Reviews Off-Broadway Published 12 November 2015

Tartuffe

West Park Presbyterian Church ⋄ 4th - 21st November 2015

Seeing red.

Rafi Mittlefehldt
Tartuffe holds Olga aloft.

Tartuffe holds Olga aloft.

Rafi Nation: Weekly Column.

Listen up, Rafi Nation Warriors. The Dems are at it again.

Look, I can’t say I’m surprised. Since their policies don’t work (and never will), liberals have to rely on dirty tricks and political assassination to stay in power. This week’s target: Tartuffe, the Republican nominee running for the open Senate seat in Unspecified Red State.

If you tune into my Rafi Nation radio show every week — and if you don’t, why the hell not? — you know I’ve been gunning for this guy for some time. And with good reason. Tartuffe is the only one with a real plan to deport all immigrants, get rid of the gays, and bring this country back to the Christian ideals it was founded on.

He also has a compelling story. Working tirelessly as a firebrand conservative warrior, he was plucked from obscurity by his campaign manager, Olga, who discovered him while he was leading a rally.

Now that he’s the upstart frontrunner, the ultra-liberal basket-case Dems are running scared — scared enough to start a vicious whisper campaign spreading disgusting rumors about the very woman who helped bring Tartuffe’s message to the people.

You gotta listen to this. Olga, they would have you believe, is so vile she would blackmail her daughter into marrying Tartuffe to cover up an unplanned pregnancy. She allegedly has also disowned her supposedly coke-addled son — not for his purported drug use, mind you, but because he dared to speak ill of Tartuffe, whom she — you guessed it — is secretly in love with.

Oh, and if that’s not enough, Tartuffe is a closeted gay guy who in fact is chasing Olga’s husband Elmer.

It’s all garbage, of course. This is back-door liberal media malpractice at its worst. So desperate are they, in fact, that—get this—they’ve hired Beth Gardiner and Three Day Hangover to put on a play about this farce to spread their hellspawned lies.

A play? They think true-blue Americans are going to fall for a play?

Sure, they call it a light comedy, but you know who would actually find it funny? The kind of namby-pamby wimps who think women deserve health care, the Earth is billions of years old, and sex isn’t just for marriage. Degenerates, I mean.

Just to prove how tone-deaf they are, they’re basing the story off some foreigner’s play from 450 years ago. Guy by the name of Molière. Jake Brandman’s adaptation actually sticks to the original plot pretty well—so I’ve heard, of course; I’ve never read anything by a Frenchie.

Turns out the original version was done entirely in rhyming couplets, because Europeans were into that, I guess. And they actually kept some of that here! Not a lot—Brandman mostly reserves it for speeches made by Tartuffe (played by Tom Schwans) and his true believers, Olga and her mother (Carol Linnea Johnson and Dillon Heape, respectively), probably just to make fun of us conservatives.

I’d expect that kind of hoity-toity intellectualism from liberal elitists, but they were careful to make this production stand on its own—you don’t actually need to be familiar with the French guy’s version to get it.

Worse, they have a cash bar in the back. The play is even punctuated here and there with a recurring drinking game, ‘Never Have I Ever’, allowing the audience to share all their depraved and perverted secrets as an excuse to drink even more.

I gotta admit this is a shrewd strategy, but it’s bad news for us, folks. All the feeble-minded sheeple who come to watch are gonna be even more susceptible to the left’s jiggery-pokery after having knocked back a couple.

Now, I don’t think this is anything Tartuffe or Olga can’t handle. If the libs are this desperate, it’s only because they’re losing this badly.

But that doesn’t mean we should be complacent, Rafi Nation. I don’t think it’d be a bad idea to go see this mockery for yourself.

Just to keep your enemies closer, of course.


Rafi Mittlefehldt is a contributor to Exeunt Magazine

Tartuffe Show Info


Produced by Three Day Hangover

Directed by Beth Gardiner

Written by Molière, adapted by Jake Brandman

Cast includes Jose Cagigal, Dustin Charles, Leah Gabriel, Dillon Heape, Carol Linnea Johnson, Dan Morrison, Tom Schwans, Abbey Siegworth, Sean Tarrant


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