Repertory: The Three Musketeers & George Dcmdin

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The Théàtre de la Cité of Lyons and its director, Roger Planchon, have scandalized French traditionalists by taking gross liberties with the classics to give them contemporary credence. A U.S. audience is more likely to feel the faint shock of cultural lag. Freshly attuned to the theater of tribal intimacy, with its skin-to-skin actor-audience confrontations and its stereophonic barrage of sound, a playgoer may be startled to see a stylized drama in which each line is pruned, each gesture sculptured, each scene framed.

Appearing at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, the company opened with two plays that are blithe of spirit and scant of substance: Planchon's adaptation of Dumas' The Three Musketeers and Moliere's George Dandin. Musketeers is a nightlong spoof of the romantic spirit. The production presents Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D'Artagnan as meddlesome buffoons, a quartet of Gallic Ritz Brothers. In one sequence, neon-lit ropes arc the stage like tracer bullets while the cast ruefully announces that it has lost the threads of the plot.

George Dandin, is the decorous tale of a wealthy farmer who is all but cuckolded and constantly humiliated by his upper-class minx of a wife. The only novelty provided in its performance is an acting style that is resolutely anti-psychological. Each role is lustrously burnished; none is probed. No transistorized translation is offered with these plays, and to those who lack French, the language may sound like an LP record played at 78 r.p.m.