You may know about Restoration comedy from
Congreve’s masterpiece, The Way of the World or Wycherley’s The
Country Wife, both of which are revived from time to time. You may even
know about Andrew Marvell’s coy mistress but do you know the man Marvell called
“the best English satirist [and] the most learned among Restoration wits”?
Three hundred years later Ezra Pound proclaimed poet/satirist John Wilmot, 2nd
Earl of Rochester, no less than equal to Alexander Pope!
You won’t see a more sumptuous production
(with just eight moveable screens for a set!) about the scandalous man of 17th
century letters than Bridge Rep’s THE LIBERTINE (in association with Playhouse
Creatures Theatre) at the BCA through September 22nd. If the title
seems familiar, Stephen Jeffreys’ play was made into a film in 2004, starring
Johnny Depp as Wilmot, the libertine, and John Malkovich as King Charles II,
often the subject of Wilmot’s ridicule. (I haven’t seen the movie but the play
has inspired me to ferret it out.)
THE LIBERTINE offers a hearty portion of the
Earl’s adventures, played to hilarious and bawdy perfection by an exemplary
cast, led by the charismatic Joseph W. Rodriguez as Wilmot. He’s a rake, a
philanderer, a heart breaker and a dissolute charmer. As William Hazlitt famously
said, “His contempt for everything that others respect almost amounts to
sublimity.”
The Earl’s “Merry Gang” of satirists included
writers Wycherley, George Etherege and Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset.
Jeffreys puts Etherege and Sackville into his play as willing sidekicks to the
mercurial Earl, whose rapier wit and witty epigrams often came back to bite him.
(He was jailed a number of times and convicted of treason when the King overheard
a most unflattering diatribe.)
Not content merely to comment on what
Grayling calls “the age of riotous immorality,” the Earl lived life to the
hilt, even catching the eye of Samuel Pepys. His famous diary recounts the
Earl’s unconventional courtship of his wife-to-be: He kidnapped her to
illustrate his devotion! Jeffreys works in the historical material with flair,
capturing the licentious spirit of the times in his delightfully naughty
dialogue but he isn’t long on plot, leaving me wanting something more to unite
the highly entertaining scenes. (Aphra Behn’s OR, in a crackerjack production at
the Lyric a few seasons ago, deals much more successfully with the same subject
matter.)
That said, it’s a high energy, highly
entertaining production, thanks to director Eric Tucker’s ingenious staging (especially
the comical “commenting” scene from behind the skewed screens) and a cast to
cherish: Brooks Reeves first as the playwright Etherege, a reluctant reveler in
the Earl’s destructive exploits/then as a humorless portrait painter; Eric Doss
as the Earl’s game manservant/then a constable; Daniel Duque-Estrada as the
foppish Sackville/then a self-aggrandizing actor; and Troy Barboza as the
Earl’s inexperienced, ill-fated, new found conspirator, all performed with
panache.
Also well drawn: D’Arcy Dersham as the no
nonsense stage manager, Richard Wayne as the overindulgent King Charles, Sarah
Koestner as the Earl’s longsuffering wife, Megan O’Leary as the Earl’s favorite
prostitute, Olivia D’Ambrosio as the actress beloved of the Earl and the
ensemble players, who deliver the cheeky “Signor Dildo” ditty (to new music by
Michael Wartofsky).
