as he not only has to witness his own horns about to appear, he's actually obliged to facilitate his own downfall and help Horace, played with somewhat dim but noble fortitude and vigor by Paulo Quiros.

As the worldly, philosophical Chrysalde, Andy James Hoover -- arguing with Arnolphe at every turn as Chrysalde favors a sophisticated, tolerant approach to being cuckolded -- delivers some of the play's most trenchant social critiques.

The others in the cast -- Yvvone Cone as the notary, Jeffrey Coyne as Oronte, Fernando Gamarra as Enrique -- are mostly there to move the plot along, but they manage to imbue their characters with enough individuality and personality so that this School for Wives seems a real, if highly stylized, world.

During the second act, after a short intermission -- very welcome for some of us with certain issues, and a rarity in outdoor productions -- it began to rain. First a drop that you couldn't be sure was anything, then a drizzle, then more steadily. But we were determined even if we got soaked, we weren't leaving as long as the play went on. And not one audience member moved as the rain fell.

Fortunately, it was a short passing shower that faded within about ten or twelve minutes, but a downpour couldn't have dampened our enthusiasm for this jewel-like interpretation of Molière, produced by Kate Stahl, with luscious costume design by Arnold Buseo. Katey Howett was stage manager and Torrence O. Browne production assistant. By the comedy's inevitable and satisfying conclusion, what we'd seen felt magical.

"Beneath the facade of a seventeenth-century farce," one critic wrote of The School for Wives, "there is an inevitable and quite extraordinary contemporary resonance about male-female relationships and a multiplicity of interpretive possibilities." Extant Arts Company made those possibilities come alive in this beautiful production, and we are really grateful we got to witness it.

Friday Night in Park Slope: Piper Theatre presents "The Miser" outdoors at the Old Stone House

Tonight in Park Slope, we saw a phenomenal and extraordinarily professional production of Molière's The Miser put on by the Piper Theatre outside the Old Stone House. Cleverly adapted and directed by Welker White, this was a remarkably funny and relevant version of this classic farce, updating the satiric comedy to the 21st century.

We see a lot of outdoor theater in parks around the city (avoiding the big productions at Central Park's Delacorte Theatre, which we know are great, due to our allergy to waiting on line). Most have to begin early because they have no artificial lighting and you want the audience to be able to see the action. The Piper Theatre's high production values gave them the advantage of professional lighting, so tonight's performance didn't begin until after 8:30 p.m. (making our dumbphone camera kind of useless).

The lighting was only one example of the top-notch production values on display tonight: a highly effective sound system, a real inside-theater set, and the effect of watching a play indoors. While this takes away some of the fun of having the action going around all around you, it's closer to the experience of being in a real theater.

Welker White, the director, has worked as a film, stage and TV actress with some of the top directors and although she only last year received her MFA in Directing from Brooklyn College, we're pretty sure this belated academic credential was didn't mean she could have taught some of the graduate courses she'd taken at BC. Tonight's production was evidence that she's already an experienced and accomplished director.

Particularly brilliant was her choice, in adapting Molière, to combine both contemporary elements (Clèante's iPod and addiction to fashion blogs are just two examples) and those from the play's 1668 debut (when the playwright himself played the title character, Harpagon) -- and then adding just a soupçon of funny fourth-wall-breaking references, like Harpagon's inveighing against the noisy gangsta teens in the playground and the pampered Park Slope tots "and their lesbian mothers." If it sounds like it wouldn't cohere, you're wrong: everything worked perfectly in this well-oiled machine.

Which is not to say that the play felt slick. Still, this felt like one of the few outdoor plays we've seen that was seamlessly ready for prime-time. For one thing, the lead actor, Damian Young (Harpagon), was utterly in control all the time. The role is a tricky one; despite his almost inhuman greed and utter disregard for the feelings of his son and daughter, much less anyone else, he's got to appear simultaneously a ridiculous buffoon, an instrument of real (if banal) evil, and at least somewhat sympathetic, if not endearing. In his modulated virtuoso performance, Young strikes all the right notes.

He's helped by a very strong supporting cast, especially stage veteran Jan Leslie Harding as Frosine, the matchmaker -- here played as a combination of the unctuous real estate broker and the kind of artsy older woman who puts a pencil in her hairbun -- who serves as Harpagon's foil, enabler, ally and manipulator. The unfortunate kids of the miser who are being kept from their true loves by his plans for mercenary marriages for the entire family are played with wonderful flair by Todd C. Bartels as the trend-obsessed Clèante and Hannah Jane McMurray as the hapless, romantic Elise.

David Bachman probably gets the most laughs as LaFleche and especially as Jacques, the miser's coachman cum cook. With the exaggerated French accent of a children's cartoon character, he is such an adept physical comedian that he comes close to stealing his scenes. But the other actors do manage to match him, and the laughs keep coming quickly, the key to a high-functioning farce.

But all the actors here were memorable: Gilbert Cruz as both Simon and a comic-"Law and Order" style police commissioner; Zac Hoogendyk as an earnest yet sarcastic Valere; Alice Winslow as the sweet but distracted Mariane; Tom Tammi as a hearty and jovial Anselme, and the younger actors playing the miser's put-upon, despondent, passive-aggressive servants.

The Piper Theatre production of The Miser is not just a highly entertaining, very funny farce, but it also kept us thinking about our present economic situation, like the line that asks who's worse: the borrowers who take out enormous loans they can't possibly pay back or the greedy lenders who give them the money with the complete awareness that these people will default?

In the end, the old curmudgeonly miser here and his children and their loves and everyone else get a joyously happy ending, made more even upbeat by the cast's boisterous final musical number. If only the greed of the past decades would end so happily! We're grateful to the Piper Theatre and the Old Stone House for giving us this wonderful evening in the theater.