Cheap thrills The Miser pays off at the ART BY CAROLYN CLAY
	The Miser By Molière. Adapted by David Ball. Directed by Dominique Serrand. Set by Riccardo Hernandez. Costumes by Sonya Berlovitz. Lighting by Marcus Dilliard. Sound by David Remedios. With Steven Epp, Stephen Cartmell, Sarah Agnew, Will LeBow, Natalie Moore, Bern Budd, Karen MacDonald, Remo Airaldi, and Nathan Keepers. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through July 18.

The Miser, as rendered by the American Repertory Theatre in association with Théâtre de la Jeune Lune, is stingy with merriment. Rage, bitterness, and scabrous, expertly physical comedy are doled out in a profusion that, had they monetary value, would infuriate to apoplexy the skinflint antihero of Molière’s 1668 comedy L’avare, which director Dominique Serrand characterizes as a "brutal and mean play" fueled by Molière’s anger at the censorship imposed on Tartuffe and Don Juan. Serrand makes a good argument for his argument, pulling off a production that exposes both the play’s ugliness and its commedia dell’arte underpinnings. It isn’t that the staging isn’t funny; steered by Steven Epp’s explosive wraith of a Harpagon, it is bruisingly, scatologically so. But in Serrand’s 21st-century rendition of this 17th-century classic, the comedy is more vulgar and vicious than vivacious.

The lights go up on a ghostly gray, starkly empty palatial setting by Riccardo Hernandez inspired by the crumbling manses of old Havana. (Homeowner Harpagon, it’s clear, does not shell out for maintenance.) The only furnishing is a chair fastened like a brooch halfway up a water-stained wall. A transparent tarp plugs the gaping hole in the ceiling, and another separates the audience from the gauzy post-coital action on stage where the miser’s daughter, Élise, and her secret paramour, the steward Valère, are straightening their rag-tag period togs. The requisite five doors of classical farce are on view but go nowhere in particular. Most of the residents of Harpagon’s household (though not its visitors) are dressed in fraying grays and creams, as bloodless as the tumbledown mausoleum of a house. It’s like Molière on the moon — or, in this case, the Lune.

The Minneapolis-based Théâtre de la Jeune Lune, with which the ART collaborates on the production, was founded in 1978 in Paris by students of École Jacques Lecoq, which trains mimes and clowns as well as actors. The troupe’s signature is a visually arresting, vigorously physical style that draws on commedia, circus, and vaudeville. Director Serrand and actor Epp are two of five artistic directors of the nothing-if-not-democratic troupe, which favors creative collaboration. Here five of its actors are teamed with ART stalwarts Will LeBow, Remo Airaldi, and Karen MacDonald. This last, as a circus-hued matchmaker carting a bucket for a purse and given to such exclamations as "Christ on a bike!", is like a shot in the sinewy arm of the production. She also has the best line in David Ball’s freewheelingly coarse adaptation. Preparing Mariane, the nubile young woman on whom Harpagon has set his rheumy eye, for the distastefulness of intimacy with the old goat, she emphatically declares, "That’s why God gave us eyelids!"

But though Serrand finds baggy-pants, visceral, cruel, and (too much) potty humor in The Miser, he takes its hoary Plautus-meets-Pantalone situation seriously. Harpagon, who’s determined to wed Mariane, plans to rid himself of his adult children by forcing them into gruesome marriages for his own profit (though Élise is secretly affianced to Valère and son Cléante has clandestinely courted Mariane). Were it not for the play’s contrived shipwrecked-family-reunited ending, Harpagon’s ruthless avariciousness would leave his alleged loved ones thoroughly broken, and Serrand, though making buffoons of even the victimized characters, nonetheless respects their desperation. Indeed, an essay in the ART newsletter cites critic Mareel Gutwirth’s interpretation of the paranoid, pathologically retentive Harpagon as a symbol of death, and that could be the keystone of this production, which ends with the miser’s gold — purloined and then returned, to his groveling glee — being shaken into a coffin.

Harpagon, of course, wants to climb in with it. But in the wiry person of Epp, he is as vital a prune of a grasping geezer as has ever lived. Balletic and reptilian, yet with a whimsical fragility and the paddling glide of a toddler, the character’s abject parsimony extending even to his windpipe, Epp turns in a virtuosic performance that’s part Beckett, part Buster Keaton. Whether going rigid atop a tin bathtub at the mention of the word "money" (this after a servant on stilts pokes the leaky roof to produce a shower) or sitting like a spider on his own cane, the performer is like an encyclopædia of comic invention. Will LeBow ably handles the production’s deadpan chores, and Remo Airaldi, as a double-duty servant always on the wrong end of a cudgel, strangulates the offending word for lucre in a number of sidesplitting ways. I also admired Sarah Agnew’s open-mouthed, almost goofy Élise, who though possibly slow-witted hits her father with a heartbreaking plea for humanity. Harpagon evinces no hearing problem, but it falls on deaf ears.