Ever-Modern Moliere

Three actors and three large free-standing doors occupy the makeshift stage in a Mark Taper Forum rehearsal room. The center doorway has an attached structure and staircase, and serves as backdrop to the three men, who are gathered in front of it, working out a bit of business.

Even though they’re only in rehearsal clothes, the bows and postures of the younger men on either side suggest immediately that this is not the present day. What’s more, this impression is reinforced by the man in the middle, who keeps breaking out of his role as actor to assume the guise of director, adjusting an inflection or gesture here, discussing a line there.

It takes precision--and humor--to get it right. The actor-director, Brian Bedford, suggests to one actor that he must relish the phrasing and language of the rhymed verse even more. The other is told to take more delight in the information being revealed. All in the interest of the enterprise they’ve set for themselves, bringing the world of 17th century France to the hearts and minds of 21st century Californians.

The men are rehearsing “The Moliere Comedies,” a double bill of “The School for Husbands” and “The Imaginary Cuckold,” in a translation by Richard Wilbur. Directed by and featuring Bedford, the production opens at the Taper on Thursday.

They are not alone. Moliere is in the air. Long a staple of the classical repertoire but comparatively seldom seen in the Southland, France’s best-known playwright is making more appearances than usual on major Southern California stages these days. In addition to the Taper production, South Coast Repertory just closed David Chambers’ staging of “The School for Wives,” starring Dakin Matthews. And in May, La Jolla Playhouse will open its 2002 season with a production of “Tartuffe,” directed by Des McAnuff and starring Jefferson Mays.

The scheduling appears to be no more than an interesting coincidence, given that the programming decisions behind these productions were made as many as several years ago and as recently as this season. What’s more, while all three theaters have a history of occasional forays into the classics--some more occasional than others--they are all better known as havens for contemporary plays and playwrights.

Yet is an audience accustomed to Richard Greenberg, John Belluso or Lee Blessing necessarily ready for--let alone excited about--Moliere? Such is the question at the heart of the ongoing debate about how to make period pieces viable for today’s audiences.

“People think that by putting a Shakespeare or a Moliere play in modern dress that they are making it more contemporary for us,” says the soft-spoken and genial Bedford, seated in a Taper office after rehearsal on a recent evening. “But that is not what makes it contemporary. It’s the actors’ understanding of these characters’ psychological makeup.

“The only way to make them contemporary is to go to the very heart and soul of these things and have your actors manifest that, so the audience says, ‘My God, this play could have been written last year.’”

The English-born Bedford is highly qualified to discuss the challenges of the classics. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he is considered one of the premier classical actors of his generation, often associated with the work of Moliere and Shakespeare.

Over the years, Bedford, who is also a veteran director, has performed many leading roles at the Stratford Festival of Canada and elsewhere, and appeared on Broadway more than 20 times. Bedford won a best actor Tony in 1971 for his performance in “The School for Wives” and since then has received four additional Tony nominations for best actor.

The Taper production marks the fourth time he has performed “The School for Husbands” (1661) and “The Imaginary Cuckold” (1660) as a pair. The two works are emblematic of the longtime collaboration between Bedford and Wilbur--Bedford first appeared in one of Wilbur’s translations in the ‘60s--and are dedicated by the translator to the actor.

In 1995 at the Criterion Center in New York, Michael Langham directed Bedford in a staging of “The Moliere Comedies” for which the actor received a Tony nomination. Writing in the New York Times, Vincent Canby not only praised the production, but cited Bedford for “giving what are possibly the two best performances by an actor on Broadway at the moment. He’s twice as priceless as characters who, by coincidence, both happen to be named Sganarelle.”

As if dual roles weren’t enough, Bedford has also seated himself in the director’s chair. And that means he’s responsible for setting the strategy to bridge the gap between Moliere’s time and the present.

Bedford began by enlisting the cast and creative team in a discussion of the use and abuse of period style. “I started out this rehearsal period here by reading at considerable length from a book called ‘The Rediscovery of Style,’ which is a magnificent theater manual by Michel St. Denis, who directed Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. He initiated the Old Vic school and then eventually the Juilliard School in New York.”

St. Denis’ book, familiar to many classically trained theater artists, argues that period style is more than surface behavior. “Most people have an idea that style is something quite superficial, that it’s a way that people behave,” Bedford says. “Michel saw style as being something much deeper and much more essential, to do with creating the reality of the people within these plays, not just as a superficial bowing and use of handkerchiefs.”

A balance must be struck between the writer’s vision and modern sensibilities. “We are trying our very best to fulfill what we perceive as Moliere’s intentions, but we can only get at it through our own time, because our style is not the style of the Moliere play, and style does exist in modern plays too,” explains Bedford.

Manners and mores and historically accurate curtsies may be important, but they should not be thought of as separable from the characters’ psychology. “The truth of working on any classic is that the psychology of a human is constant,” says Art Manke, who is coaching the period movement and choreographing a dance for “The Moliere Comedies.”

A founder and former co-artistic director of the classical company A Noise Within, Manke directed a number of Moliere works for the Glendale troupe, where he continues to serve as a resident director. “Where people sometimes trip up is they focus so much on the form that then they somehow miss the content and the core of the work.”

Still, how the psychology is interpreted is subject to one’s own worldview. “I’m interested in trying to penetrate to a play’s inner concerns, but I know that that is subjective by who I am and the time I live in,” says Chambers, who directed “The School for Wives” at South Coast Repertory. “I don’t think the classics are necessarily universal or modern, but I do think a good text will stretch to contemporary concerns.”

Contemporary indeed. In “The School for Husbands,” an older man zealously guards the much younger woman he wants to keep as his own, sequestering her from the rest of society, lest her affections land elsewhere. In “The Imaginary Cuckold,” a husband thinks his wife is cheating on him with a younger man.

The plots and protagonists would seem to be perennial. “The leading characters in Moliere are immensely complicated, usually neurotic, self-involved people who, in the case of ‘The School for Husbands,’ are so insecure themselves that they think the way to a relationship with another human being is to control them,” Bedford says.

“Moliere, like Chekhov, found unhappy, neurotic people funny, and it’s particularly surprising with him, because we gather that he was somewhat like that himself. In ‘School for Wives’ and ‘The School for Husbands,’ for instance, you have men whose aim is to have a very young, very ignorant, beautiful girl as their wife. Moliere also married a very young girl.”

But Moliere goes beyond the easy laugh. “The protagonist of ‘The School for Husbands’ is an incredibly complicated guy, and you want the text to be excavated psychologically so that you have the different levels of this,” Bedford says.

One of the greatest barriers to bringing classics to today’s audiences is the text. Moliere--and particularly his rhymed verse--has long been considered tough to translate for American audiences.

Wilbur’s translations, however, are often regarded as the benchmark when it comes to accessibility. “I try to avoid perishable slang and to keep it in contemporary language but without writing an updated version,” says Wilbur, speaking by phone from his home in Florida. “Fortunately, Moliere’s style is a frank conversational style, and one can take him over into English without a lot of adjustment.

“You have to be attuned to the sensibility as well as responsible to the dictionary sense of his words. I think the reason why Moliere works is that his language is so plain and natural, even when he’s giving you jokes between aristocrats.”

One reason fluid translation is pivotal is that times have changed. “Articulating long, complex thoughts through language is something we are no longer as skilled at because we’ve turned into a much more visual society,” Manke says.

“When you have a piece like the Moliere, the challenge is hooking the audience into listening more to the language,” he adds. “The way to do that is focusing on the truth of the human relationships, and that is what will connect us to it.”

In the case of “The Moliere Comedies,” there is also the matter of rhyme. Today’s audiences may not be accustomed to hearing it, but they are certainly capable of enjoying it. “We forget that one of our earliest experiences is nursery rhymes,” Manke says. If the translator wields power in terms of the language, the director and designers have a similar power in the physical production. Most obviously, there is the decision of whether or not to update the setting.

Wilbur finds most updating unnecessary. “Moliere is a good deal less problematical than other playwrights,” he says. “If one translates him into an equivalent simple and open language, he comes across without much mediation or adjustment to contemporary audiences. That’s why I think there’s never any need to update a play, to put it in modern dress or locate it in North Carolina. It usually turns out to be an adjustment that doesn’t need to be made.

“I’m not saying that one must perfectly imitate the costumes--anything roughly 17th century will do,” Wilbur says. “But we get some kind of patronizing distortion if a director puts his mark on it by modernizing or moving it. I don’t think that injected references to President Bush or Saks Fifth Avenue help.”

Such interpolations may cover up for the lack of a deeper understanding of the play. These classical plays demand tremendous skill, Bedford says. “But the theater is such a ragbag that we get the most awful departures from professionalism,” he says, “and what happens is that people who don’t know how to get to the heart of these plays just think, ‘Oh, we’ll do something tremendously original by the way they look.’”

However, not everyone who updates a play does so capriciously. Many respected theater artists believe that resetting a period comedy or drama in a different place and time is a highly effective and efficient way to make it accessible.

Chambers, for instance, has reset many classics, including his fourth and most recent Moliere at South Coast Rep, in a translation by Ranjit Bolt. “Any reading is greatly influenced by one’s own time and sense of history, so any reading is a contemporary reading,” he says. “What I’m always interested in doing is locating it somewhere and somehow that is analogous and accessible, but which still has a poetic layer of distance on it.”

The key to a successful transposition, in Chambers’ view, is to find a backdrop that brings out the play’s principal concerns. “With 17th century France, many of the external codes are very distant from our experience,” he says. “There are ways Moliere translates directly, but I find that certain audiences are at times simply removed from the experience by the sight of a certain style of costume, setting and performance.”

Even Bedford, who’s not generally an advocate of resetting, acknowledges that almost anything goes, as long as you do your homework. “My belief is you can do anything with these plays,” he says. “You can set them on the moon, in the future, in the present or wherever you want, just so long as you excavate appropriately that text.

“I have such a passionate love of these texts,” Bedford continues. “The only way that these plays come to the kind of life that I admire is in a very lively, dazzling way which is based on reality.”

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“The Moliere Comedies,” Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Opens Thursday at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. No 7:30 performance on April 7. Ends April 7. $30-$44. (213) 628-2772.

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Jan Breslauer, producing director at the Falcon Theatre, is a regular contributor to Calendar.