Augustin-Eugène Scribe would’ve felt right at home in today’s television industry. The most popular French playwright and librettist during a good chunk of the 19th century, Scribe anticipated the Hollywood writers’ room by maintaining a creative staff whose members assembled the hundreds of entertainments that appeared under his name. He also invented the well-made play, a template capable of generating endless variations within an ironclad set of narrative rules. Scribe was, as his 1861 New York Times obituary noted, “Less a dramatist than a manafacturer [sic] of comedies, vaudevilles and opera librettos.”>
Unfortunately for Albert, the notion of proving one’s worth through demonstrations of courage, fortitude, and martial skill has become as quaint to Parisians as truth itself. In the world of puff, matches are made for the sake of advantage and good optics. Albert’s reeducation begins when he happens to save Desgaudets from getting run over by a horse cart, and comes to a crisis when Antonia is contracted to marry the wealthy, frivolous Comte de Marignan in order to settle Maxence’s debts. There’s a huge number of twists, turns, and even double flips along the way, many of them resulting from the usual farce fodder—eavesdropped conversations, snooped diary entries, misinterpreted signals—but others attributable to nothing more than the quick pace of developments leaving people a scheme behind, which is only appropriate for a play spinning on the axis of perception. Unlike David Ives, whose adaptations of Molière and Corneille are ostentatiously anachronistic, Bolt is a quiet and fluid modernizer here; it’s only late in the game, after you hear someone say “I suffer from low self-esteem” or “It’s the way I’m made,” that you realize you’ve been listening to 21st-century tropes all evening. Nick Sandys’s direction, quiet and fluid too—resisting what must’ve been a sore temptation to overplay the sense of many balls juggled, so that small gestures, like those of Christopher Sheard’s Comte de Marignan as he rearranges his public face after a miscalculation or Joshua Moaney’s Albert as he suffers a fit of the moral dry heaves—can read as human as well as comic.
Through 1/7: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM (except 12/10, 1:30 PM), Sun 2:30 PM; also Wed 12/13, 7:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, remybumppo.org, $48.50-$63.50
