"And when there is an enemy to defame/They cloak their spite in fair religion's name."

Last night, we drove out to Spring Green to see the American Players' production of "Tartuffe," the wonderful 1644 Moliere play about an outrageous hypocrite who dupes a rich man by acting extremely pious. Many things are said about Tartuffe before the character appears on stage, including the fact that he's eating and drinking way too much, so when the character finally appeared, I was surprised to see not a fat man but a scrawny little man. The actor (James Ridge) reminded me of George Carlin.

The theater is out in the woods:



And you have to take a bit of a walk up a hill to get there:



But it's exciting to be out under the stars, and not a single mosquito appeared. They must spray the bejeezus out of the place when the Madisonians are not looking.

With a Moliere play, there's the whole problem of translation. Are you really going to try for the endless rhyming couplets? Some, not all, translations do. We heard the Richard Wilbur translation, which really was quite beautifully and cleverly rhymed throughout. At intermission, whenever I spoke one sentence I felt a strange compulsion to try to say a second sentence that would rhyme. I did resist this impulse.

The theme of religion and the lust for power has a lot of resonance today, so let me leave you with a passage:

These charlatans, I say, whose pilgrim souls
Proceed, by way of Heaven, toward earthly goals,
Who weep and pray and swindle and extort,
Who preach the monkish life, but haunt the court
Who make their zeal the partner of their vice --
Such men are vengeful, sly, and cold as ice,
And when there is an enemy to defame
They cloak their spite in fair religion's name,
Their private spleen and malice being made
To seem a high and virtuous crusade,
Until, to mankind's reverent applause,
The crucify their foe in Heaven's cause.