Pooling their resources for Moliere's 'Miser'
ART, Theatre de la Jeune Lune team up in production of classic
CAMBRIDGE -- Swallowed up in a billowing white coat and a floppy chef's cap made from a
Airaldi is in the American Repertory Theatre's basement rehearsal space. As Master Jacques, he's standing in front of his employer, Harpagon, the famous cheapskate in Moliere's "The Miser," who is sitting in a tiny washtub, feet dangling over the edge. Harpagon has just ordered the chef to prepare a meal for guests. But nothing fancy. Or even edible. Still, even bad food needs to be purchased.
"I need some . . ." Airaldi's hand flutters by itself around his mouth so that the word "money" won't escape. Dominique Serrand, the director, has him try three different ways; swallowing, mispronouncing, and otherwise obliterating the dreaded word.
When Airaldi finally spits it out, Steven Epp's roar as Harpagon is instantaneous, and so is the chef's subsequent leap out of the room. It's a classic bit of comic timing, done perfectly.
Even a glimpse of rehearsal reveals what can happen when two like-minded and renegade companies -- the ART and the 25-year-old Minneapolis-based Theatre de la Jeune Lune -- put the heavyweight comic talents of their combined casts to work.
Veterans of both troupes are in the show: The director, Serrand, has worked for Jeune Lune since its beginnings in Paris, and Epp has nearly as long. Along with Airaldi, ART actors Karen MacDonald and Will LeBow have key roles.
Before the rehearsal, Serrand, who wears a crisp white shirt that sets off his tan and stylish blue-framed glasses, and Epp, with a greying crew cut and the big schnozz so right for a character actor, talk about their roots in physical comedy and their desire to find other layers within comedy -- even tragic ones.
In the play, Harpagon -- wealthy, widowed, and parsimonious -- keeps his adult children on a tight leash. His daughter, Elise, falls in love with Valere, a young man of noble parentage. But Harpagon has betrothed her to an elderly friend. Harpagon's son, Cleante, has fallen for a country girl named Marianne, but finds out that his father plans to wed her himself. Fate intervenes to right everyone's fortunes.
Knowing that "The Miser" is usually done as a comedy or a farce, Jeune Lune dug into its history and found that Moliere wrote it after two of his plays, "Tartuffe" and "Dom Juan," had been censored.
"Basically his company said, `Come on, write something, we need to eat,' " says Serrand. "It's an angry play made up of many plays. You can read how he borrowed from some of his most romantic work in terms of the lovers, and some of his most farcical relationships."
But "if you are too, too farcical, it becomes a bag of tricks," he says. "If there's something profoundly human and moving, it's far more exciting." Jeune Lune means "new moon" in French, and like the moon, the democratically run company -- Serrand and Epp are two of five artistic directors with equal power -- changes what it does regularly. The company made its name doing highly visual productions by classic European playwrights, including Carlo Goldoni, Bertolt Brecht, and Georges Feydeau, as well as contemporary ones such as Yasmina Reza. It has also performed original work by company members. Recently the troupe has added opera to its repertoire. "There's a point in the emotions where you have to sing," says Epp. "The theater side of the company learned a great deal from having gone into that opera world and found out what it takes to sustain emotion at that level in performance. It requires great discipline."
That's one of the lessons that members of the company took away from training with Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Serrand and several other Lecoq students formed Jeune Lune there in 1978 and ended up in 1985 in Minneapolis, where two of the artistic directors were from.
"What they bring is a sense of physical virtuosity," says Gideon Lester, the ART's associate artistic director. "Lecoq has probably been the most significant force on European physical theater. [His school is] known primarily as a clown school, but it's much more than that. It trains actors and directors how to move the body in space, and it also connects with really ancient traditions of vaudeville and commedia dell-arte."
Those physical-comedy roots are why Serrand knows to give Airaldi the stage business of having one part of his body prevent another from doing its job.
In order to do Moliere right, Lester says, "It really takes a profound understanding of the craft of comedy. That's what Jeune Lune brings."
The company has always drawn from a multicultural prop trunk of disciplines, including classical farce, circus, and cinema. Serrand says he prefers to say that it draws from different cultures, rather than styles.
In keeping with the company's multinational bent, the set for this French play will be based on Cuban architecture. It happens that the set designer, Riccardo Hernandez, was born in Cuba. Serrand had a book that he loved on Cuban architecture. In showing it to Hernandez, Serrand realized the architecture provided the perfect metaphor for the show.
"It's both well-preserved and unpreserved 18th-century architecture, because capitalism has not brought down all those buildings," he says. "At the same time they were in disrepair. That is to me very symbolic of miserliness.
"A miser is someone who keeps having what he has and at the same time has no respect for it."
Lester says the founders of the company are influenced by their unlikely home in the Midwest. "In Paris, they were surrounded by virtuosity at all times, by people who went to the theater regularly," he explains. "In Minneapolis, dealing with the struggle, the hard winters, has made them very inventive."
Serrand says the company was torn about leaving Paris. "Funnily enough," he points out, "that's exactly what Moliere did. He went for 20 years away from his home town to travel the country so he could establish the work he was doing."
Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com. 