Liar Sparkling Dialogue and Dazzling

Liar

Sparkling Dialogue and Dazzling Visuals the Shakespeare Theatre Company's the Liar at the Lansburgh Theatre

Listening to the buzz of the audience during the intermission gives one a pretty good impression of the value of this new…well, new again…play. David Ives' updated and translated version of the seventeenth-century French Farce the Liar by Pierre Corneille does not offer fodder for deep introspective conversation, nor does it inspire animated conversation on current social issues over glasses of red-wine clutched in the hands of the fur-clad matrons in attendance. Instead, titters, chuckles, and outright guffaws could be heard from the moment the house lights came up until the final subduing of the audience as seats -- and the action resumed. There is high comedy in this play, and very little else, but when the pure comedy itself is as masterfully crafted and as universally entertaining as it is in this play nothing else is rally necessary, and in fact would only serve as a distraction.

Seeing a play called the Liar in the heart of the nation's capital, a mere two blocks from the International Spy Museum and less than two miles away from the White House and other major seats of the federal government, might carry certain connotations and expectations. Check these with your coat and leave them outside the theatre proper, however, and let yourself enjoy the ride. Corneille's story revolves around a French gadabout who is simply incapable of telling the truth, recently landed in Paris to find himself a wife. A set of mistaken identities, some purposeful and some otherwise, ratchets up the hilarity of the situation and the hyperbole of the language to a fevered pace.

In the tradition of a true French farce, lovers' triangles and quadrangles abound, though they are not always known to by the characters involved; Dorante, the eponymous protagonist of the play, woos one woman with his magnificent falsehoods while believing that she is actually her friend, and these two women willingly engage in perpetuating this perception with wonderful innuendo in some especially memorable scenes. Dorante's servant, in the meantime, is in love with one of a set of twins -- played indistinguishably from each other by the very same actress -- and he can never seem to tell which one he is talking to. Despite these convolutions, the plot is actually relatively simple, and even if you get lost at some point the dialogue remains engaging and humorous enough to make the plot considerations almost non-essential.

This is not to disparage Corneille who was, it must be acknowledged, working within the constraints of French Restoration-era comedy, which is not especially known for the depth of its social value or the real consequence and import of any of the actions or characters within the plays. His characters are well-crafted and truly memorable, though they have lain forgotten by the theatre and literary world for quite some time, and without this foundation it is certain that Ives would not have been able to achieve what he did with the script. The rhyming couplets that this modern playwright lifted from the French into modern English, however, bounce with a wit and playfulness that is wholly original, and it is in the dialogue -- the extravagances, the intricacies, and the verbal sparring and love-making that Ives' crafted with inspiration from Corneille -- that this play finds its true genius.

The jokes range form the raunchy to the almost unbearably corny, but the actors all acquit themselves in a remarkably deadpan and unaware attitude when required, which is often, waiting out the audience's laughter with extreme -- and extremely repetitive -- aplomb. Christian Conn is more than suitably nimble with his tongue and his movements as he dances ever on the precipice of being trapped in his incessant and incorrigible untruths, and Erin Partain and Miriam Silverman as the pair of friends and deceiving would-be lovers to Conn's Dorante meld an ingenue-ish innocence with a modicum of wicked devilry, taking Ives words and making them both delicious to mouth and to hear. None of the actors fails to play their part perfectly to the hilt, hitting all of the extremes that the period and the modern script demand, demonstrating the extent of the wonderful theatrical talents that this city has to offer for residents and international visitors alike.

Of course, all of the credit cannot be bestowed simply on the authors and the actors; this production easily could have been pushed into the realm of the plastic and repetitive, or ruined by too much attempt at theatrical innovation and directorial re-imagining. Instead, Michael Kahn tightly reigns in this production where necessary while letting it explode in all of the right areas, allowing the full torrent of a French Restoration farce to wash over the audience without flooding them out of the theatre or beating them over the heads with symbolic elements that try to add a "modern significance" to this light-hearted, boisterous, and ultimately frivolous piece of comedic theatre.