Controlling chaos Trinity goes over-the-top with Molière BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

As an actor supposedly quipped on his deathbed, dying is easy — comedy is hard. He might have changed his mind watching recent rehearsal hall mayhem on the top floor of Trinity Repertory Company. They made it all look as simple as getting out of breath. For a scene in The Molière Impromptu, Rachael Warren, as a daughter deprived of her lover, was having a hissy fit, literally bouncing off a wall; Cynthia Strickland, as her deadpan mother, was getting more droll the more she plotted with Andy Grotelueschen’s frantic imposter of a doctor. Between run-throughs, Christopher Bayes, who was directing the shenanigans, would leap up and flail his arms or goggle his eyes to demonstrate what he wanted more of — bad acting, over-the-top — which in this case was not only good commedia dell’arte acting, but also drop-dead funny.

Trinity is staging the premiere of The Molière Impromptu February 4 through March 13 in the large upstairs theater, complete with an ornate proscenium stage that will remind us not only of the opulence of the French court, but also the majesty that the building once commanded as a movie palace.

The play stitches together scenes from three Molière farces: The Forced Marriage, The Versailles Impromptu, and The Doctor In Spite of Himself. They were adapted and translated by Rinne Groff, a playwright familiar to Trinity audiences for The Ruby Sunrise, which premiered there last year.

The building blocks for this production were stacked up by Bayes four years ago when he was teaching at the Juilliard Drama School and staged the one-act plays in the above order. The sequence was apt for plays within a play, he felt, because at the end of The Versailles Impromptu the king graciously says that if the troupe doesn’t feel ready for what they’re performing they are welcome to do a different one.

Bayes estimates that Groff provided 25 percent of the text in The Molière Impromptu, which has Molière (Fred Sullivan Jr.) and his company in nervous and feuding preparation for a royal performance — Noises Off meets Tartuffe. The Trinity program will give no official writing credit besides the 17th-century playwright’s. They agreed that since Molière did most of the work, Groff would merely be billed as translator and Bayes as conceiving the production — and harnessing the energy of three hell-bent-for-funny farces as they threaten to fly apart.

Call it centrifugal farce.

"I thrive with the flying apart," Bayes declares over his rehearsal break dinner. "That’s the part I like the most. The chaos and the pandemonium."

He’d better. As director of movement and physical theater at the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium, he is officially an expert in theatrical chaos.

"I had a teacher once say to me that one of the hardest things do is to organize pandemonium," he recalls. "I love a pandemonium — there’s just so much life in it!" If, he adds, the actors are honestly creating it out of the integrity of their character, from where such panic would really be coming.

Bayes has had plenty of practice learning about and teaching such concern. He worked as an actor for 15 years, including seven with artistic director Garland Wright at the famed Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Cirque Du Soleil and the Big Apple Circus have learned about physical comedy from him, and he has taught at Yale School of Drama, New York University’s graduate acting program, and at numerous other colleges.

How on the money is this Trinity portrayal of Molière and his theater company? It feels pretty close, Bayes says, though it’s been "transmogrified through our twisted minds."

As he has before, he and the actors have researched extensively. Molière, as actor-director-stage-manager as well as playwright, after failing to excite Paris, toured the French provinces with his troupe for 13 years before returning in 1658 to anxiously perform before Louis XIV. Although The Amorous Doctor no longer survives, the king’s laughter during it echoed through the rest of an assured, spectacular career for Molière. He transformed the traditional bufoonery of Italian commedia dell’arte into farce that developed characters’ social foibles and was truer to life.

"He raised it to a different level," the director says. "He added a kind of poetry to it that runs alongside the sort of knockabout and slapstick elements of the commedia. He added pathos, the tragic element to it that makes it into a whole new form — at that time tragedy was considered to be a much higher art form, closer to like a ballet for us. Comedy at that time was thought to have less value as an art form."

But that was then and this is now. The slapstick humor of the three farces’ broad comic style needs some real-life panic for leavening, thus the advantage of Groff’s text transitions and Bayes’s directorial overview.

"In order to make it funny, you have to blend styles a little bit, because it’s not an historical document," Bayes points out. "We know that his company was and continues to be one of the most famous comic companies in history. So how do you find that feeling in the 21st century?"

If all the rehearsal hall apprehension and chaos remains lets-pretend, Trinity audiences will soon find out.