Features

No question but that the Shotgun Players are on a roll. Ever since last summer’s terrific production of Mother Courage they’ve been showing their stuff by leaping from one high point to another—all equally fine shows, but extraordinarily different in content and style. 

Their last production, The Death of Meyerhold, was so avant garde that it was difficult to even describe the acting—except to mutter “Great stuff. Really great.” So now Shotgun’s gone to the opposite extreme. 

What they’re serving up now at the Julia Morgan Theatre is a classic farce, centuries old. So old, in fact, and so classic, that people may have forgotten that the revered playwright, Moliere, gained his status as a playwright simply because he was enormously good at what he did. And what he did in The Miser is produce one of the great bubbles of pure fun in theatrical history.  

If you absolutely insisted upon it, you might be able to drag some huge meaningful truth out of this hilarious evening’s entertainment, but you probably won’t make many friends that way. The Miser is funny, simply funny and silly as the dickens, carrying no message and with no lessons to teach.  

The play’s a piece of brilliantly conceived fluff, circumambulating around the antics of the extraordinarily miserly miser, Harpagon, played with enormous agility by Clive Worsley. All of the characters are one-dimensional, enacted in a hilariously exaggerated mock-melodramatic style. They take themselves and their absurd issues with absolute seriousness; but absolutely no sense of real pain ever touches their antics. Their very seriousness is the source of the comedy. 

The plot is silly and exaggerated, of course. Harpagon is determined to get through life without spending so much as a cent unless it’s forced out of him. This presents a problem in an era in which a dowery is a vital part of marriage arrangements. Since both his son and daughter are determined to marry the totally perfect mates they’re certain they’ve found—and Harpagon himself has eyes for the same young woman that his son has already co-opted, there are definitely issues to be resolved.  

The company at times almost dance their roles. What we have here is a group of ten actors who in the course of the rehearsals of this play have indeed managed to become a true ensemble. It goes beyond the fact that they each can and do turn out fine performances—it as if they are almost fingers of the same hand. It can be as much fun to watch some of the actors who are only background to whatever absurdity is currently going on as it is to follow the main course of the action.  

Shotgun Theatre has every reason to be proud of themselves: Moliere lives!