For a New Troupe, Going Digital Has Been Easier Than Returning Live

Sitting on a bench in Prospect Park recently as flocks of maskless Brooklynites passed by, Lucie Tiberghien reflected on the long, strange journey toward the first full production of Molière in the Park, the company she conceived to bring free theater with a diverse cast and crew to her home borough.

This weekend, after months of delays that radically reshaped her plans, she is on her way to fulfilling that dream, with a staged and costumed reading of “Tartuffe.”

Raised in France and Switzerland, Tiberghien has lived in New York since 1995, directing plays regionally and Off Broadway. Walking through the park a few years ago, she wondered to herself, “Why isn’t there a company dedicated to putting on theater here?”

She created a nonprofit in 2018 to fill that role. Since Shakespeare already has his own park gig, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, and since she is French, she chose Molière, whose works she has long admired. “I had been trying to be hired to direct Molière for years,” she said.

And since the plays mix comedy and drama, she added, “it’s great for an outdoor spring theater, because it can be subversive and biting but also festive and joyous.”

Garth Belcon, an executive producer of Molière in the Park, offered another reason: “His plays place their thumb ever so lovingly into the eyes of the establishment and glitterati of his day.”

“Tartuffe,” which revolves around a supposed holy man whose ardent supporters hang on his every idea even when they fly in the face of evidence, certainly fits that bill. With the company’s mission stressing inclusivity, this “Tartuffe” will feature Kate Rigg, a multiracial, multicultural woman, as the title character.

“I appreciate that it wasn’t such a big deal for Lucie,” Rigg said. “And also that she didn’t want me because I was Asian or a woman, but because she wanted a funny person in that role.”

When Tiberghien first envisioned Molière in the Park, everything fell into place with surprising ease.

She contacted Itai Shoffman, who runs the LeFrak Center at Lakeside in Prospect Park — home to a skating rink in winter and a water park in summer — and he said yes to producing plays there. Belcon agreed to be the executive producer, and Jerome Barth, who had helped run Bryant Park and the High Line, joined her board of directors.

“So everybody said yes, but I had no money,” recalled Tiberghien, who is married to the playwright Stephen Belber. “I had to learn to write a grant proposal on the fly.”

With foundation support from the likes of Bloomberg Philanthropies and the de Groot Foundation, Molière in the Park kicked off with readings of “The Misanthrope” at LeFrak Center in the spring of 2019 and “The School for Wives” at the park’s Picnic House that fall. For 2020, the company prepped a full production of “The Misanthrope,” to be directed by Tiberghien, followed by a reading of another play.

Then, of course, came the pandemic.

“We hadn’t spent anything yet so we didn’t lose money,” Tiberghien said. “We didn’t have a huge staff so we were not forced to pay people, or to lay them off.”

Like most of the theater world, Molière in the Park migrated to Zoom. With the lower cost of online productions, the company put on three shows in fairly quick succession — “The Misanthrope,” “Tartuffe” and “School for Wives” — attracting such notable talent as Tonya Pinkins, Samira Wiley, Stew and Raúl Esparza.

Reviewing “Tartuffe” in The New York Times, Jesse Green praised Esparza’s “hilariously outré performance” in the title role and called the production “full of delight for our undelightful time.”

The theater had invested in software that made it easier to light and edit remotely, and hired animators to add other production effects. “It started to feel like we were actually doing a play,” Tiberghien said.

A partnership with the French Institute Alliance Française, in New York, brought in an international audience and enough donations to almost pay for all the productions. “We not only stayed afloat, we grew,” she said.

With the new world of Zoom theater and demand for more online productions, Tiberghien and Belcon ventured into territory they would not have contemplated for years, doing contemporary plays — bringing new perspectives to the theater was central to the company’s intention. “We want new plays that explore the present through the lens of the past, which is what we are trying to do with Molière,” Tiberghien said.

The company finished last year with an online production of Christina Anderson’s “pen/man/ship,” which Tiberghien had directed in regional theaters. It is set in 1896 on a ship bound for Liberia.

In December, with vaccines on the horizon, she hoped for an in-person 2021 production, perhaps even “Tartuffe” and “pen/man/ship” in repertory. A month later, budgetary and Covid-19 restrictions, among other factors, narrowed the focus to just “Tartuffe,” starring the Tony-nominated Esparza. But the city moved cautiously in its planning, Shoffman said, keeping a moratorium on proposals for outdoor events until March.

The lack of confirmation was both understandable and “extraordinarily frustrating,” Tiberghien said. (The long-established Brooklyn Academy of Music got permission from the city to hold a dance event at LeFrak in April.)

Unable to get sponsorship without official approval, the company was in a “financially precarious situation,” and Tiberghien briefly doubted the show would go on.

Shoffman said he stayed hopeful. “The parks department was inundated with requests about opening up all over the city,” he said. “I thought they’d be likely to say yes to a nonprofit group offering free culture to the public, so I was encouraging Lucie to stick with it.”

As the clock ticked on, the planned two-week run of “Tartuffe” was knocked in half, and then from a full production to this staged reading. “It became: ‘What could we get done with just a week of rehearsals and a week of shows?’” Belcon said. Esparza then left the production, leading eventually to Rigg’s casting as Tartuffe.

It was only on May 13 that Molière in the Park got the official go-ahead, with time for just a handful of remote rehearsals and two days in the space to prepare. All 165 seats (socially distanced in pods) for the three free shows were snapped up within the first 24 hours.

“Now we have to work triple time to make it happen,” Belcon said soon afterward. Safety protocols for the actors, designers and audience members had to meet local and Actors’ Equity standards.

The actor Jared McNeill, who did three of the company’s Zoom plays from his home in Italy last year, said that while the limitations were frustrating, he ultimately has been eager to go forward. “I’ve worked with some of these actors and developed a friendship, yet I’ve never met them in person before,” he said.

Tiberghien holds out hope for a full-fledged indoor “Tartuffe” at the French Institute this fall, as well as another play reading at Prospect Park’s Picnic House — although for that, she will be competing with other organizations emerging from the pandemic.

The company will continue expanding their reach with Zoom productions, and Tiberghien plans to eventually hire other directors for full Molière productions in Prospect Park, but not anytime soon. “I want to direct the first one myself,” she said.