Quote of the Day (Moliere, With Don Juan on How ‘To Do Anything I Want With Impunity’)

“If it happens that I am discovered, without my lifting a finger I’ll see the whole cabal espouse my interests and defend me in spite of and against anyone. In short, this is the real way to do anything I want with impunity. I shall set myself up as a censor of the actions of others, judge everyone harshly, and have a good opinion of no one but myself. If once anyone has offended me the least little bit, I shall never forgive, and shall very quietly retain an irreconcilable hatred. I shall play the avenger of Heaven’s interests, and, on that convenient pretext, harass my enemies, accuse them of impiety, and contrive to turn loose against them some undiscerning zealots who, without knowing what it’s all about, will raise a public outcry against them, load them with insults, and d—n them loudly by their own private authority. That’s the way to take advantage of men’s weaknesses, and for an intelligent mind to adapt itself to the vices of his day.” —French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), Don Juan, or, The Stone Guest (1665), translated by Donald Frame, in Tartuffe and Other Plays (1967)

In writing a play for his time, Moliere ended up creating a seriocomic parable for all times—but one that seems especially prescient for this troubled season in American history.

I couldn’t help sharing the astonishment of the spineless but sensible servant Sganarelle, who, after warning his master about a fearsome moving and talking statue that represents doom, hears Don Juan blithely reply, “hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtues.”

Every line in the above quote feels as if it could have been said now about a national figure who, whatever his other qualities, surely knows how to “take advantage of men’s weaknesses.”

(The image accompanying this post shows Andrew Weems as Sganarelle and Adam Stein as Don Juan in a production of Don Juan, which played in The Old Globe Theatre of San Diego from May 8 to June 13, 2004. It was directed by Stephen Wadsworth.)

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on Reason Vs. Love)

“Each day my reason tells me so;
But reason doesn't rule in love, you know.”—French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), The Misanthrope, translated by Richard Wilbur (1666)

The image accompanying this post, from a 2013 production of The Misanthrope at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre, features Erik Hellman as Alceste, Moliere’s title character, and Grace Gealey as Celimene, the coquette who distracts him from reason.

This will not be a Happy Valentine’s Day for Alceste!

Quote of the Day (Moliere, Letting a Narcissist Speak for Himself)

“I'm clever, handsome, gracefully polite;
My waist is small, my teeth are strong and white;
As for my dress, the world's astonished eyes
Assure me that I bear away the prize.
I find myself in favor everywhere,
Honored by men, and worshipped by the fair;
And since these things are so, it seems to me
I'm justified in my complacency.”— French playwright, actor, and poet Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, AKA Moliere (1622–1673), The Misanthrope (1666), translated by Richard Wilbur (1955)

This Day in Theater History (Moliere, Stricken Mid-Performance, Dies Offstage)

Feb. 17, 1673—Maybe he was tempting fate, but, just as Moliere was mocking doctors in the latest satire he'd written for his troupe, The Imaginary Invalid, he began to cough and gasp towards the end of the comedy's fourth performance. 

The audience, at first stunned, fell into familiar laughter when they saw the French actor, director, theater administrator, and playwright grinning. But he had been coughing up blood and had to be carried home in a sedan chair.

Moliere frantically urged his company to summon his wife and a priest to hear his last confession, but neither arrived in time before he died, at age 50, succumbing to a seizure brought on by tuberculosis.

Why didn’t Moliere call for a doctor as he expired? I can think of four possibilities:

1) He knew his case was hopeless at this point, as he’d been suffering from TB for several years, refusing to let it curtail his creative activity;

2)    2) He thought doctors were incompetent and/or useless;

3)    3)  He dreaded physicians (an attitude not entirely excluding Possibility #2, given the state of 17^th-century medicine); and

4)    4)  Dialogue he’d written for himself in his new farce, a broad wink to the audience, might have revealed how he thought men of medicine would react to his emergency: “Your Molière’s an impertinent fellow… If I were a doctor, I’d have my revenge… when he fell ill, I’d let him die without helping him. I’d say: ‘Go on, drop dead!’”

But the choice of the two people that Moliere (the pseudonym adopted by Jean Baptiste Poquelin) did want at his side echoed the two major controversies of his life and career. 

There was a two-decade difference in age between him and wife Armande, at a time when significant age gaps between spouses were even more snickered at than they are now. 

Adding fuel to the wisecracks aimed at him: the rumor that Armande was either the sister of his former mistress or her daughter by Moliere.

(Remember: With no such thing as exercise regimens, understanding of diets, or regular checkups, a 50-year-old man in 1673 was more like 60—at least.)

Moliere was fully aware of what a buffoon he looked like to his critics. The School for Wives (1662), written not long after his marriage, featured the playwright himself as a foolhardy bachelor bound and determined to wed a pretty young thing. 

And in The Misanthrope, the title character is nearly undone not just by his judgmental temperament but by his jealousy of the younger, flirtatious woman he loves.

As for a priest to hear his confession: the Roman Catholic Church came closer to wreaking vengeance on him than the medical profession did. Though Moliere had been careful in Tartuffe and Don Juan to show that he despised religious hypocrisy rather than the practice of religion itself, the Church saw these plays as direct attacks on the institution. 

When he died, his widow had to plead directly with King Louis XIV (someone that Moliere had been careful not to offend) to allow a Christian burial—an appeal only granted on the condition that the ceremony be done with no pomp.

Today, nobody but Moliere scholars knows the names of his critics. But in the three and a half centuries after his death, his work continues to entertain audiences and influence members of the profession for which he literally gave his life. 

Ever since I saw a local production of Don Juan—and a 1970s PBS telecast of Tartuffe starring Donald Moffat and Tammy Grimes—I have marveled at Moliere's slashing wit, as well as his sprightly dialogue rendered in Alexandrine rhymes (and translated superbly by American poet Richard Wilbur). 

I could not let this post go without discussing a bit more about the most dramatic exit he ever made. Have any other entertainers died under similar circumstances?

Well, yes. Interestingly enough, quite a few opera singers died onstage. (I suppose that the enormous vocal demands of their work—and, sometimes, the singers' big frames—left them vulnerable.)

But there have also been several notable cases of other comic actors who, like Moliere, were struck down during a performance:

• Redd Foxx, the example that sprang immediately to my mind, died of a heart attack in October 1991 during rehearsals for the sitcom The Royal Family—and cast and crew, remembering his many feigned attacks two decades before on Sanford and Son, did not immediately suspect anything was amiss this time;
• Dick Shawn, perhaps best remembered as the hippie actor "LSD" in Mel Brooks' film The Producers, suffered a fatal heart attack during a performance at the University of California, San Diego's Mandeville Hall; and 
• Al Kelly, a vaudeville comedian, died in the audience in 1966 right after delivering a Friar's Club roast of Joe E. Lewis.

(For more details on Moliere's death, see this fascinating 2013 post by French literature scholar and novelist Maya Slater, on the Oxford University Press blog.)

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on ‘Artificial Style’)

"This artificial style, that's all the fashion,
Has neither taste, nor honesty, nor passion;
It's nothing but a sort of wordy play,
And nature never spoke in such a way."— French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), The Misanthrope, translated by Richard Wilbur (1666)

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on How Women Can ‘Run Rings Around the Cleverest Man’)

“Yes, all these stern precautions are inhuman.
Are we in Turkey, where they lock up women?
 It's said that females there are slaves or worse,
And that's why Turks are under Heaven's curse.
Our honor, sir, is truly very frail
If we, to keep it, must be kept in jail.
But do you think that such severities
Bar us, in fact, from doing what we please,
Or that, when we're dead set upon some plan,
We can't run rings around the cleverest man?
All these constraints are vain and ludicrous:
The best course, always, is to trust in us.
It's dangerous, Sir, to underrate our gender.
Our honor likes to be its own defender.
It almost gives us a desire to sin
When men mount guard on us and lock us in,
And if my husband were so prone to doubt me,
I just might justify his fears about me.”—French playwright and satirist Moliere (1622-1673), The School for Husbands (1661), translated by Richard Wilbur (1992)

Quote of the Day (Poet Richard Wilbur, Translating Moliere With Verve)

“I may be pious, but I’m human too:
With your celestial charms before his eyes,
A man has not the power to be wise.
I know such words sound strangely, coming from me,         
But I’m no angel, nor was meant to be,
And if you blame my passion, you must needs        
Reproach as well the charms on which it feeds.
Your loveliness I had no sooner seen
Than you became my soul’s unrivalled queen;
If, in compassion for my soul’s distress,
You’ll stoop to comfort my unworthiness,
I’ll raise to you, in thanks for that sweet manna,
An endless hymn, an infinite hosanna.
With me, of course, there need be no anxiety,
No fear of scandal or of notoriety.”— French playwright Moliere (1622-1673), Tartuffe (1664; English translation by Richard Wilbur, 1965)

Richard Wilbur, born 100 years ago today in New York City, was as honored as a poet can get: the second poet laureate of the U.S. following Robert Penn Warren, as well as a Pulitzer and National Book Award winner. His work reflects his belief, as stated in a Paris Review interview, that “the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good.”

Though it is uncharacteristic of the bulk of his work, Wilbur’s translations of Moliere, Voltaire, and Racine plays have their own unique merit, with Moliere in particular fulfilling what I usually choose in a “Quote of the Day” for the first and last days of the workweek: humor to get readers through tough hours.

I encountered Wilbur’s Tartuffe translation in a high-school anthology, and it made me eager to watch this comedy about a religious hypocrite when the Circle in the Square production was aired on public television in the 1970s. The excerpt above, I think, will give you an idea of its sprightliness, with its rhyming couplets rendering the playwright in as close an English approximation of the joy and wit of the French original as it may be possible to get.

Essay: Falwell Jr. and Religious Right Show When ‘Heaven is Not Averse to Compromise’

“Some joys, it’s true, are wrong in Heaven’s eyes

Yet Heaven is not averse to compromise;

There is a science, lately formulated,

Whereby one’s conscience may be liberated,

And any wrongful act you care to mention

May be redeemed by purity of intention.”—French playwright Moliere (1622-1673), Tartuffe (1664; English translation by Richard Wilbur, 1965)

Religious hypocrisy—the target of Moliere’s sharp satire in 17^th century France—remains just as powerful, perhaps even more so, in 21^st century America. That is the only way to view the news coming out of the evangelical world, starting—but by no means ending—with Jerry Falwell Jr. (pictured).

The son of the founder of the Moral Majority has taught all too many Americans, like Moliere’s scoundrel, that “Heaven is not averse to compromise.” That is benefiting him at the most opportune time: When he has jeopardized his job as president and chancellor of Liberty University through colossal folly.

How many male educators who take it on themselves to guide the morals of young people—and are not shy about doing so—then turn around and post, for all the world to see, on Instagram, a picture of themselves in unzipped pants, with one hand holding a glass and the other around the waist of a young woman whose shorts are also unzipped?

What could that educator have been thinking when he tapped out this caption to the picture? “More vacation shots. Lots of good friends visited us on the yacht. I promise that’s just black water in my glass. It was a prop only.”

That caption only makes matters murkier. What, for instance, is “black water”? What was it a “prop” for? And if this was a yacht, was it the “Monkey Business”—that vessel where, before the 1988 primary season began in earnest, Democratic candidate Gary Hart was photographed with his arm around a young lady not his wife?

At this point, perhaps when the stuff in the “black water” wore off, someone must have persuaded young Falwell to try to contain the damage. It began promisingly enough, when he deleted the post. But then he gave an interview to a local radio station in Lynchburg, Va., and—well, read what he said:

“Yeah, it was weird. She’s pregnant. She couldn’t get her pants zipped and I was like trying to like… I had on a pair of jeans I haven’t worn in a long time and couldn’t get zipped either. So, I just put my belly out like hers. She’s my wife’s assistant, she’s a sweetheart. I should have never put it up and embarrassed her. I’ve apologized to everybody. I promised my kids I will try to be a good boy from here on out.”

Jeans he “couldn’t get zipped”—one too many Taco Tuesdays for the school president? Isn’t that a product of one of the seven deadly sins—gluttony? 

But the clincher in this statement is that phrase “good boy”—a final flippant note that falsified the hymn of contrition.

These days, most authority figures—particularly those at an institution ostensibly dedicated to moral formation—would find it impossible to survive a sex scandal. Even at a secular school, they would be forced to resign immediately, with the board of trustees proclaiming that it’s retained outside counsel to investigate the leader’s misbehavior and the toxic environment he fostered.

But most authority figures also have not labored for Liberty University, with a board of trustees that, with many members loyal to Falwell through friendship (William E. Graham IV, grandson of Billy) or blood (Falwell’s brother Jonathan, also a minister), were willing to overlook “Junior” Falwell’s previous transgressions--numerous enough that I'm not sure why the school wasn't renamed Libertine University.

The so-called “mainstream media” such as The New York Times have been endlessly derided (and yes, let’s stipulate not without reason) for their bias against religious organizations such as Liberty University.

But I must say that these outlets pulled their punches in reporting on other Falwell controversies in the coverage of this recent incident. Invariably, they have listed only two or three.

Chalk it up to impulses toward charity, or, if you insist, the need not to strain the eyeballs of time-pressured readers. 

But no such constraints exist for Messiah University historian John Fea, who, in a blog post after the latest incident, listed three dozen examples of objectionable Falwell statements or actions that could have--but didn't--bring the hammer down on him (e.g., Falwell “created a Blackface face-mask and tweeted about it” and “Michael Cohen had ‘racy photos’ of him and his wife”).

This latest controversy—created, be it noted, entirely through Falwell’s insane Instagram post—proved a bit too much even for the executive committee of the board, which forced him to take an “indefinite leave of absence” even as catcalls from the student body were so loud they could have brought down the walls of Jericho.

(Who could blame these youths who, after being hectored to adhere to “The Liberty Way”—an honor code prohibiting premarital sex and private interactions between members of the opposite sex—now had to watch when the same proscriptions did not apply to their president? Like Bill Murray being pulled towards a seductive Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, Falwell Jr. seems to think that, when applied to himself, “it's more of a guideline than a rule.”)

Clearly, the board was playing for time—time either to announce, after a decent interval, that Falwell had undergone some combination of 12-step program and spiritual counseling to announce that he’d been “redeemed,” or—if the outrage and ridicule still hadn’t subsided—to have a successor in place if Falwell is forced to step down permanently.

Don’t be surprised if Falwell survives this. What others might view as rank pretense, the religious right writes off as a redemption story in the making.

Why should they be put out when Falwell grabs a single woman by the waist when they have already excused a Presidential candidate who’s boasted about grabbing women “by the p----y?”

Unfortunately, Falwell’s not the only one willing to wink at “boys will be boys” behavior—and even engage in some of his own. Far too many evangelicals—and the entire religious right movement—have compromised their stress on personal integrity to win and keep access to power.

It was one thing to support the divorced movie star Ronald Reagan, who secured the allegiance of Falwell’s father and other key evangelicals in the 1980 election when he told them at a major Dallas confab,  “I know you can’t endorse me, but I can endorse you.”

But they could console themselves with the notion that Reagan’s second marriage had endured for nearly 30 years, that there was no serious question that he adored wife Nancy, and that he had a record of public service that could be analyzed.

But they had to shut their eyes far more to Donald Trump, who was unapologetic about his two divorces, exhibiting no real interest in atonement, and—unlike most of the other GOP candidates—lacking any governmental record to prove his fidelity to conservative ideals.

But, as recounted in a New York Times article this past weekend, he told them something, in a Dordt University address, they dearly wanted to hear:

“Christianity will have power. If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.”

The same address became notorious in non-evangelical circles for another Trump statement: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

Ever since then, evangelicals have gone a long way towards confirming Trump’s boast. It doesn’t matter to them that in the process, they demonstrated that their most telling contention about Bill and Hillary Clinton—that character counts—was utterly hollow as they followed someone who far surpassed them in moral turpitude.

Indeed, they exiled anyone who dared to question their passionate embrace of this President with no solid religious or even moral anchor—including at (surprise!), Liberty U., where, four years ago, Mark DeMoss was forced off the board of trustees for criticizing Falwell for personally endorsing Trump for President.

Enjoyment of the kind of power promised by Trump parallels the religious right’s sense of aggrievement and encirclement. All their gains in positions filled and right-wing Supreme Court justices are being jeopardized now through their overreach.

No longer are evangelicals content with debating issues that, no matter what else one might think of them, are indisputably moral in nature, such as abortion and gay rights. Now, they are forcing stalemates on issues of public safety and personal security: gun control, climate change, even COVID-19.

Religious conservatives on social media have raised hackles about politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom being “anti-Christian” for restricting indoor religious gatherings during the COVID-19 outbreak. 

It’s too bad these religious hand-wringers don’t spend as much time denouncing leaders like Falwell whose serial offenses have led more people to question the value of Christianity than an entire school system of secularists.

Tell me: Why do the loudest shouters about others’ sins get caught engaging in them so often themselves?

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on ‘Reason and the Sacred’)

“It’s as if you think you'd never find

Reason and the Sacred intertwined.”― Moliere, Tartuffe (1664

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on a Medical Quack’s Progress)

Sganarelle: “No, I tell you; they made a doctor of me in spite of myself. I had never dreamt of being so learned as that, and all my studies came to an end in the lowest form. I can't imagine what put that whim into their heads; but when I saw that they were resolved to force me to be a doctor, I made up my mind to be one at the expense of those I might have to do with. Yet you would hardly believe how the error has spread abroad, and how everyone is obstinately determined to see a great doctor in me. They come to fetch me from right and left; and if things go on in that fashion, I think I had better stick to physic all my life. I find it the best of trades; for, whether we are right or wrong, we are paid equally well. We are never responsible for the bad work, and we cut away as we please in the stuff we work on. A shoe maker in making shoes can't spoil a scrap of leather without having to pay for it, but we can spoil a man without paying one farthing for the damage done. The blunders are not ours, and the fault is always that of the dead man. In short, the best part of this profession is, that there exists among the dead an honesty, a discretion that nothing can surpass; and never as yet has one been known to complain of the doctor who had killed him.”—Moliere, The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1666), in The Complete Works of Moliere, Vol. II, edited by Charles  Heron Wall (1898)

Theater Review: “The School for Lies,” Adapted by David Ives from Moliere’s “The Misanthrope”

Were Moliere (1622-1673) alive today, it’s easy to imagine him producing something like The School for Lies. To be sure, David Ives has taken a few liberties with The Misanthrope, the French comic genius’ uncompromising satire on an all-too-easily compromised society, but they’re fewer than you’d think.

I managed to catch Walter Bobbie’s sterling staging of this comedy earlier this month, just before it closed, at New York’s Classic Stage Co. The sprightly production was not only endlessly amusing in its own right, but made a persuasive case for mounting this adaptation elsewhere.

All the major characters in this comedy retain their original French names except for the protagonist: called Alceste in the original, he goes by the name of Frank (as in brutally frank) here.

Moliere and his company, the Troupe du Roi, first mounted The Misanthrope at the Theatre du Palais-Royal in 1666. As he did with other works, Moliere molded his protagonist partly on himself, a middle-aged man frustrated by his much-younger paramour’s endless flirtatiousness with other men. Adding even more realism to the proceedings, he cast his wife as the flirt. That bit of double-stunt casting didn’t make this five-act comedy in verse popular in Moliere’s lifetime, but in the centuries since it’s been recognized as one of his finest attempts to stretch French comedy beyond its enormous indebtedness to the Italian commedia dell’arte form.

Ives and Bobbie eliminated the concept of the cuckolded middle-aged man, but Moliere’s central conceit—of a man who practically goes out of his way to create enemies—was effortlessly embodied by Hamish Linklater, who strode around the stage like a mad stork. (Even his hair--the most unruly male top this side of Barton Fink--got into the act.)

Though he has what friend Philinte calls “a preternatural gift for being blunt” (he calls two people he meets “a doormat” and “a bedpan”), Frank is struck uncharacteristically mute by the sight of the glamorous Celimene, and she proves more than a match for him in wit. “You mimic rigor mortis so intently,” she teases as he remains stuck in his verbal stupor.

In a society where candor is punishable as much by law as by custom, Frank’s blunt dismissal of an abysmal poet makes him the target of a lawsuit. Celimene has her own troubles with the law, something this widow hopes a wealthy, well-connected suitor can help her with. Philinte’s fraudulent suggestion that Frank is an aristocrat leads to an amazed outburst from her (“This kook’s a duke?”) and an affair with the delighted misanthrope.

You may or may not recall Mamie Gummer’s name, but her face has the distinctive imprint of her mother, Meryl Streep. I can’t tell you whether she has her legendary parent’s skill with Berlitz-style pronunciation, but, having seen her a couple of seasons ago in the Roundabout Theatre’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, I can say that she displays similar range. While she played a sheltered 15-year-old convent girl all too ripe for seduction in the former, she makes the worldly Celimene here at first amused, then astonished by a man as alien from her world as it’s possible to get.

Bobbie shows a similar sure-handed touch with other cast members, notably Alison Fraser as Celimene’s viperfish frenemy, Arsinoe (“I never gossip, dear—I just report”). Outside of casting, not all of Bobbie’s or Ives’ creative decisions work so smoothly. There’s a routine with a servant, for instance, that wears out its welcome after, oh, the 12th repetition. In addition, Moliere might have protested the decision to soften his depiction of Celimene as a heartless coquette, as well as to substitute a more upbeat ending than his own ambiguous one.

But on the crucial questions—Does it make us laugh? Does it make us think—there’s no doubt that the playwright would have been pleased, as Ives’ clever introduction puts it, by the batter whipped up from Moliere’s ingredients. Even in other instances in which the play departs from what Moliere wrote, he would notice how it pays homage to several of his other texts.

Ives’ title, for instance, not merely takes its cue from Frank’s declaration that society is a school for lies, but also echoes later Moliere classics such as The School for Wives and The School for Husbands. Moreover, the play’s conclusion, in which a character resolves the plot that does not grow organically out of the text, echoes a similar deus ex machine in Moliere’s Tartuffe.

I hadn’t been to the Classic Stage Company since I saw Amy Irving nearly a decade ago in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. Bobbie and Co. have made it more likely that I’ll be back again soon because of their work on The School for Lies.