STAGE REVIEW : Fine Effort on Moliere’s ‘Invalid’

Some playwrights see their works die onstage. Moliere went a step further: While playing the lead in the debut 1673 production of his “The Imaginary Invalid,” he keeled over during the fourth performance and died later that night.

Would that some of his plays had exited with such dispatch. Certainly, Moliere was a comic innovator with his share of deservedly immortal comedies. But other of his works, notably “The Imaginary Invalid,” may be significant only in a manner that lends itself to exposition via Cliff’s Notes.

In its time, “The Imaginary Invalid” was controversial because it attacked the medical profession, which was then rising to the demi-religion status it still asserts, where select initiates play a half-science against our fear of mortality. But though Moliere had a long history of medical problems--not the least of which led to his truncated final performance--he gave little resonance to “Invalid’s” superficial characterizations. Instead of revealing anything of the human condition--such as examining why man is so out of touch with his nature that his senses are overruled by outside opinion--the farce bounces weightlessly from broad satire to an artless diatribe against doctors, written into the third act with all the wit and color of a Jack Webb anti-LSD speech.

The cast of the Irvine Valley College production did a soldierly job of making it through the acts under Ron Ellison’s direction, delivering up the laughs afforded by the text (a translation by John Reich) and working in a few on their own.

The title character, the hypochondriacal Argan, was played by Don Formaneck without the palsied overacting so many younger actors affect in trying to portray elderly characters. What he did deliver was an apt mix of cringing supplication and blustery indignation, the former when in the presence of a succession of doctors, hose-wielding specialists and his scheming wife, Belinda, and the latter reserved for the rest of his household.

His own body beyond his control, Argan instead bosses his impudent servant Toinette (Mary Kaye Ciel-Edwards) and daughter Angelica (Laura Meadors), whom he plans to marry off to a doctor’s son. She has a beau of her own picked out, and her romantic dilemma and his doctor-induced illnesses spin through the comedy, arriving finally at a pat conclusion.

Unfortunately, Ciel-Edwards and Meadors seem to equate “farce” with “lark,” and both moved through their roles showing little emotion other than fixated beauty-pageant grins. With all the medical roles played in cartoonish proportions--with Michael Brown’s blowhard Dr. Gravestone being a standout--there wasn’t much grounded reality to give the farce perspective.

It’s not surprising that the production’s best turns were ones running counter to the play’s movement. Angelica’s undesired fool of a fiance, Thomas, typically should be a puffed-up vacuous variety of oaf, consonant with the rote medical nonsense he spouts. Instead, Vidal Perez’s marvelously comic Thomas is another kind of fool entirely. With clownish makeup and a countenance like a cross between Harpo Marx and Prince, he’s an innocent otherworldly rube, unable even to sit on a chair as other people do, instead perching on it and flapping his arms to move. He comes off as wholly endearing, thus undercutting the drama of Angelica pursuing her cipher of a true love.

As with many productions of “Invalid,” Moliere’s original musical numbers have been excised. In their place there’s a superfluous new song, “It’s Only in Your Mind,” and an acrobatic harem-dance number, which climaxes the second act with a dancer doing a double reverse flip and landing in Argan’s lap. The production has an original score by Gare Mattison, sounding like a cross between French court music and ‘60s sitcom themes and delivered via tape at an overbearing volume.

To hoist Moliere on his own convenient petard: “You haven’t achieved anything in comedy unless your portraits can be seen to be living types,” he wrote. In “Invalid,” he left far less true-life, human insight and depth of character than has been found weekly in most of Steven Bochco’s television series.

‘The Imaginary Invalid’

An Irvine Valley College Theatre production of Moliere’s comedy. Director Ron Ellison. With Don Formaneck, Mary Kaye Ciel-Edwards, Laura Meadors, Karen Petersen, Justin Andersen, Hutch Cathey, Michael Brown, Vidal Perez, Mike Mukilics, Robert Thomas and Marcus Perrenoud. Translation: John Reich. Sets and lighting: Jim Rynning. Costume design: Charles Costagno. Plays at 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday at the Forum Theatre, Irvine Valley College, 5500 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. Tickets $6 to $8. (714) 559-3333.