Broadway’s ‘Imaginary Invalid’ Struggles to Find Its Laughs

“Do people actually laugh when they pay their good money and go to those plays of his?” asks Argan, the wealthy hypochondriac at the center of The Imaginary Invalid. “I hear it is often very quiet in his theaters.” The jab at the play’s own author, Molière, lands with an unintended sting in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s new Broadway revival, where, according to Time Out New York’s Adam Feldman, pained silence often greets the cast’s strained efforts.

The line itself is a flourish added for this production. Feldman notes that the original French text does include a passage in which Argan attacks Molière, but not because his shows fail to get laughs. Bill Irwin, who adapted the 17th-century comedy from a translation by Doug Skinner and trimmed it to an 85-minute, intermission-free running time, also plays the title role at the Todd Haimes Theatre. Molière himself originated the part, and, as Feldman points out, was gravely ill at the time; he died shortly after the play’s fourth performance in 1673.

Feldman, who gives the production a “not recommended” rating, is clear that the fault does not lie with the source material. He points to an excellent Off Broadway account of the play by Red Bull Theater last year, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and starring Mark-Linn Baker. In his view, the trouble here is that Irwin and director Brandon J. Dirden try to turn the play’s theatrical self-awareness into an organizing principle, and a message that takes its own comedy very seriously.

The evening opens with a wordless prologue in which a masked Pantalone figure stands on an empty stage and the other performers, masked and dressed as commedia-style doctors in black robes and white ruffs, draw symbolic red ribbons from his body. Only then does Beowulf Borritt’s attractively rendered set take shape as Argan’s parlor. Irwin, a gifted clown, settles into a recliner to sort through a stack of medical bills, a scene Feldman says should have been a cakewalk but instead feels rushed, fumbled and mumbled. He credits Irwin with precise physical comedy and a gallery of skillful grimaces, but finds it out of step with the rest of the ensemble.

That ensemble includes Crystal A. Dickinson as Argan’s scheming wife, Beline, and Dylan Baker as his sensible brother, Beralde. Ava Lalezarzadeh and Daniel Croix Henderson play the young lovers Angelique and Cleante, while Brooks Ashmanskas takes on two doctors, Purgon and Diafoirus, and Hiram Delgado plays three roles. In costumes by Karen Perry, they have been directed to ham it up, and some earn laughs with individual flourishes, Feldman writes, but without a shared rhythm they step on one another’s toes.

Rachel Bloom, making her Broadway debut as the feisty servant Toinette, brings what Feldman calls hints of inner life to the role, urging Argan to defy his advisors and ease his reliance on laxatives. Otherwise, he writes, the production embraces its own artifice with a self-regard worthy of a Molière protagonist. “Health is laughter,” Beralde says at one point, and at the end: “It surpasses understanding. It is the theater.”

The message, as Feldman reads it, is that the real doctor is the theater itself, right before our eyes. His verdict: not all invalids, it turns out, are fabulous.