Through political turmoil, social unrest and roller-coaster economic developments, one thing remains true: There’s always a bull market for alternative facts.
Fakery-as-commodity in many hues and incarnations forms the zesty heart of Eugene Scribe’s 1840s comedy, “The Puff — or Falsehood and Truth.” Ranjit Bolt renders the title “Puff: Believe It or Not” in his translation, now in a sturdy world premiere with Remy Bumppo Theatre Company under Nick Sandys’ direction.
Scribe is the father of “the well-made play,” those dense-but-tightly-plotted affairs that, at their best, run with the precision of Swiss watches amid twists of fate — often precipitated by manuscripts falling into the wrong hands — before the tidy ending. Bolt, for his part, has created many delicious translations of Moliere and other titans of French neoclassical drama.
It’s a happy marriage, even if Sandys’ production gets off to a muddled courtship in the opening scene, where the setup asks us to keep track of a lot of never-seen and not-yet-seen characters and their relationships to each other.
Albert d’Angremont (Joshua Moaney) is a soldier recently returned to Paris after five years in colonized Algeria. He’s intent on helping his late general’s widow achieve a larger pension and wooing Antonia de la Roche-Bernard (Netta Walker), the younger sister of his friend, Maxence (Gregory Geffrard), who has become a shady stock manipulator. A chance encounter with Cesar Degaudets (David Darlow), a miser who also happens to be the co-guardian for Antonia, sets the wheels of the plot’s steam engine in motion.
But it’s the “puff” that keeps it going — agreed-upon falsehoods that go beyond “fake news.” Everyone in Paris is a budding memoirist, including Cesar’s own daughter, Corinne (Kelsey Brennan), and the politician and writer manque on whom she’s set her marital sights, Comte de Marignan (Christopher Sheard). Both scheme to get publisher Napoleon Brouvard (Peter A. Davis) interested in their “private memoirs,” which Corinne describes as “daguerreotypes of the mind.”
Albert swears he won’t get sucked into the web of trickery and flattery holding up Parisian society, the “lying carried to the level of speculation,” as one character describes it. But suffice it to say that love and the pursuit of fortune make fools of us all, with or without our willingness to spread the “puff” around.
Sandys’ staging contains a few anachronistic elements, particularly in Rachel Lambert’s cunning costumes and Victoria Deiorio’s music and sound design, which both take on increasingly contemporary accents in the second act. But for the most part, he’s not straining to make obvious connections between Scribe’s world and our age. We, like Scribe’s own characters, can see what we want to see here.
One can, however, easily see Scribe’s influence on later dramatists, particularly Oscar Wilde. The first scene between Antonia and Corinne (which is where the show really finds its groove) feels like an obvious blueprint for Cecily and Gwendolen in “The Importance of Being Earnest.” One cannot, however, imagine a Wildean lady saying, as Brennan’s Corinne does in assessing the Comte de Marignan as a prospective spouse, “I’d kill babies for an urban count.”
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Brennan and Sheard handle their richly exaggerated roles with obvious relish, balanced by Darlow’s phlegmatic-but-knowing Cesar and Walker’s sweet-but-not-insipid Antonia. Geffrard’s Maxence and Davis’ Bouvard are two sides of the same slippery coin. One sells the promise of financial gain, the other dangles carrots of literary fame and posterity. And they’re both, of course, full of puffery.
By the end, even Moaney’s upright Albert has learned that lying can be a twisted form of moral currency and that “one little fiction can produce a whole host of facts.” In Scribe’s world, as filtered through Bolt’s subtle contemporary sensibilities, at least those “little fictions” don’t cause lasting harm to the heart or the state.
Kerry Reid is a freelance critic.
Review: “Puff: Believe It or Not” (3 stars)
When: Through Jan. 7
Where: Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes
Tickets: $42.50-$52.50 at 773-404-7336 or remybumppo.org
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