'Bungle' along with Molière at the Long Wharf

If you have ever wanted to party in Versailles, all you have to do is find a way to get to the Long Wharf Theater. This theater is certainly no replica of a royal court, with fewer men in tights, dimmer walls, and just your everyday theater seats courteously nipping you in the bud every time you stand to let someone squeeze by.

COURTESY LONG WHARF THEATER There sure were some hot guys in Molière's time. Yow!

In spite of this lack of courtliness in the Long Wharf itself, its newest production, Molière's The Bungler, is not merely faithful to the text, but also to the court setting in which the text was originally performed.

The base of the set is a makeshift wooden stage, without any varnish or weather seal to gloss it. The audience surrounds it on three sides, as it thrusts out from a bare wooden wall with a few doors cut into it. For set changes, various characters and stagehands draw the backdrops out on a line running across the stage. Such plain and wooden apparati do not seem to provide the grounds for anything except termite infestation. This bare set, however, creates a necessary balance for the mass of intricate events it must carry.

Most of the load that this rickety stage must bear concerns the troubles of Lelie, a young aristocrat, who pleads with his crafty servant, Mascarille, to devise a plan to help him wed a gypsy named Celine. Lelie cannot marry her at the Messina city hall because he must first buy her freedom. His evil father also forbids the marriage, since he believes Celine is too low in rank to merit marrying into the family. His servant devises many intricate schemes that are often spoiled by Lelie himself, who has a notable deficiency of wit.

These schemes become plays within the play, so most of the action in the play is deceptive. The honest set then provides firm support to so much trickery. An extravagant stage would have also made the play too sweet, since this rich performance stands on its own as a cake with no need of extra frosting.

Despite this set's modest appearance, it bares it all. It has no inhibitions about letting every audience member see into the wings. The audience can then spy on the actors preparing for their entrances and see the props waiting to be carried on stage. Mascarille even shows everyone all the trapdoors built into the stage. These are not huge bloopers or a result of severe mismeasurements of the wood, but open up the hidden world surrounding a play. This truthfulness makes one feel as if one knows all of the truth in a play so concerned with lying—a feeling of complete knowledge over all the tricks of stage magicians that Louis XIV would have loved.

The actors make use of many archaic performance styles, which current productions often avoid in their struggle for realism. They dare to take advantage of this play's verse form, stressing the rhymes at the end of each line in a way most modern actors avoid or obscure. With no fear of Molière's text staging a coup upon their own work, the cast plays with the language.

Molière's theater experience has deep roots in commedia dell'arte, and the actors acknowledge important aspects of that performance style with improvisation and exaggerated physical expressions. These deeply ingrained elements of court theater enhance the feeling that one is attending a play at court. These gestures even allow the actors to sneak beneath the text, and show the audience the subtleties and other intentions they might have, drawing out real emotion out of the performances rather than merely affectation.

Each actor's willingness to play with the text determines the quality of his or her performance. Jeff Weiss (Mascarille) has the courage to imitate the style of pop television and film characters when he delivers such trite lines as "I'll be back." J.R. Horne (Anselme) has a wonderful sense of comic timing and no qualms about expanding on the text. His physical expression certainly derives from the commedia dell'arte style, as he makes his search in his pocket for a purse look as if he was masturbating. Jeremy Shamos (Lelie) also expresses his character's overwhelming passion through exaggerated movements and tones, but his efforts rarely delve deeper than affectation.

Theater

the Bungler By Molière Directed by Doug Hughes Sept. 20 to Oct. 22 Long Wharf Theater $15

The minimalist set may initially trick the audience into believing their omniscience could threaten to take the magic out of theater. It does just the opposite instead, since letting the audience into the stage world has a price: they no longer have immunity to its devices.

Thus, the audience joins into the court life by playing along with the characters, scheming along with the fraudulent, acting as idiotic as the fool, and even being cast into the action. The only part this play doesn't allow the audience to perform is its traditional role as mere bodies filling numbered seats.

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