'The Liar": A puff pastry, amusing and clever
Truthiness, fibs or fabulations,
Fictions or humbugs or disinformations,
Deceits or canards or "alternative facts" —
All words for the same astonishing acts:
Lying. This led Pierre Corneille to opine
In the 17th century: It's the same goldmine.
David Ives' clever translation and adaptation of Pierre Corneille's 17-century French comedy The Liar is written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, directed by Michael Kahn, and performed with high jollity by an agile cast at Classic Stage Company. (You may have seen this show locally, when the Lantern Theatre Company gave us a superb production in 2013.)
Christian Conn plays the compulsive Liar, named Dorante. He falls in love with Clarice (Ismenia Mendes), or maybe it's actually her friend Lucrece (Amelia Pedlow in a winning performance) he's after.
But what of Clarice's reluctant fiancé (Tony Roach)? Dorante's honest servant (crowd-pleasing Carson Elrod) finally tries taking lying lessons, while Dorante's father, the beleaguered Géronte (Adam Lefevre), copes with his son's shenanigans in the show's only moving moments.
As is usually the case in classic French comedy, the saucy maid is the best role, and here there are not one but two maids, both played delectably by Kelly Hutchinson, who has, suitably, two suitors, one of whom is Aubrey Deeker.
Filled with contemporary references — take-out coffee, fist bumps, dating profiles — the show is nevertheless a puff pastry and not a napoleon, a confection and not a satire, providing us with an amusing and theatrical respite between then and now, when he ends the comedy with this:
Perhaps I'll go onstage and be an actor.
Maybe Corneille will write me up a play.
Or maybe, with my gifts and disposition,
I'll emigrate and be a politician.
Emigrate? Good luck with that.
Ives has proved himself endlessly surprising, from the high seriousness of New Jerusalem to the goofy, witty merriment of All in the Timing. The Liar is yet another example of his wide range, but whatever Ives does, he does it with immense style and intelligence.