About midway through 17th-century French satirist Moliere’s splendid study of a scoundrel, my companion leaned over and whispered, “So that’s where Dr. Seuss got it.” Mais bien sur! Not just the rollicking rhythm and rhyme, of course — though Richard Wilbur’s translation displays a master’s touch in its combination of fidelity and invention. I caught maybe a single rhyme that felt ever-so-slightly out of place — a late pairing of “absurd” and “word,” funnily enough, given that wordplay and absurdity are the foundational strengths of the play. (Foundational, but hardly final: As with great Shakesperean comedy, the admirable wit on the page becomes genuinely funny when spoken by a canny actor, and properly hilarious when enfleshed in smartly directed physical comedy. Special notice here to Katie Karel’s sapient servent Dorine for the former and Bruce Turk’s religious rogue Tartuffe for the latter — he tears into the role the way his character tears into a chicken — though the entire cast knows its business.)
So yes, Seuss sussed out the way an audience may be carried along and carried away by verse — but he also picked up a thing or two about where to carry it and why. If satire is what closes on Saturday, then you’d better show folks a good time while you feed them their medicine. Think of the unteachable Sneetches, or old Yertle the Turtle. And yes, given the passage of a few centuries since the play’s creation, and a few decades since the rise of the televangelist, we can smile and nod as poor nobleman Orgon gets so caught up in his enthusiasm for the sainted Tartuffe that he bends reason into knots for the sake of his misplaced faith. But folly is man’s best friend, or at least his closest companion, and Tartuffe remains everywhere with us, despite the playwright’s regis ex machina at the end.
Bonus points for making the voice of reason into something of a speechy windbag; the truth hurts, and can even take a toll on those who bear it and share it. It takes some genius to turn it into a good time for those on stage and in the audience.