Gregory wooddell school for lies moliere

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 think this play lets audience members start to fill in some of the rhymes as it goes,” Frings says. “There’s something kind of fulfilling about that, especially when it’s set up really well.”

But the rhyme scheme does more than just keep the audience on their toes. According to Wooddell, the rhyming solidifies the sense of spectatorship.

“You already have this world established, just in terms of how these people relate to each other and how they speak,” he says. “But it’s just joy for the audience to be able to hear the brilliance of David Ives’ writing and rhyming couplets. I think the audience really gets a kick out of hearing the language for an hour and a half.”

Even once the audience

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.

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 of The School for Lies, Ives' retooling of his own adaptation of Molière's Le Misanthrope. In terms of this particularly Ivesian idiom, The School for Lies continues a downward trend in quality, but to say each subsequent Ives-adapted/Kahn-directed product doesn't quite reach the heights of The Liar is to note that the Himalayan peaks of Kangchenjunga, Lhotse, and Makalu are a few hundred meters short of Everest. While not reaching the highest summit, like its Ives predecessors at STC's Lansburgh Theatre, The School for Lies attains breathless heights of comic theater.

Heck, just reading Ives' program notes for this production will have you LOLing even before the play beg

In the best of all possible worlds, the Shakespeare Theatre Company would be able to resuscitate Molière so he could update his classic Le Misanthrope into a comedy as relevant to the 21st century as it was to the 17th. But since that's impossible, the S.T.C. is doing the second-best thing for the last production of its season: producing an updated version of David Ives' brilliant remake of Le Misanthrope, The School for Lies. This is a shorter, tighter satire, also written in rhymed couplets that reference many local and national current events and incorporate plenty of contemporary slang.

The play takes place in Paris in Célimène's drawing room, supposedly two years after Molière's play ended. It is a glamorous world where gossip, scandal, and influence are all-important elements to everyone except the main character, Frank. Newly returned to Paris, Frank claims to hate hypocrisy, pomposity, and social conventions. He sets out to show up the liars and rogues in positions of power in French society for what they are.

Despite his convictions, however, Frank cannot help but love the flirtatious and playful Célimène, a young widow whose wit epitomizes the courtly style that Frank says he despises. Though he constantly reprimands her, Célimène refuses to change and entraps him with her beauty and grace.

Frank and Célimène are surrounded by other extravagant characters: Célimène's cousin, Eliante; Eliante's suitor, Philinte; Clitander, a courtier; Oronte, an unskilled poet; Acaste, a wealthy marquis; and Arsinoé, the town gossip. The plot is paper thin and delightfully silly. Frank gets in trouble for criticizing a horrible poem by Oronte, and Célimène is led to think that Frank has influence with the king.

Gregory Wooddell is excellent as Frank, a man who sees accurately that everyone around him is telling lies and he insists on criticizing them, thinking that his point of view will inspire them to change a

Playwright David Ives’s mastery of rhymed verse builds on Molière’s 17th-century comedy of manners. Together, they will leave your sides aching.

The School for Lies is the fourth French collaboration between playwright David Ives and director Michael Kahn. Ives calls his mix of translating and adapting French works “translaptation,” despite significant evidence that he usually has his way with words. What it means is that Ives made significant changes to the plot from Molière’s Le Misanthrope before rewriting the play in English.

The play begins very similarly to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Gregory Wooddell stars as Frank, a Parisian noble who has only just returned to the city with an undeniable disgust for the upper class’s two-faced manners. Frank starts off as halfway between Benedick and Don John, sassy yet overcome with, well, misanthropy.

Things take a turn towards Frank’s inner Benedick when he meets Celimene (Victoria Frings), whose sharp wit has kept would-be suitors at bay, in a very Beatrice way. Then his friend, Philinte (Cody Nickell), decides to pull a prank that Don Pedro and Claudio would be proud of: Tricking Frank and Celimene into each believing the other loves them. Or, at least, can get them out of serious legal trouble if seduced, in Celimene’s case.

The School for Lies breaks hard from the Shakespearean plot when Eliante, Celimene’s younger cousin and the object of Philinte’s affections, takes a hard look at how things went for Claudio’s Hero and instead chases after Frank. Dorea Schmidt shows a great range as Eliante, at times seeming the purest character in the cast until she threatens to kill Frank if he doesn’t have sex with her on the floor of her cousin’s drawing room. Somehow, Schmidt and Kahn fit both extremes believably within Eliante’s constant earnestness.

From there, the play piles on layer after layer of misunderstood intentions, a couple of mistaken ident