Famous Troupe in Manhattan

Le Bourgeois Sentilhomme (by Moliere) was the opening bill of a momentous Broadway engagement; for the first time in its illustrious 275-year history, the Comedie Franc,ise was performing (in French) on U.S. soil. It was fitting that the Comedie should raise its first Broad way curtain on something by France's most famous playwright; it was, on the whole, wise that it chose from Moliere something so relatively familiar and so lightly entertaining as Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Far from the great Moliere of Le Misanthrope, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme is indeed not only broad Moliere, but also broad comedy. Its picture of the rich, gullible upstart M. Jourdain, who desires, with the most impassioned fatuousness, to live like--and among--persons of quality, is a sort of satiric-strip characterization. There is a delightful absurdity about him, whether in the family scenes, or with the lackeys he yells for "just to see if they heard him," or in his famous enraptured discovery that he has been talking prose for 40 years. In his pursuit of the graces and his groping for quality, he employs a battalion of instructors, only to go on dancing like an elephant and fencing like a paralytic. For his monomaniacal follies, he is everywhere guffawed at and everlastingly gulled.

Moliere's joking is broad, but his character sense is broad-bottomed; somehow, though M. Jourdain's head swims with wild delusions, his clumsy feet stay on the ground. And the Comedie Franchise's Louis Seigner keeps him that way, makes him seem human while remaining idiotic, and so childish as to be likable. Actor Seigner's would-be gentleman becomes a solid center round which revolve a succession of sideshows.

The sideshow nature of the play* makes possible a diversity of insights into the Comedie's methods of production. If much is traditional and even ritualistic, very little seems petrified. In view of interspersed high slapstick of dancing and singing and fencing masters, of ostentatious banquet scenes and staircase serenades, of a Turkish fandango suggesting fraternal-order shenanigans. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme becomes a varied though lengthy evening. Despite its measure of real low comedy, it retains a kind of ballet air. There is something ceremonious as well as earthy in its laughter, and a pinch of period charm in all its horseplay.

Founded in 1680 by Louis XIV as a state-subsidized actors' cooperative, the Comedie Franchise has been called France's first nationalized industry. It is the most ancient theatrical organization in the world.

Originally, it combined two of Paris' existing dramatic companies, one of which was Moliere's own Troupe du Roi. Moliere himself was at the time seven years dead. But in his lifetime he had been recognized as a great playwright and, unlike Shakespeare, as a great actor too. It was in his spirit that the new theatrical enterprise got under way. State funds offered actors great prestige, security and high incomes, and through the centuries Le Franc,iase has presented such alltime greats as Talma, Rachel, Mounet-Sully and Bernhardt. But where state funds are involved, so are political favors. In the early part of the 20th century, the mistress of an influential politician had a better chance to get into the Comedie Franc,aise than a talented actress. In unimaginative hands, the great French theatrical tradition of the Comedie became musty and dull.

About 20 years ago, the old theater was revivified when the Big Four of the Paris theater (Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, Georges Pitoeff, Gaston Baty) swept into the House of Moliere and swept out the mustiness and pedantry that had infected it. Today it consists of two theaters, the Salle Richelieu on the Right Bank, where classical plays are given, and the Salle Luxembourg on the Left Bank, where contemporary plays are given. It has a staff of more than 400 actors and technicians, and its repertoire is so immense that it could give a completely different program every day for five years. It gives its actors a chance to play in, and its audiences a chance to see, such varied fare as Shakespeare and Beaumarchais, Mauriac and Montherlant. It combines the best of the old and the best of the new in France. Actor-Producer Jean-Louis Barrault once said: "I have a god: the theater. When I entered Le Franc, I entered a religion whose temple was La Comedie and whose pope was Moliere."

* A "comedie-ballet," Le Bourgeois Gentil-homme, when first produced in 1670, was less important for its Moliere text than for its Lully music, while most important of all (with Orientalism the rage) was its Turkish ballet.

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