STAGE REVIEW : We Have Met ‘The Miser’: He Is Us

Douglas Hughes’ Seattle Repertory Theatre staging of Moliere’s “The Miser” seems made for those who itched to escape their parents’ house and make their own mistakes.

Hughes’ edition (he has fashioned a fresh translation) is very American in good and bad ways, so it’s appropriate that his show has hit the American road. It arrived in Southern California Thursday at Pepperdine University’s Smothers Auditorium, on the first leg of a Southland tour.

“The Miser” remains Moliere’s most immediate comedy, confronting an audience with all the worst feelings it ever harbored against parents, while letting it enjoy the lampooning of Harpagon’s infantilistic materialism. Hughes stresses the former over the latter, placing the Harpagon household in a quasi-Victorian world of prison bars and bizarre Darwinian monstrosities (Hugh Landwehr’s set looked overstuffed at Smothers).

The most prominent monster of all is Harpagon himself, and actor John Aylward stretches the notion to cartoonish extreme, hunching his back, licking his lips lizard-like and generally looming over his domain like Nosferatu (the text refers to him as “a vampire.”).

He’s the perfect Harpagon for a culture that knocks the old and loves youth and freedom. This is a “Miser,” as well, from a culture that likes things strong and upfront. No bewigged European manners here: Hughes directs Aylward and his company with a sense of direct physical contact, so that the characters face the crowd as much as they face each other. We have met the monster, and he is us.

It makes for a more complicated, dimensional “Miser” than usual, but with very broad strokes. No one here--not Aylward, nor R. Hamilton Wright’s mod-rocker Valere, nor Katie Forgette and T. Scott Cunningham as the imprisoned siblings, nor Marianne Owen’s plotting Frosine, nor Woody Eney’s schizoid Jacques--is less than big, brash, boisterous. Like Hughes’ translation, they recognize that “The Miser” can’t be done with propriety, because Moliere’s characters have already taken the gloves off before the first scene.

These children defeat the beast, and Hughes’ closing image suggests an Harpagon alone and trapped in a prison of his own making. But the cumulative effect was blunted by the Smothers’ size (Hughes’ direct approach needs intimacy) and a sense of powerful actors going through their paces. Prison and monsters bring pain, and while Hughes and company come on with a roar, their final bite is more that of a mouse.

“The Miser.” Tonight, 8 p.m.: Campbell Hall, UC Santa Barbara, $12-16, (805) 893-3535; Tuesday, 8 p.m.: Occidental College, Thorne Hall, 1600 Campus Road, $15, (213) 259-2737; Thursday, 8 p.m.: Dore Theatre, 9001 Stockdale Highway, Bakersfield, $15, (805) 664-2387; April 28, 7 p.m.: El Camino College, Marsee Auditorium, Torrance, $18-$25, (213) 329-5345. Running time: 2 hours.