Moliere’s ‘Wives’ fresh, 350 years later

Moliere is so durably droll that he can withstand any amount of revisionist poking and prodding. However, when a company essays the master straight on, without updating or folderol, the result not only proves Moliere’s genius, but also, hearteningly, confirms that mankind’s universal concerns -- and universal foibles -- remain roughly the same from generation to generation.

Written some 350 years ago, Moliere’s “The School for Wives” was deemed blasphemous in its day by his jealous detractors. Director Sabin Epstein may not be able to exactly replicate the same degree of scandalous titillation that Moliere’s audiences experienced, but Epstein’s blissfully purist production at A Noise Within remains as fresh and funny as it was, one imagines, when first produced.

The play revolves around the richly comical character of Arnolphe (Robertson Dean), a manipulative aristocrat who fears above all things being made a cuckold. To escape that fate, Arnolphe has confined his much younger ward and intended bride, Agnes (Noel True), to a convent since age 4.

Assuming that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing where women are concerned, Arnolphe has purposely kept Agnes in a state of abject ignorance. But young love, not to mention Agnes’ native wit, confound all Arnolphe’s plots and preconceptions.

Treated most notably in his play “Educated Women,” the issue of female education was a Moliere favorite. In “Wives,” his musings on the subject are all the more piquant, considering that he penned the play shortly after marrying a young girl half his age -- one who, by all reports, was especially frolicsome. It has been argued that Arnolphe is based on Moliere himself. If so, then Moliere was so formidably self-aware as to be able to poke fun at his own unenviable situation.

No such awareness plagues Arnolphe, whose obliviousness inspires the keenest irony. Dean’s Arnolphe is a dapper buffoon whose smugness soon dissolves into the sweaty stratagems of a lover scorned. Authoritatively foolish, Dean often plays directly to the audience, as if desperately drumming up male support of his misogynistic views.

Wisely, Epstein keeps his players firmly fixed in a classical context, with no obvious rooting for post-Method subtexts. Still, the actors invariably find the genuineness under their comic archetypes. Ben Messmer and Brooke Parks are effectively slack-jawed as Arnolphe’s doltish servants, while Alan Blumenfeld is amusingly worldly as Arnolphe’s pragmatic friend Chrysalde, who speaks on the subject of cuckoldry with an authority that can come only from firsthand experience. Even Horace, Agnes’ admirer, who could have been conceived as a typical young stalwart, gains new depths of silliness in Scott Jay’s foppish character turn.

Angela Balogh Calin’s eye-catching set design, with its tawny golden stripes sweeping up a bright blue floor, brings to mind an exercise in forced perspective. Peter Gottlieb’s lighting, Ron Wyand’s sound and Laura Karpman’s original music are also essential to this striking mix, but pride of place goes to Nadine Parkos for her wonderfully extravagant period costumes, a sumptuous blend of brocade and feathers, which garner appreciative laughter all by themselves.

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‘The School for Wives’

Where: A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale

When: Plays in repertory. Call for schedule.

Ends: May 14

Price: $20-$40

Contact: (818) 240-0910, Ext. 1

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes