Tartuffe (2020)

More free theatre streamed during the pandemic, but this time around, it’s not something that was already in the can and ready to air. This was something produced and shot now, social-distance-style. Earlier this spring, I saw a regional production along those veins, a mounting of The Diary of Anne Frank recorded over Zoom, but this is from Moliere in the Park, a remote English-language production of Tartuffe.

When Orgon meets Tartuffe, an allegedly-pious man fallen on hard times, he takes the fellow under his wing and into his home. While Tartuffe fills Orgon’s head with notions of piety and subtly influences his decisions, the trusting patriarch is easily fooled. Meanwhile, the rest of the household recognizes Tartuffe as bad news: a hypocritical, wanton swindler.

On the whole, this production is a disappointment to me. Obviously, producing art over Zoom isn’t an easy task, and we make allowances to the limits of the medium. But I feel like the whole thing would’ve looked better were it not for the digital background it threw up, placing everyone’s individual windows inside of it. Erasing everyone’s own backgrounds to fit into the digital one made everybody look fuzzy around the edges, and people’s hats would randomly disappear in technical glitches. I’m sure all the cast members had at least one blank wall they could’ve positioned themselves in front of, and that would’ve looked a lot cleaner.

This was my first experience with both Moliere and Moliere in the Park (albeit not in the park,) and I found it mostly just okay. All the dialogue is rhyming, and many of the cast members fall into a singsongy pattern with their lines, which can often pull some of the emotion/acting out of the dialogue. That said, things get more fun when Raúl Esparza’s Tartuffe enters the scene, having already been much talked of by the other characters. Esparza is one of the reasons I sought out this production when I heard about it, and his over-the-top performance, both pretending to be oh-so-pious and actually being an insatiable lech, is entertaining.

But really, the other reason I checked out this production is what ultimately makes it worthwhile, and that’s Samira Wiley as Orgon. I’ve loved Wiley since Orange is the New Black (Poussey!), and in this little Zoom production, she’s fantastic. First of all, I like that she’s playing a male character and it isn’t A Thing – she just is, and it very much works. Second, she’s much more consistent about delivering her lines for their content and not for their rhymes, which helps me connect more with Orgon as a character, naïve and misguided as he is. Amid a very unnatural acting environment, she makes it seem effortless, and even if I’m not overly impressed with this production as a whole, it handily reinforces my love for her talent and my desire to see her in whatever roles she wants to play.

Warnings

Implied sexual content (it’s all remote, obviously) and thematic elements.