Word: orgonized
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...most part the cast is excellent and keeps the play moving quickly, garnering a great deal of laughter. The first 15 minutes of the play, however, are dreadfully slow. Georgine Hall, playing Mme. Pernelle, Orgon's mother, barely manages to keep her lines straight as she scolds Orgon's family. Her comic timing is miserable...
Francine Torres, on the other hand, perfectly plays the maid Dorine as a cross between Roseanne and Carol Burnett. Her lengthy scene with Orgon (the always amazing Thomas Derrah), in which she tries to stop him from forcing his daughter Marianne (Jessalyn Gilsig) to marry Tartuffe (Alvin Epstein), is riotous. She can make vacuuming funny...
...Dewolf as the bratty Damis, who Orgon disinherits for insultingTartuffe, is another stand-out. Dewolf's ridiculous, over-the-top teenager has a severe attitude problem and too many music videos playing in his head. He is a little too sitcom, but is nonetheless amusing...
Also excellent is the gorgeous and stately Yanna McIntosh as the smooth and studied Flipote, Orgon's wife...
...even appears to heal the halt and lame. But there is nothing inspirational in him and nothing ennobling in his impact. In the opening scenes, the actors appear in clownish whiteface and lurch like robots. The playing reaches its tenderest pitch at an utterly perverse moment: Harriet Harris, as Orgon's wife, fakes lust for Tartuffe so as to reveal his perfidy to her husband, throbbing with an emotion that we never see Orgon arouse in her. The play's visual imagery is equally extreme. At the moment the lights go up on the institutional white, bricklike walls...