Snaky Spell

By T.E.Kalem

TARTUFFE by Moliere comedy" is a modern term, Moliere was a master of the genre over three centuries ago. His characters have a schizophrenic quality; their glib and merry lips belie broody, troubled hearts. The present production of Tartuffe at Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater is infectiously high-spirited, but it scants the biting melancholy wisdom that animates Moliere's satiric moral vision. Fortunately, wading only knee-deep in Moliere is more bracing than total immersion in most playwrights.

He was the god of common sense.

While tragedy moves from sanity toward self-destruction, comedy moves from self-delusion toward preservative sanity. In his pride, the tragic hero overreaches human limits and dies. In his folly, the comic hero pounds his head against those limits, is brought to his senses and lives. It is difficult to know which is the less comfortable end -- death or self-knowledge -- and that is one reason why great tragedy and great comedy are so close.

The man who exists to be brought to his senses in Tartuffe is Orgon (Stefan Gierasch), a bluff, well-to-do bourgeois who courts innocence by association. His mind's eye is so befogged that he persistently mistakes sanctimoniousness for sanctity, guile for goodness. His chosen saint in residence, Tartuffe (John Wood), is a monster of false piety, a dark prince of humbug and hypocrisy. More significantly, he is the stinking essence of the world's wisdom: that a crime is no crime unless one gets caught.

Under Tartuffe's snaky spell, Orgon accedes to the disruption of his household, disinherits his son, signs away all his property, affiances his daughter (Swoosie Kurtz) to Tartuffe, and sweeps his wife into Tartuffe's sweaty-palmed lechery in a seduction scene made hilarious by Tammy Grimes. This is madness, as Moliere knew. As he also must have known, it is a disturbing, distorting mirror image of Christian divestiture -- giving away all worldly goods, cutting one's closest human ties to achieve a holier state of grace.

Like all of Moliere's comedies, Tartuffe is double-edged.

In the title role, John Wood radiates evil.

He is a Rasputin of fraud. The straggly hair that frames his craggy Florentine features is a fright wig of deceit. His flamingo legs carry him with awkward zest from sin to sin, while his tongue utters unguentary lies. Yet we are too conscious that he is a self-aware villain, scoring stunning acting points without carrying complete emotional conviction. And Stefan Gierasch's Orgon is not quite the ideal foil. He seems more like an exacerbated paterfamilias who wants Tartuffe to cow his recalcitrant brood rather than a breathless gull hopelessly infatuated by a bogus saint.

The entire cast works with will and skill, and Patricia Elliott is particularly winning as a perky lady's maid with a tongue of salt and a spine of spunk. Ste phen Porter directs with stylish assurance, and equal praise accrues to Richard Wil bur, the translator-poet. His springy rhyming couplets carry scarcely a trace of melodic monotony and he turns Moliere's French into buoyantly idiomatic English.

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