Woke Molière: Director Satya Bhabha Reflects On Interpreting TARTUFFE in 2018

It's 2002 in Boston and Satya Bhabha (who you may recognize from Scott Pilgrim vs World) is in high school. Like his now 94-year old grandmother in Mumbai, he loves theatre. He is thrilled to play Orgon in the school's production of Molière's Tartuffe. The prep school budget allows for the play to be done up to the nines: over the top wigs, lavish robes, and a mustache that just won't stay on his face.

"The audience shrieked with laughter the entire time," he recalls. "Looking back now, and realizing what we, high schoolers, were laughing about, I'm confused. And a little horrified."

What Bhabha refers to is how the themes of this beloved play, which has been interpreted as a comedy for the last 350 years, don't seem so funny when viewed through a present-day lens. In fact, there seems to be a darkness beyond Molière's satire that's generally unacknowledged.

"As I see it, this play is about a male obsession with power and how violence gets enacted on women's bodies to preserve that power," he continues. "It embodies so much of what we're seeing women fighting back against in this current cultural moment. We see it in #metoo, and we saw it in the rise of the conversation about intersectional feminism in the wake of Black Lives Matter and the 2016 election."

As 2017 came to close, it felt clear to this young actor-turned-director working with New Guard Theater Company: this was the story, this was the medium, this was the moment. They would take on Molière's The Imposter in a radically new way.

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I caught up with the UK-born actor, filmmaker and director near Atwater Village Theatre, where New Guard is presenting their full stage production, directed by Bhabha.

Why did you want to take on this play?

We're at a moment where society is finally taking on the ways institutions of all kinds enact violence on women's bodies. What isn't being examined is how this violence endures in our narrative and dramatic institutions as well.

Take Molière's work, for instance. It's been loved and laughed at for centuries. When you take a closer look, the female characters absorb all the collateral damage of the men's mistakes. I wanted to question the very notion of how this play is done: why have we been laughing at this forever?

What are some of the ways you poked at this idea?

First and foremost, by approaching the events through a dramatic lens as opposed to a comedic one. Even though there are still some big laughs in the production, the audience is left unsettled due to our focus on the unresolved interfamilial tensions and, hopefully, this leads them to engage critically with the material.

Secondly, and this is key, we set out to give the characters, especially the women, full narrative arcs. Historically, Molière's character arcs have been criticized as being underdeveloped: despite huge events, people end up where they began with few insights gained. For us, it was essential that the dynamic of this family changed irrevocably throughout the piece. Many of these revelations came during the process itself. Unlike in film or television, theater is exceptionally collaborative, and in discussions with the cast it became clear that there was no way this family could experience such trauma and remain unchanged.

The women in the cast were instrumental in helping me understand the story through a woman's eyes, or a modern woman's eyes, I should say. In discussion it became clear that the only people they still felt connected to at the end of the play were the other women on stage. That's how we arrived at the powerful ending scenes in which the women, who start the play rather at odds, find some degree of comfort and reassurance in each other.

It was also important that Orgon emerge from this a changed man. Unlike a traditional interpretation of the play's ending where Orgon is celebrated as a hero of sorts, our production presents his final moments on stage as alone and conflicted. Even though he's off the hook, he certainly has not won.

Tell me more about how this production ties to the cultural moment we're in, what you hope the play says to the culture?

Both this play and this cultural moment are about women claiming power in response to a tradition of masculine dominance. This structure has been around since long before Molière, of course. Our production highlights the explicit toxic masculinity in the script, as well as the implicit assumption of male dominance that is present in most traditional comedic interpretations of the work.

That said, it was also important for me to keep Orgon human, to humanize the dehumanizer. In our radically polarized times, I think we need to remember that we are all still human beings. We have shared capacities for empathy and love, no matter how buried they may be or seem. The only way we are going to move forward as a society is by not othering the other beyond the point of his or her humanity. This is why throughout the piece we highlight moments of emotional turmoil and self-doubt in Orgon, giving him more dimension.

What does it mean for New Guard Theatre Company to be doing this work?

To me, theatre is the most essential and exciting medium. Not only is the process deeply collaborative, but so is the execution: the final product itself exists only in collaboration with an audience. This makes theatre implicitly transient: a true here-and-now experience, the likes of which are rapidly disappearing in our digitized world.

Doing this work with New Guard is equally exciting. There are few young theatre companies working with classic texts, not to mention ones with the challenges of this piece (all metered rhyming couplets). New Guard has spent the last year putting on pop-up performances of brand-new work by contemporary writers. For us to successfully tackle a major classical text shows the vast array of talent, experience, and intellectual rigor within the company. It is essential to the ongoing cultural landscape of LA and I'm thrilled and excited to be a part of it.

The Imposter runs through February 25 at the Atwater Village Theatre. Tickets are available at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-imposter-tickets-41592750035

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