THE MISANTHROPE
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Or better yet, The Littlest Nietzschean. There’s a sort of Triumph of the Will bravado to the compensations of this Alceste. He looks disconcertingly Aryan when we first see him stripped down to a tank top, wearing a modified bristle cut a la von Hindenburg, looking grim but pink cheeked, and doing exercises. His surroundings are sleek and hard. He drinks one of the better brands of bottled water.
And when he talks, his words have that arrogant uber alles edge to them. The philosophical despair, the sweet sadness normally associated with Alceste doesn’t show up here. He’s cold and more than a little priggish when he scolds his friend, Philinte, for hypocritically playing up to people he hardly knows. The superior man, says Alceste, “ought to die of self-disgust [rather than] . . . falsify the heart’s affections thus.” Alceste despises “these lavishers of meaningless embraces . . . [who] praise the fool no less than the man of worth.” In fact, he can’t abide the herd, period: “All are corrupt; there’s nothing to be seen / In court or town but aggravates my spleen.”
The Seahorse people are a sharp bunch, and they handle both the script and its updated setting with assurance–as well as a lot of slick humor. Hultgren gets considerable comic mileage out of his soft, pink baby face and the angry deadpan he puts on it. Mark Mysliwiec, as Acaste, makes a striking aesthete–a cross between Artaud and Oscar Wilde, sans either one’s brains. Elizabeth Muckley’s a sort of seductive Margaret Hamilton, combining enormous sexiness with a scratch-out-hereyes cattiness as Arsinoe the prude. And David VanMatre’s woozy servant reminds me, appropriately, of the pudgy little fellow with the day-old beard who’s got a thing for Miss DiPesto on Moonlighting.
