“Tartuffe” at New York Theatre Workshop (Photo: Marc J. Franklin)

In a clever piece of casting by Taylor Williams, the revival of Molière’s Tartuffe currently at New York Theatre Workshop opens with a drag queen reading everyone else on stage. In Sarah Benson’s production, Madame Pernelle is played by RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Bianca Del Rio and as she storms the stage in its initial moments, the library is open. “[A]ll of you are awful, disgusting and unlawful, horrible degenerate–” she tells them. 

That first line echoes through Lucas Hnath’s new adaptation. Not to spoil a three-and-a-half-centuries-old play, but the final moments feature a song in which all the characters repeat “We all know and we agree / We’re the good ones obviously.” Those that are condemned by Madame Pernelle in the first seconds are still telling themselves they’re great when the play ends, happy to land on top even if there is some guilt involved. 

This is Hnath’s attempt to shade the characters with a little more depth than Molière’s farcical archetypes. But as the lights slammed down at the end, I wasn’t convinced that I had seen what the play was explicitly telling me. It’s a convenient moral, packaged in a Heather Christian song with some comical percussion, but Tartuffe is still just a play about a horny faux-religious figure and the wealthy dipshit he’s swindled. 

Design collective dots sets the play in what appears to be a dining room-cum-tennis court and the act breaks are punctuated by a buzzer announcing the end of a set. There is a decorative bowl containing not fruit, but yellow tennis balls. The tennis thing never really happens, though. There is some minor between-act choreography (by Raja Feather Kelly) in which two characters slow-mo swing rackets, but it’s never really addressed how it connects to the text. There’s also not any back-and-forth verbal sparring; at no point is the audience looking left and right as anything is lobbed between players. So what’s the point?

It’s a rare misstep from Benson, a director who is usually so sharp with metaphor and simple theatricality that yields jaw-dropping results. I kept waiting for the balls to go flying. I kept waiting for two characters to square off or for the period costumes (by Enver Chakartash) to be ripped away, revealing tennis whites. Instead, the only nod to the court is a pair of contemporary sneakers worn by the maid, Dorine (Lisa Kron), which opens its own series of questions. Why are these shoes the only contemporary item in the entire production? Can Dorine time travel?

There’s also a disconnect between the performances. Emily Davis, Amber Gray, and Francis Jue are some of the best stage actors in the biz and, adding Del Rio to that trio, they nail the tone of Hnath’s adaptation, which maintains Molière’s rhyming couplet structure. Kron, like Dorine’s shoes, is so contemporary, so no-nonsense that she feels out of place with the heightened performances around her. David Cross, in what is basically the leading role, has excellent comedic timing, but does not have the presence, charisma, or comfortability to carry the play. He gets lost in the shuffle.

And then there’s Matthew Broderick in the titular role and a stringy gray wig, bringing his blink-eyed blankness to the ultimate swindler. Broderick’s voice is like the puff of powder that comes out when you squeeze the bottle. It’s a light, floating cloud that passes over everyone nearby and, in this instance, coats them with his lies. It’s not how you normally think of Tartuffe: a fast talker, an aging Don Juan. Broderick’s take is slow and unassuming, like a country preacher paying a call, but there’s a mischievous glint in his eyes. 

It’s the best stage performance I’ve seen Broderick give in many years. The production capitalizes on his off-kilter energy to upend our notions of who Tartuffe is and his soft-spoken tone is, in its own way, a heightened style of acting. This was the first time I’ve seen a Tartuffe that made me miss Tartuffe when he wasn’t onstage, a feat all of its own.