Word: scapin
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...lmpromptu de Versailles and Les Fourberies de Scapin (by Molière) opened the Comédie Française' three-week visit at the City Center by happily passing up fanfare for fun. With such full-length classics as Molière's Tartuffe and Racine's Britannicus to follow, a troupe that matches polish with perkiness leaped in with minor Molière and made it seem, in a dreary season, a major evening even for those with shaky French. The two works, moreover, make a pleasant contrast...
...comparison, Les Fourberies de Scapin (roughly, "Scapin's Knavery") is a farcical hellraiser, with its resourceful scamp of a hero-the traditionally pert and clever servant-engineering a whole repertory of deceptions with a full battery of slapstick. Based on a famous Roman play, Terence's Phormio, Les Fourberies is served up in the famous Italian style of the commedia dell' arte. For their sons' sake, Scapin hoodwinks two miserly fathers-one of whom, as the price of Scapin's saving his life, has offered him a coat "after I've worn...
...City Center almost every character has his amusing bag of tricks, while Robert Hirsch, as Scapin, is something extra and something different. Looking lithe, gamin, even apache in a very modern way, Hirsch is fun-loving but hardbitten, a kind of acrobatic con man, up to every trick, on to every wile, physically all bounce, mentally all barbed wire. Hirsch's Scapin seems even more resourceful than Molière's, and on a stage full of antique, chattering magpies and grinning dolls and grimacing puppets, he is a kind of unpredictable mechanical toy with, at moments, shock...
...Players (Wellesley): June 23-July 4, Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing"; July 7-18, Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire"; July 21-August 1, Shaw's "Man and Superman"; August 4-15, Barrie's "Peter Pan"; August 18-29, Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" and Moliere's "The Follies of Scapin...
...hours. He had Robert Brustein compose and, in the persona of Moliere, deliver a prologue and epilogue; the prologue was appropriate enough, but the epilogue was ineffectual and ill-advisd. He furthermore incorporated, by changing the sex or name of some of the characters, scenes from Les fourberies de Scapin, which Moliere penned right after finishing the present work--specifically, the portions dealing with the extortion of ransom money for a phony kidnapping. In principle I do not approve of the directorial use of scissors and paste; but in this case I am forced to admit that the practice...