Molière, as every theater student is eventually told, collapsed on stage while playing a hypochondriac. The role was Argan, the play was The Imaginary Invalid, and the year was 1673; he died hours later, and the joke of a man pretending to be sick while actually dying has been haunting the comedy ever since. It is a heavy bit of history for a farce to carry, and the surest way to lift it is to hand the role to a clown.
Roundabout Theatre Company has done precisely that. Its new Broadway production of The Imaginary Invalid, in previews since Sept. 25 at the Todd Haimes Theatre on West 42nd Street, opens officially on Thursday, Oct. 22, and runs through Nov. 22, according to BroadwayWorld. It stars Bill Irwin, the Tony-winning actor, MacArthur fellow and, not incidentally, one of the great American physical comedians, as Argan, in his own adaptation of a translation by his longtime collaborator Doug Skinner.
The clown returns to Molière
Roundabout’s marketing describes Irwin as returning “to Broadway (and to Molière),” and the parenthetical is doing real work. Irwin’s résumé, as listed by the company, includes Scapin and A Flea in Her Ear alongside his own wordless clown pieces, Largely New York, Fool Moon and The Regard of Flight, and a Tony-winning turn in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. He was an original member of San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus. He has, in other words, spent half a century preparing to play a man whose entire life is a physical bit about his own body.
The company describes the plot as “a comedy about money, medicine, and marital mayhem,” and the summary is admirably current. Argan, a “perpetual patient,” obsesses over his ailments and schemes to marry his daughter to a doctor in order to save on medical bills. That is a 353-year-old joke that lands in 2026 with an uncomfortable thud. American audiences who have recently argued with an insurer will recognize Argan’s logic as not entirely insane.
The company
The cast, per Roundabout, is a well-assembled ensemble of Broadway pros and screen names. Rachel Bloom, the co-creator and star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, makes her Broadway debut as Toinette, the clever maid who is the real engine of most Molière comedies. Three-time Tony nominee Brooks Ashmanskas plays the doctors Diafoirus and Purgon, which is the kind of double role that exists so that a comic actor can steal two scenes instead of one. Dylan Baker plays Béralde, Argan’s sensible brother. Crystal A. Dickinson is Béline, the scheming second wife. Ava Lalezarzadeh, who made her Broadway debut in Roundabout’s English, plays the daughter, Angélique, opposite Daniel Croix Henderson, also making his Broadway debut, as her suitor Cléante. Hiram Delgado plays three roles.
Bloom is the casting most likely to sell tickets to people who do not ordinarily buy Molière. Her Roundabout biography notes a Golden Globe, an Emmy and a Critics’ Choice Award for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a Drama Desk nomination for the lyrics of her off-Broadway show Death, Let Me Do My Show, and a Netflix special adapted from it. Toinette, the servant who outwits everyone in the house, including the audience, is a role built for a comedian with musical timing. On paper, at least, it is hard to imagine a better fit.
A footnote for completists and ticket-buyers: Roundabout’s production page notes that on Nov. 3 and Nov. 10, the role of Toinette will be played by understudy Madeline Seidman. Plan accordingly, or don’t; understudy nights have launched more than a few careers.
The production is directed by Brandon J. Dirden, best known to New York audiences as an actor in All the Way, Jitney, Skeleton Crew and Take Me Out, and a director at Yale Rep and Two River Theater. The design team, per Roundabout, includes Beowulf Boritt on sets, Karen Perry on costumes, Allen Lee Hughes on lighting and John Gromada on sound and original music. Movement direction is by Lorenzo Pisoni, himself a Pickle Family Circus child and Irwin collaborator, which suggests that the physical comedy here has been engineered by people who take a pratfall as seriously as an aria.
Ninety minutes, no intermission
One of the more telling details on Roundabout’s page is the running time: 90 minutes, no intermission. Molière’s original, with its musical interludes and its mock-Latin ceremony in which Argan is made a doctor himself, can run much longer. A brisk adaptation suggests Irwin and Dirden are treating the play as farce first and period piece second, which is the right instinct. Nobody has ever left a Molière comedy wishing it had been longer.
It also makes the production an unusually good value proposition in a season of long evenings. This is a show you can see after work at Roundabout’s 42nd Street flagship and still make a reasonable dinner reservation.
The season around it
The Imaginary Invalid is one of several classics on Broadway this fall. Jamie Lloyd’s Much Ado About Nothing begins previews at the Winter Garden on Oct. 31, and Lincoln Center Theater has A Few Good Men at the Vivian Beaumont. Of the three, the Molière is the least starry, the shortest and, possibly, the funniest. Roundabout’s bet is that a Tony-winning clown, a TV star making her stage debut and one of the oldest jokes in the Western canon are enough. Given the cast, it is a reasonable bet.
Critics will file after the Oct. 22 opening, and The City Politic will report what they say. In the meantime, there is a pleasing symmetry in a man who built a career on making his body the punch line now playing the role that killed its author. Molière would, one suspects, have laughed. It would have been bad for his health.
The City Politic has reached out to Roundabout Theatre Company and to representatives for Bill Irwin and Rachel Bloom for comment, and will update this story with any response.
Photo: The American Airlines Theatre, now the Todd Haimes Theatre, on West 42nd Street, by Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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