The Liar by Writers Theatre (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Liar by Writers Theatre John Shanahan Review of The Liar by Writers Theatre. Written by David Ives, adapted from Le Menteur by Pierre Corneille. Directed by William Brown. May 21-July 28, 2013. David Ives writes that on first reading Pierre Corneille’s 1643 comedy Le Menteur to explore the possibility of adapting it “I found myself astonished. Exhilarated. Giddy. For, lying on the desk before me was one of the world’s great comedies. I felt as if some lost Shakespeare festival comedy on the order of Twelfth Night or Much Ado had been found. … The Liar is one of those plays that seem to be made out of almost nothing, yet ends up being about so much. “1 Indeed, this comic farce by a playwright known primarily to the English-speaking world for stolid love-and-honor drama (e.g. Le Cid, Cinna) or meta-theater in the vein of Calderon or Bernini (L’illusion Comique), is a reminder of the complexity to Corneille’s oeuvre. From the late 1620s to the early 1670s Corneille wrote more than a half-dozen comedies, and the occasion of Ives’ brilliant recasting of Le Menteur will I hope spur greater attention to Corneille’s less well known comic plays. When Dryden in his late poem to Congreve looked back with envy to the “giant race before the flood”—those playwrights before the English civil wars who seemed to him to have set the standards for great drama—he surely had in mind French writers like Corneille as well as English ones (though he credited overtly only the latter).2 Writers Theatre in Glencoe, IL seats about eighty-five people in a cozy semi-circle. The entire theater space, roughly an oval, was used creatively throughout the performance. The set was a well-conceived minimalism; its total color scheme royal blue with flourishes of gold baroque trim, and a large chandelier high at the center of the ceiling. Place names on antique placards in opposite corners identified the “Place Royale” and the Tuileries Gardens. The large forestage was constituted by a curved step up to a raised platform with a two-level oval structure not unlike a massive wedding cake at its center. This single prominent structure at mid-stage served at various times as a podium (for the prologue, for example, and several soliloquies throughout), as a seat for intimate conversations, and as a platform during a duel. Along the back of the stage two high-backed walls, also [End Page 89] baroque in style, featured benches and open lattices which proved perfect for the Cyrano-like wooing shenanigans near the end of Act One and the various episodes of impersonation, overhearing, and miscommunication at other times. Director William Brown fashioned an attractive mash-up of baroque and contemporary, mirroring Ives’ inventive remix of Corneille’s implied bawdy with winking nods to present-day romcom flicks and TV sex farces. Brown was aided here by the set design of Keith Pitts and costuming by Rachel Anne Healy. Costumes were a fun mixture of old and new. LaShawn Banks (Cliton), for instance, mixed seventeenth-century boots and breeches with a modern off-the-shelf knit cap, while the women sported period-appropriate floor-length dresses and curled hairstyles as seen in Lely’s or Kneller’s paintings. The men generally wore small, modest, powdered tie-wigs familiar in the mid- and later eighteenth century (if not in the seventeenth), lending still more period mash-up to the ensemble. The sound design (by Andrew Hansen) blended classical and contemporary, setting an early modern harpsichord-and-violin air to a bass-heavy disco beat. This punchy soundtrack returned at each set change, helped stress the flashy arrival and departure of the female leads Clarice (Laura Rook) and Lucrece (Kalen Harriman), and punctuated the frenetic moments of swordplay and erotic chase. Ives calls his two-act Liar a “translaptation” of Corneille’s five-act Menteur. By this Ives claims he has crafted a “translation with a heavy dose of adaptation,” trimming and modernizing Corneille’s script just as the French playwright had adapted in turn a 1634 Spanish source, Juan Ruiz de...