The Theater: Famous Troupe in Manhattan

Le Bourgeois Sentilhomme (by Molière) was the opening bill of a momentous Broadway engagement; for the first time in its illustrious 275-year history, the Comédie Françise was performing (in French) on U.S. soil. It was fitting that the Comédie should raise its first Broad way curtain on something by France's most famous playwright; it was, on the whole, wise that it chose from Molière something so relatively familiar and so lightly entertaining as Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Far from the great Molière of Le Misanthrope, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme is indeed not only broad Molière, but also broad comedy. Its picture of the rich, gullible upstart M. Jourdain, who desires, with the most impassioned fatuousness, to live like—and among—persons of quality, is a sort of satiric-strip characterization. There is a delightful absurdity about him, whether in the family scenes, or with the lackeys he yells for "just to see if they heard him," or in his famous enraptured discovery that he has been talking prose for 40 years. In his pursuit of the graces and his groping for quality, he employs a battalion of instructors, only to go on dancing like an elephant and fencing like a paralytic. For his monomaniacal follies, he is everywhere guffawed at and everlastingly gulled.

Molière's joking is broad, but his character sense is broad-bottomed; somehow, though M. Jourdain's head swims with wild delusions, his clumsy feet stay on the ground. And the Comédie Franchise's Louis Seigner keeps him that way, makes him seem human while remaining idiotic, and so childish as to be likable. Actor Seigner's would-be gentleman becomes a solid center round which revolve a succession of sideshows.

The sideshow nature of the play* makes possible a diversity of insights into the Comédie's methods of production. If much is traditional and even ritualistic, very little seems petrified. In view of interspersed high slapstick of dancing and singing and fencing masters, of ostentatious banquet scenes and staircase serenades, of a Turkish fandango suggesting fraternal-order shenanigans. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme becomes a varied though lengthy evening. Despite its measure of real low comedy, it retains a kind of ballet air. There is something ceremonious as well as earthy in its laughter, and a pinch of period charm in all its horseplay.

Founded in 1680 by Louis XIV as a state-subsidized actors' cooperative, the Comédie Franchise has been called France's first nationalized industry. It is the most ancient theatrical organization in the world.