A handshake with history.

A man sits alone in a chair, surrounded by paper, doing math out loud. The doctors have billed him at a price he considers astronomical, and he says so, to nobody. He revises the figure downward, moves on to the next bill, and shrinks the figure again. Loudly. The man is not sick, though he will spend the rest of the evening insisting otherwise. 

That is the opening of The Imaginary Invalid, and it is also, structurally, a cold open. Nearly three centuries before a network sitcom ever cut to a pompous boss delivering nonsense with total confidence, a French playwright had already built the joke. Molière invented the credentialed fool, the cash-obsessed patriarch, the servant who’s smarter than everyone she works for, the meddling relative who says the quiet part out loud. Then he set them loose on a stage in front of an audience that recognized every one of them immediately. Modern sitcoms didn’t discover this architecture. They inherited it. Molière, in turn, had borrowed his materials from an older Italian tradition (more on that in a moment), but the assembly was entirely his. 

So when director Brandon Dirden describes this revival of The Imaginary Invalid as a “handshake with history,” he’s naming something true about the play’s reach across time. Dirden and adapter Bill Irwin are both focused on helping the play connect with the broadest possible modern audience, though they approach that goal from different directions. Irwin does it by reshaping the language: this adaptation, he writes in his Adapter’s Note, “concentrates on the family story.” Dirden, meanwhile, avoids binding the production too tightly to its original setting and era, letting the casting and design feel more expansive. Together, their work highlights the timeless qualities of the story and underscores why it continues to resonate today.  

But the more interesting question isn’t whether Molière still works. Structurally, his plots never stopped working, and this revival doesn’t have to prove it. What the revival can do is press better questions: who, historically, has actually been offered that handshake from Molière’s world, and what does it mean to widen the aperture on who stands on stage and who sits in the seats without changing the centuries-old jokes underneath.

Stock characters as a shortcut.

A stock character is a recurring, instantly recognizable type: the miser, the scheming spouse, the clever servant. Their habits walk onstage ahead of them, and every audience knows what to expect. Molière didn’t invent his cast from scratch; he borrowed it, almost entirely, from commedia dell’arte, the improvised Italian theatre tradition that had already been touring Europe for a century by the time he picked up a pen. Commedia ran on fixed types: Pantalone, the miserly patriarch; il Dottore, the pompous fraud who mistakes long sentences for expertise; the innamorati, young lovers whose romance drives almost every plot; and a servant class that consistently outsmarts everyone paying their wages. When Molière moved from improvised tradition into scripted comedy, he didn’t retire these types. He just gave them names and a French address.  

You can watch the transfer happen inside The Imaginary Invalid directly. Argan, who’d rather argue with an apothecary bill than get out of his chair, is Pantalone with a thermometer. Monsieur Diafoirus and his son Thomas, a doctor and his even more insufferable doctor-in-training, are Il Dottore, doubled for emphasis. Cléante and Angélique, who conduct their courtship in secret under her father’s nose, are the innamorati. And Toinette, the maid who diagnoses the household’s dysfunction faster than any physician, is the clever servant. 

Why have these character types held up? Because a stock type is a compression algorithm. An audience doesn’t need three paragraphs of backstory to understand that the wife is circling her husband’s fortune, or that the doctor is all credentials and no substance. The type does that work in a single entrance, freeing up runtime for jokes and escalation instead of setup. That’s the same architecture a sitcom runs on: the pompous boss, the sarcastic best friend, the schemer, the naive romantic. We know them as soon as we see them. Nobody needs an origin story for a new Michael Scott.  

This wasn’t an accident of durability, either. An extensive 1910 study traces how fully his character types were borrowed by Restoration playwrights within his own lifetime and the decades immediately following. In other words, Molière’s blueprint had already survived one major cultural transplant before it ever got near a television camera. And a more recent thesis on his use of commedia dell’arte describes his characters as having “both universal and particular characteristics.” Translation: recognizable everywhere yet textured enough to feel specific and original to the new storyline. A stock type was never sealed to seventeenth-century France. It was built to time-travel. 

Why the jokes still land.

Stock characters explain who’s on stage. They don’t explain why the dialogue still gets laughs 350 years later, in a language Molière never spoke a word of. But it does still get laughs! His plays remain in constant production around the world, and directors keep finding that the plots relate to present times with almost no resistance. Part of the answer is structural: Molière’s plays run on rhythm, not plot. He takes a thin premise and builds escalating rounds of proclamations, exposures, and reversals around one character’s fixation. In The Imaginary Invalid, the comedy isn’t really Argan’s story at all. It’s the collision between his imagined feebleness and everyone trying to unmask it.  

As for why that collision is funny, the most useful theory is also the oldest one: the philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1900 essay Laughter, which builds much of its argument by pointing directly at Molière and asking, essentially: what is mechanically happening here, when we laugh? Bergson’s answer is that comedy is what happens when something rigid and repetitive gets mistaken for something alive. His own phrase for it is “something mechanical in something living.” A living thing bends, adapts, and moves on. A comic character can’t. A comic character gets stuck on one note and just keeps hitting it. 

Bergson uses The Imaginary Invalid for one of his central examples, dissecting the scene where Doctor Purgon threatens Argan with an escalating cascade of diseases. Every time Argan tries to interrupt, Purgon rebounds in rapid fashion with a threat of yet another in a long list of obscure illnesses. The list is the joke. Purgon works his way through bradyspepsia, dyspepsia, apepsia, lientery, dysentery, hydropsy, sepsias, and, having run out of organs, arrives at the loss of life itself. The illnesses stack in frightening fashion, but the audience is not laughing at the diagnoses. They are laughing at the fact that they just keep coming. Bergson’s image for it is a spring: repress a feeling and it rebounds, again and again, faster or louder each time, until the rhythm itself becomes the joke, almost independent of what’s actually being said. 

That’s not a seventeenth-century joke shape. That’s a sitcom! It’s the slow-burn callback, the escalating “and ANOTHER thing,” the character who can’t stop circling back to the same complaint no matter how many times the scene tries to move past it. 

Bill Irwin’s adaptation leans into that mechanism rather than around it. His script reaches for what he calls, in his Adapter’s Note, “a hybrid of period and contemporary voice”: the beats of the story stay fully intact (apothecaries, notaries, arranged marriages) while the dialogue’s actual tempo is re-tuned for a contemporary ear. When Toinette delivers her flat verdict on the family’s new doctor-suitor (“he’s educated,” which is somehow the whole insult), it lands with sitcom-precise timing. Irwin isn’t modernizing what these people are arguing about, and he doesn’t need to modernize the structure. He’s modernizing the rhythm between the setup and the laugh. 

And Dirden finds Irwin’s new adaptation does even more than just keep the jokes flowing: “It’s not just accessible, it’s relevant to us today… how does it land on our ears today to where we don’t reduce the size of the question that Molière is asking?”

What resonates as a “handshake with history.”

Strip away the French cuffs and the invented Latin diagnoses, and The Imaginary Invalid is arguing about three things that have never stopped being relevant: mistaking credentials for competence, family warfare over money disguised as concern, and young people trying to choose their own lives over the objections of their parents. None of that is a French problem from one specific century. It’s a human problem that happened to get written down in France, in that century, by a playwright who was unusually good at noticing it. Put differently: Molière never wrote “French people are absurd.” He wrote “people are absurd,” and used the French bourgeoisie because that was the only cast available to him in 1673.  

This is what makes Dirden’s specific approach so exciting. He isn’t proposing a flattening move that asks specificity to disappear into abstraction. The time period stays fixed. The story is Molière’s. What’s expanding is who gets to stand inside that frame, and how: casting that draws from a wide range of backgrounds and design that plays with color, weight, and texture within a period-specific silhouette.

It was important to me to really honor Molière and the source material. And so this is an analog production, as I like to say. There’s no cell phones, this isn’t postmodern; we are in a classic French seventeenth century, very well-appointed home. The costumes are reflected as such, but we will have touches of, perhaps, anachronistic costuming. I mean, not that brings us to 2026 at all, so this is not a topical adaptation. But there will perhaps be some colors and some flavors and some things that didn’t necessarily exist, but it is not going to be so far that it pulls us out of the genre or the era.

This isn’t correcting the play, and it isn’t a claim to make the play better. It’s about completing the jokes. All of them, in their original scope and structure, for a modern ear.

Conclusion.

Return to the cold open: an old French man alone with his medical bills, complaining aloud. Now widen out. Picture that same bit performed by a cast and a design team drawing from more traditions than seventeenth-century Paris ever had access to, without a single detail peeled away to make room for them. 

That’s the real impact of this revival. Not that Molière needs updating, but that he was never as narrow as the old, powdered wigs might suggest. The jokes were built wide enough to hold more people than history initially let stand inside it. The sitcom inherited Molière’s architecture centuries ago and never gave it back; this production does something more generous with the inheritance, extending to everyone in the theater what Dirden calls a handshake with history.