By John Istel

Tartuffe director Joe Dowling makes Molière’s comic masterpiece run like a clock.

If he wasn’t dressed in such a natty suit and tie, Joe Dowling could pass for the Maytag repairman—or at least his Irish cousin. Deliberate yet down-to-earth, meticulous yet modest, he maintains a mechanic’s calm, as he takes a moment to talk about his upcoming production of Tartuffe unruffled by a demanding directing schedule that includes running a premiere American regional theatre company, the Guthrie in Minneapolis, while making frequent house calls to New York and Europe to brainstorm with designers or catch another casting session.

But Dowling doesn’t just tinker or adjust. He makes things work. From 1978 to 1985, the Dublin native restored and revivified Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey, before moving across his hometown for ten years to make the Gaiety Theatre an internationally worthy rival. Since settling in the U.S. in 1995, Dowling has retrofitted Shakespeare and Restoration comedy for DC audiences, staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream at New York’s Public Theater, and raised revivals of O’Neill in Boston and O’Casey on Broadway. For Roundabout, he received acclaim for both Philadelphia, Here I Come! and London Assurance.

This season at the American Airlines Theatre, Dowling mounts Molière’s Tartuffe. He’ll have the help of two great classical actors: Brian Bedford, whose production of The Molière Comedies for Roundabout earned multiple Tony nominations, plays Orgon; and Royal Shakespeare Company veteran Henry Goodman takes on the title role.

Front & Center: How was this particular Roundabout project born?

Joe Dowling: Brian Bedford, Todd Haimes, and I began talking about doing something else after we did London Assurance together because we had such a good time working on it. We tried one or two other things that didn’t work out because of conflicts with dates. Then Brian called me and said, "I’d like to play Orgon." I thought it was a great idea.

Most theatergoers have seen your work with classic Irish playwrights — O’Casey, Synge, Friel. Tartuffe will be your first major American Molière production. Is your preparation different or do you tackle it like any new project?

It’s new in the sense that I haven’t done the play before, but I’ve done classical plays and texts from that period. There’s no difference between Tartuffe and Shakespeare or Chekhov in terms of exploring the play and its themes. You work with the designers to find a way to translate it to the visual, and you work with the actors to develop a common style and approach. That process is not new to me.

Doing a verse play is always going to be different than doing a prose play. Obviously with Shakespeare you end up doing blank verse and you work on the rhyming couplets. In rehearsal you discover which couplets feel natural on the tongue and what you have to do to make the play flow rather than make it feel like a series of rhymes. That will take time and energy in rehearsal.

What’s different about Tartuffe is that there are very real thematic parts of this play that you could set in 2002 and they’d be right on. We won’t do that, but the trick is finding a way of translating the social and stylistic aspects of Molière’s world to a contemporary sensibility—without disturbing the original.

Most modern audiences will surely relate to a lot of the play—especially to hypocritical authority figures, like the imposter Tartuffe and his dupe Orgon; or to the way false leaders inspire a cult-like following and twist good words to evil ends. Yet, they may have problems relating to the royal court’s role, especially considering the ending, where the power of Louis XIV is almost god-like.

It’s always tricky because modern audiences just find that ridiculous. On the other hand, we have many moments where the entire world stops and listens to a leader. That’s not necessarily a pre-French Revolutionary idea. What I find more difficult for an audience to sympathize with is the father Orgon who can tell Mariane, his daughter, who she can or cannot marry. Of course, in our world, there are societies where that still happens. While the translation of Molière’s France to 21st-century America is quite huge, it’s not such a leap from 17th-century France to other world cultures. There are interesting parallels that I hope in the context of the play we’ll be able to bring out without hitting you over the head, saying, "Ahh, look at this parallel and examine your own lives!" That’s not what this play or production should be about.

When you boil it down, Molière has a very slender little plot. Tartuffe, a rogue who pretends he’s a pious ascetic religious man, sets out to swindle the wealthy Orgon. Molière takes a slim idea and develops it by virtue of the characters and the relationships. He creates farcical moments—like the famous scene where Orgon hides under the table as Tartuffe chases his wife Elmire around—that are purely derived from commedia dell’arte. But Molière makes that scene a masterpiece of psychological comedy because all three relationships are, at that moment, transformed. His genius is to make what in other hands could be very light fare have depth, and that makes a director and actors excited and interested in exploring it.

Molière was reputed to be a superb comic actor. He wrote Orgon for himself and played that role, which Brian Bedford takes on, while Henry Goodman plays Tartuffe. How do you see the balance of these characters’ roles in the play?

The balance of the play is brilliantly worked out. Orgon makes the first entrance, but of course, it’s his home. So first you get a real sense of the domestic power that Orgon has—over his wife, children. Then two-and-a-half acts go by before Tartuffe makes an appearance! It’s probably the longest build-up to a character’s entrance in dramatic literature. Once Tartuffe comes on, it’s still all about his relationship with Orgon. And the play could easily be re-titled Orgon, the Dupe instead of Tartuffe, the Imposter. The play is about both of them. Clearly, that’s why in casting it, you need two great actors. Very often, Tartuffe is stronger in a cast and Orgon is considered more lightly. Here we have really great actors playing both parts.

What’s interesting is that the two characters are very rarely onstage together, only in three or four scenes. We watch their relationship through other people, how they relate to each other through the maid Dorine, Elmire, or Damis and Mariane, Orgon’s son and daughter. There is a very real relationship between Tartuffe and Orgon, though it’s not always physicalized onstage.

Many consider Brian Bedford one of the English-speaking world’s leading perfomers of Molière. Have you seen him onstage in the French playwright’s work?

Oh, yes. I’ve seen his Tartuffe at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. I saw The Molière Comedies that Roundabout produced. And probably of all the actors working in this country he’s the most accomplished actor of Molière because of his life-long devotion to the playwright.

What qualities does Bedford have that make him such an eminent interpreter of Molière’s comedies?

First of all, he’s a brilliant comic. His comic timing is perhaps the best in the world, absolutely unparalleled in how he times a line. He also has — I suppose it comes from years of experience—a crispness of language, an understanding of how a line needs to be said in a way that will make it have the most impact on an audience. For verse speaking, that’s essential. Brian is so meticulous in his speech and use of language. If you’ve ever met him, you know he’s an immensely bright and charming man. That combination makes him one of the most interesting actors I’ve ever worked with. For comedy, he’s truly inspired. Molière plays into all those strengths for him, especially in Richard Wilbur’s verse translations, which he’s particularly enamored of.

"Of all the actors working in this country,
Bedford’s the most accomplished actor
of Molière because of his life-long devotion
to the playwright."

---

If you read aloud Richard Wilbur’s translations, written in rhyming iambic pentameter (instead of Molière’s original 12-syllable Alexandrines), you see how difficult it is to handle. It seems to me that some actors attempt to smooth the rhymes over, to make them naturalistic. Bedford often actually accents or stresses the end rhymes to bring out the delight in them.

Exactly. That’s what I mean by his mixture of charm and precise use of language: not being afraid of the verse is only the starting point. A lot of actors are. They just think, "Oh isn’t this rhyming odd." They get nervous, very Stanislavsky, and try to discover the character’s inner motivations and passions, all of which should be there, but you have to add also that firm, crisp text, particularly with the Wilbur translations which are very demanding.

Have you worked with Henry Goodman previously?

No, this will be the first occasion. For a long, long time, I’ve known his work, from the time he was in the Royal Shakespeare Company back in the 1980s. In the last ten years I’ve watched him do some of the most amazing things. His Shylock in Merchant of Venice, which he did three or four years ago, was by far one of the greatest Shakespeare performances I’ve ever seen. Just astonishing. So I’m very excited to work with him and see how he and Brian find a common language.

Could you talk a little bit about your approach to the design elements of this Tartuffe production?

The starting point is a conversation. The designer takes your ideas and runs with it. Set designer John Lee Beatty, Jane Greenwood who is doing the costumes, and I met on a number of occasions, and we decided that the basic color palette will be more Vermeer than Rembrandt. We aren’t going to transpose the production to another time or place. So we wanted to keep it in its own very insular world.

When you say "Vermeer" rather than "Rembrandt," what do you mean?

Well if you think of the interiors in Vermeer’s paintings, they’re very light, not dark and overbearing. The themes of the play speak for themselves and you don’t need to weigh them down with shadows. After all, this is a wealthy, bourgeois home.

One of my favorite characters is Dorine, the outrageously cheeky and aggressive maid.

J. Smith-Cameron is playing Dorine. In many ways, the character can steal the show. Audiences really warm to her; she’s such a typical Molière role—a servant who is smarter than the master and gets away with things. Because it’s Molière, it’s partly a commedia character, but the fact that he makes the servant a woman is a decision that’s as gutsy as Dorine is in the play.

Is there anything in particular that you feel audiences should know before they come see it?

The play is so clear in what it’s trying to be. There are many plays where an audience needs to have so much context before coming. But Molière explains it all, which is one of the great strengths of his narrative. He tells a story. Audiences just need their imaginations.

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