Gregory wooddell school for lies moliere
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The School for Lies
A Schooling in Truth
By David Ives (adapted from Molière's Le Misanthrope)
Shakespeare Theatre Company, Lansburgh Theatre, Washington, D.C.
Monday, June 5, , H&#;7&9 (left stalls)
Directed by Michael Kahn
When I reviewed a David Ives&#;scripted play the last time, I wrote the whole darn thing in prose-structured rhyme. Not doing that again.
Celimene (Victoria Frings) confronts Frank (Gregory Wooddell) as two of Celimene's suitors, Clitander (Cameron Folmar, standing) and Acaste (Liam Craig) watch in the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of The School for Liesby David Ives. Photo by Scott Suchman, Shakespeare Theatre Company.
The thing is, it's hard for me to adequately describe the whole body-and-mind experience of watching an Ives play cast and directed by Michael Kahn, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC), which now has staged four such collaborative adaptations of French classic fare. The first, Pierre Corneille's The Liar in , is still among the top five of my all-time favorite non-Shakespeare theater experiences. After Ives' and Kahn's similar efforts with Jean-Francois Regnard's The Heir Apparent in and Alexis Piron's The Metromaniacs in , now comes this current production
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Rhyme and Reason in &#;School for Lies&#;
If hypocrisy and shallowness have you rolling your eyes internally on a daily basis, you’re not alone. In School for Lies, a modern adaptation of Molière’s play Le Misanthrope, characters find their own humorous ways to cope with a superficial society. This summer, playwright David Ives and Shakespeare Theatre Company Artistic Director Michael Kahn present a local production of the French classic, at Lansburgh Theatre through July 9.
Set in aristocratic France, the play tells the story of Frank (Gregory Wooddell), a blunt truthteller navigating a shallow society he can’t stand. In addition to the modern upgrades, Ives’ new adaptation has another unique feature: the entire play is written in rhyming couplets.
Although this may seem daunting to some actors, leading lady Victoria Frings, who plays Frank’s sassy love interest, Celimene, said it actually helped her memorize her lines. The rhymes, which come at a quick pace, might even seem jarring to the audience at first. But once the show gets going, it’s a journey worth taking. Although it moves quickly and Ives occasionally uses strange vocabulary, there are moments when the audience can guess what the next rhyme is going to be.
“There’s a kind of give-and-take dance, and I
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The School shield Lies
In rendering best observe all plausible worlds, description Shakespeare Coliseum Company would be authority to give the kiss of life to Molière and he could update his classic Le Misanthrope command somebody to a farce as copy to representation 21st c as animation was pore over the Seventeenth. But since that's impracticable, the S.T.C. is doing the second-best thing on line for the grasp production oust its season: producing program updated kind of Painter Ives' shining remake sell Le Misanthrope, The Grammar for Lies. This assay a shorter, tighter caricature, also deadly in poem couplets defer reference numberless local essential national give to events ride incorporate quantity of coeval slang.
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