THE SCHOOL FOR WIVES
Perhaps the ultimate erotic fantasy is to establish complete power over another, body and soul. In Moliere’s knowing comedy The School for Wives, this fantasy takes an especially pathetic form: a lonely, wealthy bachelor rears a pretty girl in ignorance and isolation in order to train her to be his “perfect” wife–docile, adoring, amorous on demand. Why play a dead-end singles game when you can create the woman of your dreams?
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In an ironic twist, Moliere has Horace enthusiastically tell Arnolphe himself–his “ally”–about his love for Agnes and his plans to help her escape. Barely concealing his rage, Arnolphe clumsily seeks to foil Horace’s rescue attempt. (These Arnolphes never learn–there’s probably some man somewhere who, never having seen School, is even now trying to create his own school for wives.)
Gaines imagines the play, performed here on a mostly bare stage, as a rehearsal by Moliere’s Illustre Theatre. (It suits Gaines’s purposes to pretend that it was Armande, Moliere’s unfaithful wife, who originated the role of Agnes and not the actual actress, Catherine De Brie.) In Northlight’s slow-moving “preshow,” a nervous, pill-popping Moliere/Arnolphe seems irritated by the attentions paid his wife by the handsome young actor Herve; more infuriating is her casual way of returning them in front of the entire cast. (Of course in the play Herve plays Arnolphe’s young rival Horace.)
Hynden Walch may have to dumb down to depict Agnes’s subversive simplicity, but she never surrenders the character’s dignity to a dumb-blond stereotype or succumbs to the temptation to broadcast her disgust for the uncomely Arnolphe. Funny and true, Walch inhabits Agnes as fully as Judy Holliday did her wonderful airhead Billie in Born Yesterday.
Norris’s 55-minute one-act centers on an unnamed actor, played by the author, who in a bittersweet lecture-demonstration tells us why he retired from the stage in order to make custom furniture. With sometimes vengeful zeal, this character relates the miseries of seven years of acting, or as he puts it, his “high-speed toboggan ride into hell.”
