Theater: A God of Common Sense

Tartuffe is a black, bitter and biting comedy. At Lincoln Center's off-Washington Square theater, it is being presented as a broad and bouncy farce. Since this repertory group is a learn-while-you-earn company, the pay-as-you-go spectator should not be unduly surprised at still another miscarriage of esthetic justice. The amusing thing about an endeavor of this sort is that it flatters playgoers that they are breasting the cultural deeps, while the production itself merely dips its toes in a dramatic masterpiece.

Fortunately, a toe-deep sampling of Molière is worth a skullful of most playwrights. Molière was the god of common sense. While tragedy moves from sanity toward madness, comedy moves from madness toward sanity. In his pride, the tragic hero overreaches human limits and dies. In his folly, the comic hero ludicrously pounds his head against those limits, is brought to his senses and lives. It is difficult to know which is the less comforting end—death or self-knowledge, and that is one reason why great tragedy and great comedy are so close.

Since genius, like a celebrity, commands recognition even in dark glasses, all of this is present, if not clear, in the Lincoln Center production. The man who exists to be brought to his senses in Tartuffe is Orgon (Larry Gates), a complacently typical bourgeois. Orgon courts innocence by association, and his mind's eye is so weak that it persistently mistakes the appearance of sanctity for the assurance of goodness. Tartuffe (Michael O'Sullivan), his chosen saint-in-residence, is a pious fraud and an unparalleled hypocrite.

More significantly, he is the stinking essence of the world's wisdom—that a crime is no crime unless one gets caught. He could con the forked tongue out of a snake. Under Tartuffe's spell, Orgon permits the disruption of his household, disinherits his son, signs away all his property, affiances his daughter to Tartuffe, and sweeps his wife (Salome Jens) into Tartuffe's sweaty-palmed lechery. This is madness, as the superbly sane Molière knew. And like an enchanted healer from some pre-psychoanalytic age, Molière devotes his play to making Orgon grow up to the age of reason.

While the play has been deservedly well-cast, the fantastic acting creation of the evening is Michael O'Sullivan's Tartuffe. It is appropriate, if amazing, to say that the ham in the actor reveals the pig in mankind. Sparing no excess of speech, gesture or mien, he performs a surrealistic wedding dance of malice and humor. Almost equal praise accrues to Richard Wilbur, the poet. Despite a slight trace of melodic monotony, his springy, intelligent couplets turn Molière's French into speakably idiomatic English.