Lying Can be Fun: The Liar at Shakespeare Theatre

"Sit back; turn off your brain," the actor implored us in an opening monologue to The Liar on Tuesday. My friend Michelle and I were at the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Lansburgh Theatre for a special performance of The Liar meant for young professionals. Sponsored by The Onion and Magic Hat, the event was full of 21-35 year olds who took advantage of the cheap tickets.

The character giving the monologue turned out to be Cliton, (Adam Green) a valet to The Liar himself, Dorante (Christian Conn). And Cliton's warning to empty our minds proved to be exactly the right mentality with which to approach the play.

Pierre Corneille wrote and premiered The Liar in 1643. The Shakespeare Theatre's version, however, is a revamped one, replete with modern references by Peter Ives. It tells the story of Dorante, a man newly arrived in Paris, and his attempt to pursue a woman whom he meets on the first day. The problem is that he doesn't know the woman's name and incorrectly thinks it to be Lucrece instead of Clarice. Two other challenges are that his father wants him to marry a girl he has picked out, and Dorante's best friend, Alcippe, is already engaged to Clarice. This is all complicated by Dorante's inability to tell the truth in any circumstance.

Besides the typical joy one gets from such ludicrous dramatic irony, this production heaps on the jokes in its smartly rhymed lines. Recited entirely in verse, the play delivers unexpected laughs simply in the ridiculousness of some of its lines in order to make things rhyme. Near the end when Dorante is wooing one of the women, he says, "You may be a bivalve, but you are my valve." That line also delivers the delicious juxtaposition of SAT-type words (in this case SAT II Biology) with more commonly used words in the name of rhyme. Ives has also reached to the world of Twenty-first century vocab to draw even more ridiculous rhymes. Though you can pretty much predict the end of the play by the end of the first half, many jokes are delightfully unpredictable.

What makes this production memorable is how Ives draws out the themes that resonate the most with contemporary audiences. Perhaps I am prone to seeing things I want to see, but I thought this production touched on a range of modern romantic concerns, from whether or not women should play hard to get, to the standards to which women should hold their suitors.

Even if you don’t see all that, the play is sheer fun to watch, and well worth the two hours.