Tartuffe - Broadening Our Horizons

Back in February I wrote about a trip that Carol and I made to the Pearl Theatre Company's production of Twelfth Night in the East Village of New York City. The primary motivation for the outing was to see my god-daughter, Emily Ewing, who is doing an internship with this non-profit theater group. Emily's mother was my close friend, Edie Ewing who died this past December after a long and courageous battle with breast cancer. After that play we had dinner with Emily and she suggested we broaden our horizons with one of the Pearl's non-Shakespeare productions. We agreed on the assumption that she would again have dinner with us afterwards.

Yesterday was that outing where we saw the Pearl's production of Tartuffe by Jean Baptiste Moliere, a 17th century French playwright. Tartuffe is a satire largely about a religious hypocrite who gains power over a wealthy man through his (Tartuffe) piety. In fact, Tartuffe is a hypocrite who is deceiving the wealthy man both for money and because he lusts after the man's wife. The play was apparently suppressed by the religious establishment in France when it was first produced.

This marked our third time at the Pearl (the other time was to see Hamlet) and once again we came away very impressed with this theater company and especially their regular group of actors. Of a cast of 12 about half were also in Twelfth Night and three others were also in Hamlet. The one who sticks out for me is Sean McNall who we have now seen play Hamlet, Feste in Twelfth Night and now Camis in Tartuffe. Talking about him over dinner both Emily and I agreed that we would love to see him play Hal/Henry V - he is an actor of great range and he would be great in those parts.

Unfortunately Emily's internship ends in June, but I think it likely we will continue to go back to the Pearl. I am waiting with some anticipation to see what their 2009-2010 season will look like hoping against hope that they will do one of the history plays. Carol and I are both very glad that we took Emily's advice that we should broaden our horizons!