NEW YORK — Had an enema recently? Did it leave you laughing?
Medical humor — yes, enemas and all — is at the core of the 1673 Molière comedy “The Imaginary Invalid,” sometimes translated as “The Hypochondriac,” a reminder from La France that quack doctors are nothing new and that people have been ordering medical tests they don’t need for some 400 years at least.
Molière was poking fun here at the contemporaneous practices of blood-letting and purging (ewww), but also at the timeless, baked-in conflict of interest of offering cures for profit, not to mention the folly of the self-absorbed fools so easily taken in by charlatans in white coats.
This play has shown up on Broadway before, although once-mainstream Molière comedies have been much less produced Stateside these last few years, outside of college campuses. Bill Irwin, the famed clown, mime and comedic actor, is at the heart (pun intended) of this flamboyant new Broadway staging from director Brandon J. Dirden for the Roundabout Theatre Company.
Irwin came up with a new, 90-minute (thank god) adaptation and stars as the mostly immobilized Argan (enema exits excepted), the titular hypochondriac who wants to force his daughter to marry a weird and boring medical student, not the handsome dude she favors, just so he can have his own in-house doctor to pop pharmaceutical pleasures right into his bouche.
And, of course, working for free.
Molière plays often feature savvy servants who know more than those they serve, and this one has a famous example in the outspoken Toinette, here juicily interpreted by Rachel Bloom, of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” fame. Various other storied Broadway comic professionals surround Irwin’s unpleasant cheapskate, including Dylan Baker, Hiram Delgado, Crystal A. Dickinson, Daniel Croix Henderson, Ava Lalezarzadeh and Brooks Ashmanskas, whose hound-dog visage lights up the stage each and every time it makes an entrance.
All of the above are gorgeously and humorously attired by the costume designer Karen Perry, whose devil-may-care suite of faux-Baroque extravagances fuels a whole catwalk of laughs. We should all be so lucky to get to make an appearance in clothes like these, especially on Beowulf Boritt’s warped-perspective set.
Irwin’s humor is, to say the least, broad. Very, very broad.
I initially found myself resisting all of the melodious line readings, the vowel elongations, the facial contortions and the physical squirming, but in the end Irwin, truly one of a kind at the age of 76, mostly won me over on the grounds that this is a comedy with an unsympathetic and mostly immobile central character — so something, or someone, has to compensate and liven things up. And it’s all so deeply, fully and confidently realized.
Some of the supporting work here is very funny too, whether it’s the savvy Bloom’s sardonic deliveries of truths or the hilarious Delgado’s droll interpretation of the potential husband of every girl’s nightmares.
But how you feel about this show will, in the end, be a question of how you feel about Irwin, surely the conductor of this particular comedic symphony as much as the director. Some who consider medical matters as not being their first choice for a big Broadway night out might feel like they left 42nd Street and got trapped in the seventh circle of hell, Molière edition. So be warned. And warn any guest.
Still, they just don’t make ’em like Irwin anymore when it comes to outré farce and satire and 90 minutes watching this renowned thespian essay an old coot kicking and screaming as young people all around him point out his vulnerability and mortality was weirdly invigorating for me.
I mean, no enema, sure, but one heck of a lot less invasive.
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Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
At the Todd Haimes Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St., New York; www.roundabouttheatre.org