18th-century E!

Trinity accredits The School for Scandal

by Bill Rodriguez

THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL. By Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Directed by Michael Baron. Musical direction and original music by Richard Cumming. Set design by Lee Savage. Costumes by Marilyn Salvatore with Heidi Bochain, Allison Brabee, Hanna Chung, Elsie Hong, Yuli Hsu, Stacy Murphy, Shannon Quigley, Chris Viggiano, and Heather Williams. Lighting by D.M. Wood. Sound by Peter Hurowitz. With Stephen Berenson, Angela Brazil, Timothy Crowe, Richard Cumming, William Damkoehler, Janice Duclos, Mauro Hantman, Lian-Marie Holmes, Phyllis Kay, Andy MacDonald, Barbara Meek, Alex Platt, Fred Sullivan Jr., Rachael Warren, Rose Weaver, Dan Welch, and Stephan Wolfert. At Trinity Repertory Company, through October 8.

Timothy Crowe and Rachael Warren

Trinity Rep has hauled Richard Brinsley Sheridan out of the 18th century on an 18-wheeler. The troupe is famous for putting the pedal to the metal of classical comedy, whether removing Twelfth Night to Margaritaville or swinging The Miser from a grid of old chandeliers. Now Sheridan's gossip-propelled 1777 comedy of manners, The School for Scandal, turns up in a gilt-and-white, glass-blocked 21st-century penthouse, its fashionably veneered inhabitants garbed for something between a runway and Mars. Fans of period style and powdered wigs will not approve. But Michael Baron's careering production, decorated with high-punk fashion and Cole Porter songs, proves not only that backbiting is as durable as love or politics but that Sheridan, whether dressed in mothballs or leather, remains vigorous and funny.

Lady Sneerwell, having been injured in her youth by gossip, presides over a salon whose raison d'être is tattle. This irritates the good but gullible Sir Peter Teazle, whose impressionable young wife has been sucked into Sneerwell's circle. Meanwhile the brothers Surface, seemingly upstanding schemer Joseph and generous libertine Charles, are vying for the affections of Sir Peter's ward, Maria. When the Surfaces' rich Uncle Oliver returns from a long sojourn in Calcutta, everyone's true colors -- from black to green to true-blue -- show. Meanwhile, as the characters' names -- including Mrs. Candour and Sir Benjamin Backbite -- indicate, Sheridan is out to skewer the artifice, hypocrisy, and lust for scandal of supposedly genteel society.

Not so blatantly bawdy as his forebears Congreve and Wycherly, Sheridan does in the end bow to the "sentiment" and morality that were the standard of his day. But at Trinity, his tidily ennobling ending, in which the recovering wastrel gets the girl, goes up in smoke along with period style. The play's epilogue is spoken by a barely reformed Lady Teazle, in a short baby-doll dress and mod tights, as the newly wed Charles and Maria, their contemporary costumes shed, cavort like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on top of a wedding cake.

Baron first directed The School for Scandal as his MFA thesis at Trinity Rep Conservatory, and set designer and recent Rhode Island School of Design graduate Lee Savage has been an apprentice to Trinity and Broadway designer Eugene Lee. So the production, which also features some truly outré fashions created by students of the RISD Apparel Department in collaboration with Trinity costume designer Marilyn Salvatore, represents another example of the troupe's surprisingly successful program of turning the store over to the kids. (Amanda Dehnert, not yet 30 and a Trinity Rep Conservatory grad, is associate artistic director of the theater and has helmed striking stagings of material ranging from My Fair Lady to Othello.)

Baron and Savage, given veteran professional actors and a few bucks, do not disappoint. Savage's French Provincial penthouse set, with its rogue elevator to facilitate the play's numerous entrances and exits, is lavish and workable. Baron runs the characters, including one on a walker, up, down, and around its sweeping stair, balcony bridge, and white-shag-carpeted central playing space. The elevator, its lighted buttons displaying less logic than the characters, feeds some clever business. And given the aerial view afforded entering visitors, the fourth-act "screen scene," one of the most famous in classical comedy, here takes on an almost Marx Brothers dimension. Of course, the scene itself is almost upstaged by Lady Teazle's costume for it, a brief ensemble dominated by a polka-dotted Twister game-board cape under which she rigidly lays herself down to be seduced.

In an ideal world, all these shenanigans would be juxtaposed by sophisticated acting replete with some of the flourishes of the period. But that is not the rough-and-tumble Trinity style. Rachael Warren, as Lady Teazle, comes closest: whether clad as Carmen Miranda or in a sheer ruffled sausage casing, Warren keeps her petulant, flirtatious dignity. Her scenes with Timothy Crowe's sadsack, exasperated parent of an older spouse are not only funny but oddly sweet. Fred Sullivan Jr., sporting an Indian caftan over a big uniformed belly, has a lot of fun donning the various disguises of Sir Oliver, from Irish poor relation to moneylender; his kibitzing delight that nephew Charles, however disreputable, will not part with his uncle's picture is particularly irresistible. And chez Sneerwell, the gossipy set, decked out in turbans, bangles, and leopard, puts forward a more vulgar, nouveau riche face. No one really attempts the sly, flowery posturing of the era. But if this is not a School for Scandal that draws you into its time, it amply demonstrates that dalliance, dish, and a distinctively dressed demi-monde are timeless.