Timeless fun 2nd Story unleashes Tartuffe’s juicy hilarity BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Tartuffe By Molière, adapted by Richard Wilbur. Directed by Ed Shea. With Will Jamison, Paula Faber, John Michael Richardson, Rae Mancini, Amy Thompson, Walter Perez, Bob Colonna, Brian DiBello, and Marilyn Meardon. At 2nd Story Theatre through December 12.

If you think you’ve seen Tartuffe, think again. The popular Molière comedy gets rendered frequently, but rarely is all the juicy hilarity wrung out as thoroughly as 2nd Story Theatre is accomplishing. Not since Trinity Rep’s legendary 1984 production has every character been lifted off the page and slapped into life with such howling success.

In both instances, poet Richard Wilbur’s verse adaptation is much of the fun, a parallel English verse universe to Molière’s rhymed original. The 2nd Story staging brings things even more up to date than Wilbur did, who dispensed with the playwright’s creaky deus ex machina of having King Louis XIV appear in the last scene to save the day. We are in the hippie-dippy days of the 1960s, complete with orange shag carpet and even gaudier clothing, when salvation was just a guru away.

Tartuffe (Will Jamison) is an impoverished religious advisor taken into the house of the wealthy Orgon (John Michael Richardson) — who is in turn taken in by the rascal. The playwright insisted that he was satirizing religious hypocrisy rather than religion, but let’s hope he got as much devilish glee as we do from his poking fun at faux piety.

The title character doesn’t step into the play for a long while, not until his effects on others loom large. Even more cleverly, Molière keeps the actions and reactions of everyone realistic. Everybody points out the obvious to Orgon, that it’s easy to feign godliness, and so on. Orgon chills us as he cooly rebuffs all objections, demonstrating the limits of being logical to irrational people. How delicious then when Tartuffe enters, Bible in hand, looking cap à pied like an apple-cheeked youth at our door in black suit, thin black tie, and white socks, rapping to save our soul.

Shakespeare had his cunning fools and Molière his sharp-tongued servants. None of the latter were armed with more insolent admonitions than the outspoken Dorine, who Paula Faber gives a nasal Cranston whine and more saucy nerve than a tumbrel of tarts. (Costume designer Ron Cesario gives her a very practical white vinyl apron to match her cap and boots and Courèges time-setting.) "To hear him talk — and he talks all the time," she complains of the pious houseguest, "there’s nothing one can do that’s not a crime."

As Orgon, in lime-green jacket and crucifix pendant, Richardson provides a straight-faced earnestness that underscores the poor dupe’s sincerity. Rae Mancini gives his wife, Elmire, a world-weary cynicism leavened by a readily prompted sense of humor. That bemused Gallic reserve is the perfect pose to maintain, even through Tartuffe’s full-court seduction press — she’s all the more thrown off balance when her husband won’t believe that his God-fearing friend would do such a thing. Orgon continues to insist that their daughter Marianne (Amy Thompson) be wedded to Tartuffe instead of to the young man she loves, Valere (Walter Perez). We get an entertaining scene in which the two show themselves to be as self-righteously pig-headed as Orgon, each refusing to admit that they’re wrong.

Jamison is a restrained Tartuffe, providing ostensible sincerity to match Orgon’s, not needing to let us see the slyness lurking, since we know it’s there. Holding that back makes Tartuffe’s dropping his mask toward the end frightening instead of just ironic, as we see him through poor Orgon’s eyes, the scales piled at his feet.

Under the deft direction of Ed Shea, other characters who stand out include Uncle Cleante, whose sage advice is regularly ignored by Orgon, despite Bob Colonna pouring on the charm and intelligence. This situation needs a hothead when others are casually assessing Tartuffe’s latest outrages, and Brian DiBello supplies that energy as Marianne’s brother Damis. In framing set pieces, Marilyn Meardon sweeps on in imperious glory as Orgon’s zealot mother, even more impervious to evidence against the charlatan than is her son. Wilbur’s witty prize-winning translation/adaptation, or however you want to credit it, should step out and take a bow at the end.

Written in 1669, this is a play for our times too. After all, we live in an age when our dearly departing attorney general can have partially nude statues in the Department of Justice demurely draped and the resulting concern is directed at the wrong sort of boobs. As Molière would have us never forget, the pious we shall always have with us.