"...a comedy...full of outrageous, vain, spiteful, and malicious characters."

Director Anders Cato has an intuitive skill for capturing a playwright’s essence, and his range is broad. His Miss Julie in 2002 at the Unicorn Theatre was a definitive one, and his current take on Moliere’s The Misanthrope now playing at the BTF is equally on the mark.

Granted, he has poet Richard Wilbur’s superb translation that turns French hexameters into graceful, witty pentameter couplets, he has also seen to it that his cast can toss those couplets back and forth with an agility that carries the play forward with apparent ease.

The play is a comedy, but it is Moliere’s most bitter one, full of outrageous, vain, spiteful and malicious characters. He even in this play resists a happy ending.

And he gives us a leading character who hates the artificial world that furnishes the background of the play: Paris in the 17th century flourishing under the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV.

A map of both hemispheres of that world (with the Sun King’s image hanging above it) serves as a front curtain of a stage upon the stage. The proscenium is of gold and garlanded with glory. Further suggestion of the tennis court theatres of Moliere’s day are the two “boxes” in which pretentious, over-dressed characters sit as spectators (and can later double as characters in the play).

A second ingenious theatrical use is made of the stage-hands who, dressed as servants perform in unison, to music as they change the elaborate backgrounds to the various scenes. They act as regimented characters in the play itself, responding as good servants should to the watchful commands of their head man servant.

The plot of this bitter-sweet comedy is dominated by Alceste (David Adkins) who hates the artificial world in which he lives, refuses to flatter and pander, but to his own dismay loves Celimene (Kate Jennings Grant) , a beautiful, flirtatious courtesan who flatters everyone and whom he cannot help loving, despite his hating her actions.

His hysterical jealousy begins in the first act when he ridicules Orante (Gerry McIntyre) a sonneteer and rival for Celemene’s love.

Although his friend and cohort Philinte, played winningly by Steven Petrarca, who has a special ease and grace in his delivery of Wilbur’s poetry (and a sympathetic character to play) tries philosophically to get him to accept the foibles of the age, Alceste will not. He cannot be diverted and will storm through the play with tirades and denunciations, priding himself on his own honesty and losing in the end.

That ending makes brief telling symbolism of the condition Alceste’s willful antagonism has bought for himself. In the “two stage boxes” outside the proscenium, as far apart as in a sense they have always been, sit Alceste and Celimene. Silent. End of play.

Along the way, however, much of delightful interest has occurred. Although most of the characters are shallow, elegant and backbiting as they fawn over each other, Philinte’s female counterpart in the person of Elinte, (Tara Franklin) Celemene’s cousin, charming secondary heroine with whom he can pair happily a t he play’s end when Moliere lets us know that the world may be bad, but not hopelessly so, is one who also can treat some of its follies philosophically.

Philante and Elinte are the most “normal” (honest in themselves, but accepting the failures of others without condemnation) characters in the play which mostly is busy being brilliantly lit by fops, played engagingly by Tom Story and James Barry, and by an imposing aging courtesan in purple (Karen MacDonald) who wraps a nimble tongue around her spiteful and “friendly:” advice to one and all .

But it is Alceste who dominates the play, a moral giant (he believes himself) in a trivial society, hard on everyone except himself. He rants, raves, pleads and reviles.

In Act I, he will not listen to Philinte who sees the deceitful world as clearly as he does, but can make allowances:

And before the plays end, having insulted everyone in it, he declares:

With such an attitude how could he have expected to win Celimene who declines his last frenzied proposal with:

It should be apparent that Alceste’s role is a demanding and eccentric one. He asks for rejection from the world he has rejected, and gets it. Adkins handles it with physical agility and never misses a beat in the cadence of the poetry. It is a role that demands constant carping and mainly he handles it well, though perhaps if he were not quite so vehement in his first scene, he would not have to soar so high by the play’s end and almost go over the top.

All in all this is a fine production, director, actors, set and costume designers, musicians and all concerned seem cued to a play, more difficult to perform than some of the other comedies, and considered by many scholars to be Moliere’s best.

Be assured it is well worth a trip to Stockbridge.