Doctor, Doctor, Doctor
- Jonathan Kalb
- 36 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Jeffrey Hatcher’s new version of The Imaginary Invalid, directed by Jesse Berger, is a smart and joyously cracked adaptation of Molière’s famous last play. Witty, sleek (a quick 80 minutes), and eye-poppingly colorful, it’s a delightful comic confection that feels like a perfect start to a New York summer. It’s also—and this is crucial—splendidly acted, with delectable performances by Arnie Burton and Sarah Stiles that consistently heighten its silliness.
Scholars have long lauded The Imaginary Invalid as a masterpiece, but it’s diabolically hard to produce well in our age. It’s a play about a mad hypochondriac who tyrannizes over his family and allows himself to be fleeced by charlatan doctors. He wants to marry his daughter to a doctor—the son of one of his fraudulent physicians—in order to get free treatment for life.
The main problem is that most people today don’t automatically assume doctors to be charlatans, so the extensive original satire can feel dated and overdone. Also, Molière originally conceived the piece as a comédie-ballet with long, lampoonish musical interludes featuring dancing gypsys, shepherds, and more, and these sequences sorely test our patience today too. I’ve seen several contemporizations of Imaginary Invalid that have doctored the text and lyrics with clever contemporary references. All were well over two hours and felt forced and hortatory, despite occasionally landing good jokes.
Berger commissioned this script for his Red Bull Theater, and he and Hatcher have taken an entirely different approach. They have cut the play by at least a third, eliminated several central characters, severely curtailed the interludes, and distilled the action down to a swift and lean farce. Importantly, they also softened the play’s tone by making the protagonist Argan less irksome than he is in Molière. Hatcher wrote the role with the actor Mark Linn-Baker in mind, he says, because he hoped Linn-Baker’s innate warmth would neutralize Argan’s bitterness.
The tactic worked. Linn-Baker’s is the first Argan I’ve seen who isn’t caustically irritating. He plays the role as a dimwit goofball and grownup child we neither love nor hate because he’s obviously a fool and a foil. The clownish fraudsters around him all use him as their straight man. No one takes him seriously; he’s just a means to a comic end.
The strength of this show is in its modest efficiency and inspired comic invention. Set on a ridiculously small stage with ornate, electric-blue walls (design by Beowulf Boritt), the production parks Argan, master of a cramped studio that wants to be a mansion, center stage in a “combination LA-Z-BOY CHAIR/HOSPITAL BED.” This swiveling, folding, rising and lowering contraption serves as his man-crib, an examination table, and the site of numerous proctological sight gags built around the treatment of his main ailment: numb buttocks. Linn-Baker soldiers through it all with a perpetually baffled deadpan, inexorably awestruck at the brilliance of his doctors.
These doctors, meanwhile, are actually brilliant to us in another way: as comedians. All three are played by Arnie Burton in a tour de force, quick-change performance that taps the very deep well of this inspired actor’s talents. Burton invents three hilariously distinct corrupt and venal figures who are such a joy to scoff and giggle at we keep hoping they’ll return. There’s wonderfully suave and smarmy Dr. Purgon, and deliciously shifty Dr. Diafoirus, but most bizarre of all is the zealous enema-expert Dr. Fleurant, who dresses in Hulk-green and speaks like Arnold Schwarzenegger while wielding a steaming enema apparatus the size of an RPG.
Stiles also anchors things with a terrific performance as the saucy maid Toinette. Toinette is the one who cures Argan in the end by impersonating a doctor and then convincing him to become one, but along the way she earns our trust by establishing a baseline of sanity with an air of seen-it-all, unimpressible dryness. Stiles is wonderfully understated in this role, her poised non-chalance the perfect complement to Burton’s wacky extravagance. Her timing and comic carriage are dead-on. Watch the way she holds her whole upper body stiff as if her neck were clamped in place by the ruff piece at her collar. Hatcher’s dumb one-liners wouldn’t be nearly as funny without this weird rigid delivery.
TOINETTE: All these things [the doctors] do to you, it’s like you donated your body to science but they couldn’t wait.
* * *
ARGAN: You resent my doctors because they have letters after their names.
TOINETTE: My name’s filled with letters, I got three t’s, two e’s, and a big damn twah!
There is much more to enjoy: Emily Swallow’s fearless portrayal of Argan’s grasping and conniving new wife Béline, Russell Daniels’s absurd mugging as the lummox unwanted fiancé Thomas, and Emilie Kouatchou’s ditsy waffling as Argan’s daughter Angelique.
This elegantly streamlined Imaginary Invalid is a high achievement and I celebrate its creation. Nevertheless, I also feel inclined to observe that Molière’s play did originally contain a sneakily thoughtful dimension that has been shorn away in this purely farcical version. Molière wasn’t just sending up quack doctors, faithless wives, and greedy lawyers but also satirizing a more general condition of tyrannical monstrosity born of infantile narcissism, and risking a nasty protagonist to do so. That obviously connects to some rather pressing concerns of ours today.
No worries. The world is big enough for multiple approaches to Molière. And if, having enjoyed this one, you find yourself curious about how a more thoughtfully satirical one might work, I enthusiastically recommend Taylor Mac’s Prosperous Fools at Theatre for a New Audience. Mac’s play departs much further from its source (Le Bourgeois gentillehomme) than Hatcher’s, taking very precise satirical aim at the actual tyrannical monstrosity around us. The two plays share a vital and unkillable anarchical root, and speak to one another with urgency, hilarity, and love.
By Molière
Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher
Directed by Jesse Berger
New World Stages