Bill Irwin Gets The Imaginary Invalid Up On Its Feet

Molière mocked till he dropped. In 1673, he was playing Argan, the central character in what would turn out to be his last play, The Imaginary Invalid (Le Malade imaginaire), and while lampooning this inveterate hypochondriac, he began coughing up blood and collapsed on stage. He finished the performance, was taken home, and died a few hours later. It’s always the really funny ones who are the most serious about the work.

That’s not to jinx the master clown who’s currently doddering around in Argan’s shoes on Broadway. Bill Irwin isn’t going anywhere — knock on all available wood — except quickly to the imaginary bathroom just off stage right several times a night as his character’s regimen of enemas kicks in. Irwin, who also adapted Molière’s comedy from a translation by Doug Skinner, has Buster Keaton’s long, malleable face and elastic limbs, along with half a century of expertise in just about every mode of hangdog funny-man antics, from commedia dell’arte to Beckett. It’s in the former mode that this Imaginary Invalid — directed by another excellent clown, Brandon J. Dirden — begins, as Irwin appears in the void leaning on a gilt cane and masked as Pantalone. In the commedia tradition, Pantalone is the foolish old man — a penny-pincher and a dupe, as healthy of ego as he is long of tooth. We come to the theater to see his folly exposed by wily servants and hopeful young lovers, to laugh as those pantaloons, metaphorically or not, get pulled down.

Molière’s variation on that theme, and what adds some worldly-wise edge to his play’s mischief, is that Argan, though he spends plenty of time looking silly, never really has the motes blown out of his eyes. The parade of savvier comic archetypes that surround him — from his urbane, happily rational brother, Beralde (Dylan Baker), to his smart-aleck maid, Toinette (Rachel Bloom, giving eternal side-eye) — either has to evade or manipulate him. Living with Argan is a constant game of trying to make the boss think it was his idea. Which can be a challenge when the boss is convinced he’s dying, glued to his rococo La-Z-Boy, and committed to throwing his wealth down the well of various conniving quacks. Brooks Ashmanskas doubles with appropriate bombast as a pair of them, and his brief, prissily explosive appearance as Argan’s “primary care physician” Dr. Purgon is a highlight of the show.

One doesn’t go to Molière for plot. His plays are satires of the painted and powdered yet glaringly obvious pimples on the nose of society. As he levels the comedic j’accuse at religious hypocrisy or, here, moneyed self-delusion and medical chicanery (“I mean, can one afford to be sick?” Irwin’s Argan gripes), there are usually also some cute kids trying to get married and some derpy impediment to their union. Here, that’s Argan’s daughter Angelique (Ava Lalezarzadeh) — a cupcake in human form in Karen Perry’s flounce-tastic costumes — and her met-him-six-days-ago prince valiant, Cleante (Daniel Croix Henderson). Standing in their way is the fact that fretful old Argan wants his daughter to marry a doctor (free enemas for life!) and has betrothed her to Thomas (Hiram Delgado, in one of several enjoyably ludicrous roles), a medical student with a bowl cut that’s almost as scary as his sweaty blend of sanctimony and leering libido. There’s also the problem of Angelique’s wicked stepmother, Argan’s gold-digging second wife, Beline. Always a delight to watch, Crystal A. Dickinson chomps her way through the part like a bedazzled Hungry Hungry Hippo, all high drama and hairpin turns and evil eyebrow wiggles. If only she had a mustache to twirl.

At the center of this whirligig sits Irwin, often literally. Argan hardly ever leaves the stage, and while he’s there he mostly keeps up his sick shtick and sticks to his big comfy chair. There are a couple of moments in the show in which adaptor-Irwin has clearly elaborated on opportunities to move his rangy, lazzi-hungry body, and no wonder: At the heart of the role is the irony, for a clown as vital and bendable as he is, of Argan’s performed frailty. There are stretches in which we can sense him, like a toddler confined to a highchair, just itching to wiggle, which might present an issue if the play’s premise weren’t so light and if Irwin himself weren’t so charming. As it is, he turns even long seated monologues into delicately physical showpieces, peppering the recitation of Argan’s doctors’ bills that starts the show with precisely timed double-takes, aghast expressions, and boyish little kicks.

The production as a whole isn’t always as crisp as Irwin himself. Farce is 40 percent athleticism and 60 percent math, and the company is still in the early days of attempting to nail all those demanding little jabs and turns. At the moment, some of their strongest scenes are the ones in which either Molière or Dirden tips his hat to the theater of it all. When Cleante gains entrance to Argan’s home, it’s under the pretense of being Angelique’s substitute music teacher, which lands the pair in the very funny set-up of singing their feelings to each other across her dad’s lap in the form of an improvised contemporary opera (“rhythmic free verse,” Cleante assures a bemused Argan, is “the current mode”). Along with the show’s movement director, Lorenzo Pisoni, Dirden has also choreographed a nifty pop-up book of an opening sequence: As a chorus of comically sinister doctors in their own commedia masks, the ensemble seem to pull Beowulf Borritt’s soaring drawing-room set out of thin air, dragging in its pastel walls and even its ceiling using long red ribbons pulled dramatically out of Pantalone-Argan: “Blood… it is for letting,” says Thomas in all his idiot wisdom later on.

Through Toinette’s machinations and Beralde’s subtle plans, show business itself becomes the day-saving tool in The Imaginary Invalid. After all, you may never get your stubborn, dim, doctor-obsessed dad to understand his own foolishness, but at least there exist ways of jostling the human spirit more artful than straight argument. “My dear niece,” beams Beralde at a bewildered Angelique, “it surpasses understanding. It is the theater.”

The Imaginary Invalid is at the Todd Haimes Theatre through November 22.