The Art of Lying

Review of The Liar at Westport Country Playhouse

The name David Ives conjures memories of his first huge hit, All in the Timing, which was, but for Shakespeare’s plays, the most produced play in the country in 1995-96. Likewise, in the 2013-14 season, productions of Ives’ Venus in Fur also came second only to productions of Shakespeare. And speaking of Shakespeare, Ives has created much of his remarkably successful career by translating, adapting, rescuing, re-tooling, or—and he says this himself—respectfully ripping off the tales and ideas of other authors (duly cited, of course).

So it should come as no surprise that Ives’ play The Liar is an adaptation of a classic comedy from 1643 by Pierre Corneille (itself based on a Spanish play of apparently deserved obscurity). For the most part, we come to Ives seeking hilarity. The Liar, a French farce beautifully directed by Penny Metropulos and performed by a stellar cast, does not disappoint. Ives retains Corneille’s verse form and provides laughter in every line. Far from becoming tedious, the verse only augments the fun—especially when Ives twists syllables to rhyme, or adds in enough anachronisms to keep the language zany and surprising. The cast, for its part, enables one to forget about the verse within minutes, except when the playwright wants us to notice it.

Rusty Ross (Cliton), Aaron Krohn (Dorante)

Of course, The Liar concerns, well, a liar. Its main character, Dorante (the skilled and unexpectedly sweet Aaron Krohn) spins lie after lie as his very mode of being. Whenever he’s in a tight spot, or when simply making conversation, the most elaborate, overblown fictions spring from his imagination. For instance, when wishing to impress a friend, Alcippe (the very funny Philippe Bowgen), with his amorous triumphs, Dorante describes his night with a certain lady with outrageous and delightful double entendres. Amidst the verbal riches we all—except Alcippe—may forget that the latter is engaged to the lady.

Indeed one beauty of The Liar is that Dorante’s extravagant stories keep us from growing weary with the plot of unmasking a truth we already know. Another beauty is that the women, far from being ornamental objects of the men’s desire, are, if anything, wittier, cleverer, and more determined in their goals than are the men.

Kate MacCluggage (Clarice), Monique Barbee (Lucrece)

As Lucrece, the initially quiet friend of the more garrulous and showy beauty Clarice, Monique Barbee has arguably the more difficult role and plays Lucrece with sensitivity and grace. As Clarice, Kate MacCluggage’s charisma derives from her palpable joy in acting and her expert fun with the language (MacCluggage was marvelous as a witch in the Long Wharf/Hartford Stage production of Bell, Book, and Candle in 2012).

Also expert is Rebekah Brockman, who gave us such a poignant Thomasina in the Yale Repertory Theatre's Arcadia this past fall. Brockman plays identical twin ladies’ maids: Isabelle, sensual, and Sabine, sanctimonious (and especially quick with a hard slap). The object of Isabelle’s desire and Sabine’s scorn is Cliton, Dorante’s hapless servant (Rusty Ross), as compulsively honest as Dorante is compulsively mendacious. Completing the cast is Brian Reddy, very funny as Dorante’s father, and Jay Russell as Philiste, friend and advisor to the hotheaded Alcippe.

Jay Russell (Philiste), Philippe Bowgen (Alcippe)

Matching the wit of the script and the sparkle of the cast is a set design by Kristen Robinson that is at once very French, very modern, and delicious to look at: the light green trees put one in mind of pistachio sorbet. The furnishings—black and white, spare and elegant—make for precisely choreographed set changes performed by the cast to French music (designed by David Budries) that sounds like a mix of hip-hop and 1980’s electronic dance tunes. The lighting design (Matthew Richards) heightens our sense of a disco-inflected present. And Jessica Ford’s costumes—as crazily beautiful for the men as they are for the women—complete our transportation to a colorfully unreal world.

On several occasions, characters break the fourth wall to address the audience, making us complicit in their acts of lying. In one of these memorable addresses, Dorante even dips into the subject of existential despair, dodging out of it with a comforting lightness of touch. Certainly, The Liar can be enjoyed as simple, silly farce, but the philosophical questions the play elicits make it a comedic and ironic meditation on the truth, and so very French.

Dorante (read Ives via Corneille) deeply understands not only the necessity of lies as we construct the facets of our social selves, but also the more profound ways in which lies make life not only pleasurable, but bearable.

The Liar
By David Ives
Adapted from Le menteur by Pierre Corneille
Directed by Penny Metropulos

Fight Director: Michael Rossmy; Voice & Text Consultant: Elizabeth Smith; Set Design: Kristen Robinson; Sound Design: David Budries; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Costume Design: Jessica Ford; Props Master: Karin White; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting, Laura Schutzel, CSA; Production Stage Manager: Megan Smith

Westport Country Playhouse
Westport, May 5-23, 2015

Lapsed in Proof

Review of Arcadia at Yale Rep Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, now playing at the Yale Repertory Theatre, is a magnificent play, a comedy of manners set in two very different eras—the early 19th century, aka the Romantic era, and the late 20th century, aka the Scientific era—while all the action occurs in the same drawing room on the estate of Lady Croom in Sidley Park, Derbyshire. The play is a mind-bending disquisition on the place of passion in the rational universe, and the place of volition in the face of chaos theory.

In 1809, we meet Septimus Hodge (Tom Pecinka), tutor to precocious budding teen, Thomasina Coverly (Rebekah Brockman), daughter of Lady Croom. Hodge, who has been seen in flagrante delecto with the very available Mrs. Chater (never seen); Hodge repulses a challenge to a duel by her irate husband, the poetaster Ezra Chater (Jonathan Spivey), by flagrantly flattering his execrable poem The Couch of Eros. Chater chooses not to kill what he believes to be a favorable critical opinion. Very droll, the 19th century scenes also feature asides on the changeover from the rational aesthetic of the Enlightenment to the romantic aesthetic of the Gothic, as a landscape architect, Richard Noakes (Julian Gamble) is on hand to transform the Croom estate into a carefully designed “wilderness” with faux ruins and hermitage sans hermit. Wildean paradoxes and witty sallies abound—such as play with the phrase “carnal embrace”—and interesting motifs begin to emerge, such as Thomasina’s interest not only in what human bodies get up to when in congress, but also her anachronistic sense of how math helps us foresee the future—in thermodynamic terms.

Indeed, Stoppard’s play might be said to take the idea “anachronism” and twist it about so that, by play’s end, we experience a telling scene of synchronicity across the centuries in a very satisfying “dance to the music of time.” Time, we might say, while it flows in one direction, does sometimes snag on certain interesting eddies as Arcadia brings to light.

The play fleshes out our sense of the stakes of the 19th century segments by introducing us, in present day, to two writers: Hannah Jarvis (René Augesen) and Bernard Nightingale (Stephen Barker Turner)—she a best-selling writer of romantic nonfiction, he a scholar of the romantic period out to prove a hunch. She has written a book on Caroline Lamb that Bernard eviscerated, and they both converge on Sidley Park for information—she on the mysterious hermit who lived in the hermitage, he to prove that Byron had visited there, cuckolded Chater, and killed him in a duel. Much of the humor of their exchanges has to do with the oneupmanship of scholarship, the high-handedness of academic debate, and, of course, the shakiness of the grounds of Nightingale’s every leap of faith. History, Stoppard demonstrates deliciously, is hardly an exact science.

Running about this central battle of wits—Augesen plays Hannah with the forthright manner of a woman long since done kowtowing to men in the interest of seduction, and Turner’s Bernard is an over-dressed coxcomb of limited scruples and vaunting ambition—are various Coverleys, most notably Valentine Coverly (Max Gordon Moore), a math grad student in the present day. Moore is indispensable in his grasp of how to make Valentine’s nerdy obsessiveness articulate and interesting; he holds down an important expository role with depth and conviction, giving us the ramifications of Thomasina’s scribbles (she prefigures fractals) and their thermodynamic applications. Valentine is also a possible romantic attachment for Hannah while Chloë Coverly (Annelise Lawson)—a “pert thing” as they say—makes a play for Bernard. The latter day Coverleys, in other words, are all about “carnal embrace,” while Val also tries to apply an algorithm to grouse populations on the estate (the hunting diaries are important) and Chloë wonders if sexual attraction is the important deviation that throws off determinism, if, in other words, eros promotes errors. There is also the “red herring”—if you like—of Gus Coverly (Bradley James Tejeda), the mute (since age 5), younger brother of Val and Chloë, who develops a crush on Hannah, and his doppelgänger in the past (also Tejeda): Augustus, a self-possessed young lord dismissive of his tutor.

As Hodge, Pecinka displays the unflappable hauteur of the underling who is, in many ways, the most masterful figure. In Part Two, the 19th century action moves up a few years to 1812 and the relation between Hodge and his prime pupil threatens to become a conflagration that is made literal—et in Arcadia ego. Brockman plays precocious teen with a feel for Thomasina’s vulnerability and sagacity. A certain stiffness, though, makes the characters’ attraction not as warm or charming as it might be.

And that applies to the production in general: it is superbly mounted on an airy set, with the usual technical efficiency of the Rep and lovely costumes—Felicity Jones as Lady Croom is particularly well-gowned, as is Thomasina in Austenian aplomb, and Bernard’s suits are always attention-grabbing, while a fancy-dress party late in the play gives Moore an occasion to don 19th century waistcoat, tights, and boots, all of which seems to suit Valentine perfectly. But there’s something a bit “technical” about the presentation as well, as though the cast has not yet found the rhythms to make Stoppard’s highly literate script sing. A certain fussiness of diction rather than the pleasure of the text intrudes, though Pecinka and Jones both deliver great parting shots on their way, respectively, out the door, Turner makes academic posturing and diatribe a self-satisfied skill, and Augesen is a strong if not entirely sympathetic Hannah, while Spivey effectively turns on a dime as Chater’s bluster turns to blushing.

There is also fun with a tortoise—called Lightning—and other assorted props that remain in view on the large handsome table, regardless of era, and with a host of questions that must be resolved: was Chater killed? Who was the hermit? What do the missives in the copy of The Couch of Eros in Byron’s possession mean? Is Bernard right about anything? And if you can draw a leaf or predict grouse with an iterated algorithm, can you also plot the as-yet-unlived course of our lives? And can we ever know a past we never saw, as time moves in one direction? Doesn’t it?

Stoppard’s busy, astounding, thought-provoking, and entertaining Arcadia, as directed by James Bundy, is a handsome production, well-cast and well-staged and quite correct, though, in effect, more rational than sublime.

Arcadia By Tom Stoppard Directed by James Bundy

Composer: Matthew Suttor; Choreographer: Emily Coates; Scenic Designer: Adrian Martinez Frausto; Costume Designer: Grier Coleman; Lighting Designer: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer; Dialect Coach: Stephen Gabis; Production Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Casting Director: Tara Rubin Casting; Stage Manager: James Mountcastle; Photos: Joan Marcus

Yale Repertory Theatre October 3-25, 2014