Tiberghien, Lucie

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    ‘The Miser’ Review: Updating Molière, but Missing a Key Ingredient

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    This Molière in the Park production doesn’t have the sharp satirical bite of the original.The support beam of theater in France, Molière is nowhere near as famous in the United States. Yet the comic high jinks, star-crossed lovers and long-lost relatives that pop up in his play “The Miser,” first produced in 1668, will be instantly familiar to anybody who has ever seen a Shakespeare comedy.Where Molière stands out, however, is as a sharp social satirist whose denouncing of the vain, the hypocritical and the simply deluded have not aged — once timely, they are now timeless. Unfortunately it is precisely that element that is missing from the Molière in the Park production of “The Miser” at the LeFrak Center in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.The title character, Harpagon (Francesca Faridany), is a curdled, choleric, elderly man consumed by greed. It’s not even that he wants money to live in luxury: Harpagon just wants to possess it.The play relentlessly ridicules Harpagon and his pathological greed, along with his tyrannical ways at home, where he lords it over his two daughters, the flighty Elise (Ismenia Mendes) and the flashy Cleante (Alana Raquel Bowers). Complicating matters, Elise is in love with her father’s steward, Valere (Calvin Leon Smith, fresh from a terrific turn as the closeted Larry in “Fat Ham”), while Harpagon and Cleante both covet the fetching Marianne (MaYaa Boateng, from “Fairview”).That women are playing Cleante (a man in the original) and Harpagon indicates that the director Lucie Tiberghien, who is also the artistic director of Molière in the Park, is not stuck in tradition. Although it doesn’t gum up the works, why keep Harpagon as a male character, for example, and make Cleante a female one? This is where Molière’s relative obscurity in the United States becomes an asset since many audience members would not even be aware of the difference, as everything is played matter-of-factly.Trickier is Faridany as Harpagon. An essential part of the play is that the character covets the same woman as his son (OK, daughter), so his being an elderly man adds an element of discomfort. This does not hit as hard when he is played by a woman who is far from “over 70,” Harpagon’s intended age.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: At ‘Tartuffe’ in the Park, Hypocrisy Is No Picnic

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      The 17th-century play, staged by the theater company Molière in the Park, skewers those who preach morality yet practice anything but.I like to think that Molière, the great French playwright who died in 1673, would have really enjoyed the flagrant hypocrisy of our current political moment. Each month seems to bring new duplicities and new scandals, lies big and small — the résumés embroidered like Rococo tapestries, the lawmakers endorsing conspiracy theories to boost their careers. A devotee of prevarication and double-dealing, Molière would have made the most, in three acts, of stories like these. In some ways and in multiple plays, he already has. More than 350 years dead, he can seem effortlessly, wickedly contemporary.But a current production of “Tartuffe,” presented by the theater company Molière in the Park, drawing from the playwright’s original version, takes a different approach. A cause célèbre in 1664 when it was written, the play was quickly banned by an archbishop with a limited sense of humor. It skewers not only those who preach morality while practicing alternatives, but also the toadies and dupes who keep people like that in power. Sounds pertinent, doesn’t it? This slick, streamlined production, however, staged outdoors in Prospect Park by the director Lucie Tiberghien, is so busy stomping around its small stage that it never reaches out into the present.The English-language premiere, which credits Maya Slater as its translator, has simplified the original, reducing the number of characters and mostly dispensing with the third act. When “Tartuffe or The Hypocrite” begins, Tartuffe (Matthew Rauch, oilier than a perfect New York slice), a priestly figure, is already installed in the home of Orgon (Yonatan Gebeyehu), a wealthy man. Orgon’s wife, Elmire (Michelle Veintimilla), and his son and brother-in-law all see through Tartuffe, but Orgon and his mother refuse to believe ill of him. Eventually, Tartuffe propositions Elmire. But even this doesn’t sway Orgon. He would rather disinherit his own family than believe his own wife.Molière in the Park first staged “Tartuffe” nearly three years ago, with a different cast and using a different translation. That was a pioneering work of Zoom theater, presented back when most of us were still figuring out how to use the mute button. (A live version, with a somewhat changed cast, followed a year later.) In his New York Times review, Jesse Green called the streamed show “full of delight for our undelightful time” and praised the production’s allusions to the Trump White House and Black Lives Matter. So how strange that this production, despite its modern dress, resists contemporary allusion entirely, reducing “Tartuffe” to a pedestrian domestic farce.Under Tiberghien’s direction, the play begins in high energy and high dudgeon, with most of the characters racing around the stage — a square set atop another square — and speaking couplets speedily, long before the audience has any understanding of what’s what and who’s who. That stage is plopped into the middle of a circular plaza at the park’s LeFrak Center, which serves as an ice-skating rink in the winter and a splash pad in the summer. The play, which is relentlessly interior, seems disconnected from this environment.And at the matinee I saw, it failed to connect with its audience — or at least the several dozen middle school students in attendance, who napped, whispered, fidgeted and surreptitiously checked phones. Teenagers are, like Molière, keen to discover and condemn adult duplicity. But barring a slow-motion sequence at the play’s end, they found little to divert or engage them. As both teenagers and headline readers know, we are in a moment of pervasive political and religious insincerity. Someone should tell this “Tartuffe.”Tartuffe or The HypocriteThrough May 27 at the Prospect Park LeFrak Center, Brooklyn; moliereinthepark.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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

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      Molière in the Park garnered praise for Zoom productions of “Tartuffe” and other plays. Putting on an outdoor show in Brooklyn has been another matter.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.”Kate Rigg (with Andy Grotelueschen) takes on the role of Tartuffe, a duplicitous holy man.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“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.”From left: Marjan Neshat, Postell Pringle, Jared McNeill and Nicole Ansari at a recent rehearsal. Though McNeill performed with some fellow actors in other Molière in the Park shows on Zoom, he said he was meeting them in person for the first time.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe 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.)Kaliswa Brewster, left, and Tonya Pinkins in the company’s streaming production of “The School for Wives.”via Moliere in the ParkUnable 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. “His plays place their thumb ever so lovingly into the eyes of the establishment,” said Garth Belcon (far left, with Tiberghien at center), a co-founder of Molière in the Park.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt 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. More