Tartuffe Lab
Audience Guide
Devised by the Ensemble
Directed by Eberhard Koehler
What is Tartuffe Lab?
Tartuffe Lab is an original piece inspired by Tartuffe, a comedy written by the French playwright
Moliére in 1644. In Tartuffe Lab, a group of actors and designers wait in the theater for the
arrival of their director from Germany. The director seems to be a no-show, but the ensemble
soon starts to receive cryptic messages from him that start them down a path of exploration of
the modern meaning of Tartuffe. In the rehearsal process, the ensemble comprising actual actors
and designers was led by director Eberhard Koehler through a series of “experiments,” or guided
improvisations. The result of these “experiments” is Tartuffe Lab.
What is Postdramatic Theater?
To understand what that the term “Postdramatic theater” means, it is important to make the
distinction between “theater” and “drama.” Theater refers to the performance of plays or other
dramatic works, like musicals or staged readings. It can also mean the actual building where
those performances take place. Theater involves an audience and performers. Drama on the
other hand, refers only to the written word or the texts (plays) that are used in the theater. So
“Postdramatic theater” means theatrical performances that do not require or adhere to a written
text. Since the ancient Greeks began to record their plays in writing, the theater has been
dramatic, but postdramatic theater suggests that we have entered a new age of theatrical
performance that will be defined by works created without a pre-written text as the spine of a
piece. The term “Postdramatic Theater” comes from the 1999 book Postdramatic Theatre by
German theater scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann which details the history on non-textual theater in
the late 20th century.
Postdramatic theater began in the late 1960s as performers began to explore new forms of
expression in the theater. East German theater artist Heiner Müller and American stage director
Robert Wilson were at the vanguard of the movement. In practice, postdramatic theater is not a
particular style, but takes a variety of forms. The term has become a catch-all for any type of
works that eschews traditional dedication to a text. Some groups use classic texts as sources of
inspiration for improvisations or imagery, while others start from a purely visual or auditory idea
from everyday life. Common themes in the movement are the blurring of the line between a
performer’s real life and onstage persona; the use of performers who may not be trained actors;
collaborative development processes; and non-linear storytelling. In the past decade,
postdramatic projects frequently have featured multimedia designs that rely heavily on light,
projection, and video to help tell the story.
About the Source Material – Tartuffe, or The Hypocrite
Setting: An upscale home in Paris, mid-17th century
Characters:
Orgon – a gentleman who believes that Tartuffe is a saint
Mariane – Orgon’s daughter; engaged to Valére
Elmire – Orgon’s wife; stepmother of Mariane and Damis
Damis – Orgon’s son
Mme Pernelle – Orgon’s mother; a staunch supporter of Tartuffe
Cleante – Elmire’s brother
Dorine – maid to Orgon’s family
Valére – Engaged to Mariane; friend of Cleante
Tartuffe – A poor but pious man who befriends Orgon and comes to live at his home
Laurent – Tartuffe’s acolyte
Monsieur Loyal – a bailiff
Officer – of the court
Flipote – Mme Pernell’s maid
Act I
Orgon has been away on a journey. While he was away, his new friend Tartuffe, a supposedly
pious man, has been living in Orgon’s house. Elmire, Dorine, Mariane, and Damis argue with
Mme. Pernelle that Tartuffe is a hypocrite, but she will not believe it. When Orgon returns from
his trip, he asks after Tartuffe, but ignores the news that his wife has been very ill. Orgon
suggests to Cleante that he will break Mariane’s engagement to Valére and instead wed her to
Tartuffe.
Act II
Orgon tells Mariane of his plan to marry her to Tartuffe. She tries to be agreeable, but is
incredibly upset, and her maid Dorine mocks Orgon’s plan. After Orgon leaves, Dorine and
Mariane come up with a scheme to stop the marriage. Valére has heard Orgon’s plan and a
lovers’ quarrel ensues between him and Mariane, but Dorine convinces them to stop fighting and
focus on getting Elmire’s help to stop the wedding.
Act III
Dorine tells Damis about the marriage plan. He is livid, as he had hoped to marry Valére’s
sister. He decides to hide while Elmire talks to Tartuffe alone about the situation with Mariane.
Tartuffe tells Elmire that he couldn’t care less about Mariane, and in fact tries to seduce Elmire
herself, the wife of his benefactor. Damis is, again, enraged, and jumps from his hiding place to
confront Tartuffe. Elmire asks Damis not to tell Orgon that Tartuffe tried to seduce her, but
Damis tells Orgon immediately. Rather than believe his son’s condemnation of Tartuffe, Orgon
sends Damis away and decides to make Tartuffe his heir.
Act IV
Cleante confronts Tartuffe, saying he should forgive Damis and leave Orgon’s home if he is truly
pious. Tartuffe refuses. Dorine, Mariane, and Elmire enlist Cleante’s help to convince Orgon
that Tartuffe is up to no good. They convince Orgon to hide under a table while Elmire tries to
entrap Tartuffe. Seeing Elmire’s seeming change of heart, Tartuffe again tries to seduce her,
telling her that an affair will not be a sin so long as no one finds out and also claiming that her
husband is such an idiot that he’ll never find out. At that, Orgon jumps from his hiding place
and tells Tartuffe to leave. Tartuffe leaves, but threatens to take the estate which Orgon has
promised him.
Act V
Orgon reveals that he entrusted Tartuffe with a set of secret letters which incriminated a friend
and fears that Tartuffe will use them to blackmail his family. Mme Pernelle still won’t believe
that Tartuffe has done wrong, even though Orgon has now witnessed his friend’s betrayal. As
the whole family tries to determine what to do, Monsieur Loyal arrives to dispossess Orgon of
his home and possessions, per the instructions of Tartuffe. Valére runs in, warning Orgon that
Tartuffe has gone to the king with the box of letters and that authorities are coming to arrest him.
Before Orgon can make his escape, Tartuffe arrives with the bailiff to take Orgon into custody.
At the last moment, the bailiff reveals that it is instead Tartuffe who will be arrested, as the noble
king saw through his act and recognized him for the fraud he is.
About the Author
Born in France in 1622, Molière was a playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the
greatest masters of comedy in Western literature. His best known works include The
Misanthrope, The School for Wives, and Tartuffe or the Hypocrite. He served as the official
playwright for the French royal court. Quite apropo, Molière died on stage performing Argan in
his final play, The Imaginary Invalid.
© 2013 A+E Networks. All rights reserved.
Interview with director Eberhard Koehler
By Monica Miklas
MM: Can you describe the process through which you’re approaching this classic text?
EK: Tartuffe Laboratory, or Tartuffe Lab, will show a working space or studio in which we see a
group of people, a group of performers, consisting of set design students and actors, as they
perform experiments around the subject of hypocrisy, and the question “What of the content of
this roughly 350 year old play matters in our reality today?” We have one example of an attempt
to transform this historic play into a contemporary reality, and this example is almost one
hundred years old. It’s a German silent movie De Herr Tartüff. They took Moliere’s play,
simplified it, and added a frame device in order to find the play’s relevance n the 1920s in
Germany.
MM: How will the performers in this piece be used, and in what ways will the process be
new for them?
EK: What will be new is that I’m not directing a show in the classical sense of the word. I do not
yet have a vision or image in my head about what we will put in front of the audience. I
developed a timeline and a road map of questions and tasks that I put in front of the group of
performers and observe their reactions. They answered, not literally with words, but with visual
installations, with improvisations, with shadow games, tricks with video, all different kinds of
artistic vocabulary that formed their answers to my questions or provocations. Then in the
middle of the process, we tried to choose the most interesting results of those improvisations and
build a sequence out of them. We then started to rehearse and refine the sequence. The result,
might not be a narrative like we are used to where the story is told in a literal way. Here the
storytelling will be non-linear. It will be by associations, images that lead to other images. We
are not trying to make a charade or a visual riddle where we believe that everything needs to be
understood and read in only one way by the audience. Two different visitors will see two
different stories and that is fine. What will be interesting is how the audience reflects on the
experiments and how they relate to what is going on onstage.
MM: How does working in the theater in Europe differ from the style of theater you see
here and how will that impact the process?
EK: That is of course a difficult question because all generalizations are immediately in the
danger of building a false reality. I don’t believe that there is “The Theater” in Europe right
now. There are so many different tendencies and contradictory [styles] and I’m sure my
knowledge is limited of theatre in America, I know only a certain aspect of American Theatre,
and I see a wide spectrum of different styles. Still, I think that maybe there is an influence that I
believe is stronger in some European performances that goes back to Brecht and his ideas of epic
theater, of storytelling instead of performing and acting stories and includes all those elements of
alienation. I see that kind of theatre more often, but I’m also sure it exists here in the States. I’m
also sure that when we start to talk about performance in a wider context than theater, that it is
also an idea born in the visual arts here and in Europe. It’s really hard to create this border that
should run somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean or say Greenland.
There are many of post-dramatic efforts in the German-speaking countries now. By postdramatic I mean performances in which there are no actors at all, only so-called experts of daily
life. It can be a group of people who share a certain hobby, or who are all from foreign
countries, or who are all older than seventy-five or are all kids around fourteen. But they don’t
do children’s theater. They commit to a professional theater project. There the directors who
generate material and organize it in a way that it shapes an arc, but they replace the actor and this
element of acting with people from daily life who they put onstage and reveal certain
autobiographic aspects of their company. Another term they use for this kind of work is
documentary theater.
MM: Will those ideas be put into practice in this production?
EK: I will ask the performers lots of questions and then ask them to react with their own
personality and their experience. They might tell us stories from their own life, things that really
happened, or things that they experienced in their fantasy and they just pretend that it really
happened. I will have no means to discover what actually is the case and what they are just
making up. There is a visual artist from France, I believe, whose art is all about this, Sophie
Calle. She has these very autobiographic elements in her art and you never know. It’s intimate,
and it includes scenes from her sexual life. She pretends that she’s her mother and hires a
private investigator to follow her and make a diary of her life. She simultaneously writes down
what is happening and then she compares the truth and the construct. But you can never be
100% sure that what she’s telling is true or that some of those things are invented. So the
biographies of our performers will become part of our show.
Allusions to Other Works
In their exploration of hypocrisy during the rehearsal process, the collaborators of Tartuffe Lab
read multiple versions of Moliére’s play as well as a variety of other theater texts.
Offending the Audience by Peter Handke
“This is not a play. This is a prologue. You’re welcome.”
Known by some as an “anti-play,” Handke’s 1966 production was a theater piece with no plot
and no characters. Instead, the actors onstage looked at and directly addressed the audience,
claiming to have neither costumes nor pseudonyms. Handke’s postmodernist text destroyed the
fourth wall between audience and actors, shifting the focus of the event from the action onstage
to the relationship between all of the people in the theater the subject of the non-play. Offending
the Audience was at the vanguard of a theater movement that questioned all the established rules
that were inherited from classical Greek theater and laid the groundwork for further
experimentation.
Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Lessing’s dramatic poem, first published in 1779, advocates religious tolerance among the three
religions of the book: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. At the center of the story is the ring
parable: a beautiful and precious ring was handed down from father to son for many generations,
until it reached a father who had three sons who he loved equally. Unable to decide which son
should inherit the ring, the father went to a jeweler and asked the man to craft two more rings,
identical to the first. After the father died, each son received a ring, and none among them could
tell which ring had been the original and which two were copies. The sons quarreled over which
was the true ring and tried to guess which one was real, but try as they might, they could not
figure out which was which was the true ring.
Herr Tartüff by F.W. Murnau
The 1927 silent film by German director F.W. Murnau (most famous for the classic vampire
movie Nosferatu), updates the Tartuffe story by adding a contemporary frame story set in 1920’s
Germany. Murnau also simplified the plot by cutting out the subplot involving Orgon’s children
and focusing on the love triangle of Tartuffe, Elmire, and Orgon.
Discussion Questions
1. What was the story being told in Tartuffe Lab? How did it relate to Moliére’s play?
2. Where do you see hypocrisy in your own life?
3. Is theater really theater without a script? Without actors?
4. Who are the hypocrites in Tartuffe and in Tartuffe Lab?