A Fool for Truth

By Timothy Foote

LE MISANTHROPE

by Moliere

"When good Americans die," said Oscar Wilde, "they go to Paris." For anyone who has not planned on the trip, there is the Comedie-Franc,aise, a glorious traveling museum that has been presenting French classical drama for 299 years and sees little sense in breaking up a winning combination. A fortnight ago the Comedie opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Moliere's Le Misanthrope as part of a four-week visit to New York and Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center. It will also present Feydeau's La Puce `a l'Oreille (A Flea in Her Ear) and Victor Hugo's Ruy Bias.

Judged by Le Misanthrope, the engagements should be a success for France's mission civilisatrice. In telling the story of Alceste, a man torn between hatred of the world's deceit and flattery and his own love for a deceitful, flattering widow named Celimene, Moliere pressed poetic comedy and satiric wit to the edge of tears. Le Misanthrope is his bittersweet masterpiece. In a comedy of manners, Alceste's notion of telling the truth himself on all occasions and correcting the chicanery of the age clearly marks him as a crackpot bound for grief. But as the play proceeds and the caesuras required of French classic verse occasionally become pregnant pauses, Moliere manages to give his compulsive critic's obsession a touch of nobility.

When Alceste confronts the thinnest skin in the world, the proud author of a new and awful sonnet--he eventually pronounces its creation a "hangable" offense--he does not seem unkind. Scolding Celimene incessantly about her other suitors, he conveys not only jealousy, but some idealistic, crazy, husbandly delusion that she can be transformed into the only perfect being in the world.

As Alceste and Celimene, Franc,ois Beaulieu and Beatrice Agenin project modern, realistic feeling at the expense of classical eloquence. During his tirades against mankind, Beaulieu runs through the Alexandrines and casts caesuras to the winds. But he builds sympathy by the low-key, unstylized way he plays the love scenes. Agenin, too, is better at intimacy than poetic elegance. She is a wonder, though, at dispensing petits fours and nasty court gossip to a fine pair of dandies whose wigs make them resemble Bert Lahr playing the Cowardly Lion. When she leans back and says lovingly to poor, scoldy Alceste, "How boring you are!" while deliciously wriggling her toes, the night belongs to France. Moliere and the audience are best served by Comedie Veteran Michel Duchaussoy as Alceste's best friend, Philinte. He speaks his verse, perfectly balancing form against feeling, never missing a beat.

Thirsty to hear French but a bit rusty, audiences tend to turn up at the theater sensibly bearing the original text or Rich ard Wilbur's fine translation. To help with the language barrier, the Comedie offers headsets and simultaneous translations into serviceable though clubfooted English prose. The effect is a bit like watching a movie under water. Anyone who possibly can should read the play in French beforehand, then sit back and let the long lines roll down the centuries and over him.

--Timothy Foote

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