Tartuffe March 21, 2009

Jeff Cohen's new American adaptation of 'Tartuffe', written in verse and rhyming couplets, sets the play in New York City in an earlier depression-era... the 1930s. His adaptation seeks to employ a particularly American idiom -- transposing Moliere's social satire to its American equivalent. In our own present time of outlandish wealth, dashed fortunes and Bernie Madoff-like swindlers, what better era to look back on than the Great Depression of the 1930s? Moliere spun his comedy from the stock characters of Commedia, and Mr. Cohen spins his from the golden era of American comedians and films.