Matthew Broderick Stars as the Titular Grifter in “Tartuffe”
Based on the sheer quantity of revivals and new translations flooding our venues, New York theatre has chosen its Person of the Year: Molière. The satirical god of the seventeenth-century French stage has taken his throne back after a decade of near-neglect. For most of 2025, we were either watching one of the playwright’s comedies or bracing for one. In June, we had almost simultaneous productions: Taylor Mac’s “Prosperous Fools” (an update of “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme”) and Jeffrey Hatcher’s fizzy adaptation of “Le Malade Imaginaire.” And, this fall, one version of the comedy “Tartuffe” (at the House of the Redeemer) had barely closed before New York Theatre Workshop premièred its own. This sumptuously produced, frequently amusing, occasionally inert staging of “Tartuffe,” adapted by Lucas Hnath and directed by Sarah Benson, stars Matthew Broderick as the titular grifter and David Cross as Orgon, his easily buffaloed mark.
If it’s the year of Molière, then it must also be the year of the liar, the hypocrite, the poseur, the clown. In many of his comedies, as in “Tartuffe,” a man at the head of a family exaggerates some seeming virtue (respect for doctors, piety) to a fanatical degree, threatening the happiness and the fortunes of everyone who depends on him. These obstinate paterfamilias types, particularly the narcissists who think that they’re strong-minded pillars of society, are exactly the kind of flattery-prone suckers who make easy prey for charlatans—quacks, tutors, lay religious counsellors on the make. Molière, writing at the pleasure of Louis XIV, was a court-approved playwright who had both a popular audience and aristocratic patrons, and so although he often mocked rich men as gullible fools, he never suggested removing them from power. Instead, it seems, idiots with sway must be placated, educated, accommodated, worked around. You don’t need to study the demographics of those who gained influence after the last election—those hommes d’un certain âge—to understand Molière’s new-old popularity. (Maybe we can pick up some pointers?)
As the play begins, we enter Orgon’s household to find it already in a tizzy: he and his mother (Bianca Del Rio) have transferred their loyalties to Tartuffe, an in-home “spiritual adviser” who has—very much beknownst to everyone but the two of them—fixed his lecherous eye on Orgon’s young wife, Elmire (Amber Gray). Her brother, Cléante (Francis Jue), and Orgon’s two grown children, Damis (Ryan J. Haddad, spitting mad from word one) and Mariane (Emily Davis), question Tartuffe’s motives, as does Mariane’s adored, impecunious fiancé, Valère (Ikechukwu Ufomadu). No one, of course, is quite as forthright as the maid, Dorine (Lisa Kron), who has the soubrette’s license to call ’em like she sees ’em. “Pursuit of godly goals my ass, all he does is constantly harass,” she tuts, while levering her bosom a little higher out of her low-cut corset. (Enver Chakartash designed the extraordinary costumes, which employ baroque silhouettes in plummy red or bubble-gum pink, sometimes over a modern shoe.)
Cross, wearing a white wig à la Shakespeare (bald on top, but falling fluffily to the shoulder on either side), plays Orgon’s fascination with the religiously exacting Tartuffe not as God-fearing terror but as a late-in-life crush, sniffing the other man’s hat shyly when unobserved or coaxing him to curl up in his lap like a cat. Broderick, in severe black pantaloons and a Puritan’s white collar, treats the whole farce with gentle befuddlement; he tends to settle his body so it faces all one way, like a penguin, creating a real sense of fuss and bother anytime he has to gesture. His Tartuffe doesn’t try to curry favor or even stand on sanctimony. Instead, he assumes a pleasant perplexity, which never changes—not when he’s offered Mariane’s reluctant hand in marriage, not when Elmire tries to seduce him in a complex bluffing scene, not even when Orgon disowns his own son on Tartuffe’s behalf. His bland expression asks, “Is it my fault I keep getting everything handed to me?” If you’d told me that Broderick had been chosen from the audience right before the show, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Cross and Broderick here offer studies in otiose passivity. Each gets big laughs from portraying inertia: their performances abound in side-eyed glances and awkward pauses followed by “So . . .” These gags can be funny, but the propulsive mechanics of farce require more of a sense of movement. As in many Molière plays, the setting (designed here by the collective called dots) is a kind of all-purpose room, a public-private parlor in Orgon’s house where guests and residents alike can rush in and out. There are lines drawn on the floor, which recall a room being readied for painting or possibly a Sun King-era tennis court. When either of the two stars took the stage, though, I thought of a car that breaks down in the middle of a road and then stays there, hazards blinking, as traffic detours around it.
And something has certainly stalled in this particular meeting between playwright and playwright. Hnath, whose writing in, say, “A Doll’s House, Part 2” or “The Thin Place” relies on the well-placed pause, is less deft when shaping rhyming couplets, which must be taken, like fences, at a gallop. Fashioning an English version out of Molière’s hexameter is notoriously difficult, particularly because the poet Richard Wilbur already dominates the field, with a shelf’s worth of intricate lacework translations. Other adapters have taken their sparkling turns, like David Ives (who has made a long practice of verse adaptation) and Hatcher, who avoided the whole poetry issue in his zippy “Imaginary Invalid” because the original was written in prose. But Hnath, working from Curtis Hidden Page’s translation, from 1908, gets tangled up in the requirements of rhyme and is forced into some unfortunate expediencies, as well as the occasional repetition.
For contrast, here’s the Wilbur, from 1965, when Cléante is chastising Orgon for failing to see through Tartuffe’s playacting religiosity: “There’s a vast difference, so it seems to me / Between true piety and hypocrisy: / How do you fail to see it, may I ask? / Is not a face quite different from a mask?” In roughly the same place in Hnath’s script (there’s no exact correspondence, because he has made savvy cuts, to craft an intermissionless hour-and-fifty-minute show), we hear Cléante say, “It’s not hard for someone to act like they’re holy / and not actually be holy, / and in fact, those I know who are holiest / are far from the showiest.” With versifiers, too, we can distinguish a mask from the real thing when we see them side by side.
What Hnath has done, though, is keep his eye on the larger rhymes, namely, the ones with our current era. He emphasizes the rex-ex-machina ending, for instance, in which Louis XIV, as represented by a royal decree that arrives at the last possible moment, sweeps away all of Tartuffe’s machinations and plots. Various sketched-in relationships in the original involve Orgon’s support for the royal side during the wars of the Fronde, but Hnath tweaks these into indications of some past financial impropriety. In a dicey moment when Orgon thinks that his secret crookedness might mean his family’s utter ruin, a messenger from the King arrives. Donors get to play by a different set of rules.
At this point, there has been very little overt political commentary in the production, which otherwise points to modernity mainly in its language. (Tartuffe is a “dipshit,” etc.) But here, when we see a ruler bending legality for his friend’s benefit, we recognize our current White House’s pardon-as-golden-ticket strategy. Molière, mindful that Louis was his patron—not to mention the rescuer of the interdicted “Tartuffe” itself, which had been banned for five years because it annoyed the Church—would never have implied that the King’s final gesture was anything other than a touch of grace. Hnath, though, uses this moment as a queasy reminder of what it is to live in a country with a sovereign executive. “We all know and we agree / We’re the good ones obviously,” the cast sings, dolefully, as the music (composed by the great Heather Christian) turns increasingly sour, like clabbered milk left out on Election Night.
Happily, there are pleasures that precede this grimness. Benson, whose connection to the Off Broadway experimental scene runs deep, has cast two of the finest comic performers in town as the play’s young lovers, and although they cannot be onstage all the time, it is not for lack of trying. Davis, wearing a particularly Bo Peep-y set of pink panniers, turns the character into a masterpiece of clownery, sulking delightfully and throwing magnificent tantrums while her arrangement of topknots—the hair designer is Robert Pickens—bounces on her head like a prize curly lamb. This Mariane makes little rushes at people, particularly the capable Dorine, eager to fling herself at someone’s feet. Davis’s many bouffon gifts include a mouth that she can make completely diagonal, registering gradations of concern from unease to outright panic as the angle increases.
And then there is Ufomadu, our clown prince. His Valère wears seafoam blue and a gigantic turquoise hat, and glides onstage like a mid-century talk-show host, his voice at once booming and soothing. Ufomadu’s non-stop bonhomie made me love Hnath’s lines in a way that I hadn’t before. There are a few scenes, I hate to say it, that do not require Valère, but then Ufomadu turns up anyway, always confident that no one will protest. He breezes in as a sort of courier. “It’s someone we’ve never met before,” Dorine says, as Ufomadu raises a brown hat to the group, simultaneously pulling up his wig. And, later, he marches on as Louis’s messenger, wearing an outfit that makes him look like a gingerbread soldier. The production’s finest, most perfectly farcical moment ensues—a bit of purely theatrical silliness—and hey presto! Here is Valère again. I laughed at the revelation; I’ve laughed every time I’ve thought of it since; I plan to keep on laughing at it. At the end of a difficult year, I hope that we can share in Valère’s undaunted spirit. May we all believe that we are always, always welcome. Don’t worry if you’re in the scene or not. Stand behind the door, push it open, and voilà! ♦