The Imaginary Invalid
Everything is over-the-top in the Roundabout’s daft, delightful new version of The Imaginary Invalid, now playing at the Todd Haimes Theatre. It’s a pleasure to experience the cure it offers to our ailing souls in these turbulent, troubled times. The irrepressible Bill Irwin has seized Moliere’s 1673 play and adapted it into a madcap mishmash of comedic styles, including commedia dell’arte, farce, slapstick, Saturday Night Live and shameless “shtick.”
As the curtain rises, there stands a masked Irwin, imperiously dressed in a flowing white gown, alone on the empty stage as if he owns it. (He does). Enter a masked ensemble in black academic gowns and white ruffs to perform the prologue. They dance around Irwin, who stands and knocks three times with his commanding baton in the traditional “Trois Coups” to summon the cast and begin the play. Suddenly the walls of a 17th century drawing room fly down from above and surround them. Et voila! We’re in the domain of Argan, master of the house and master hypochondriac.
Immediately, Argan (played by Irwin, of course) launches into a diatribe against his “primary care physician” Dr. Purgon and the outrageous bills he’s charging for Argan’s enemas. (Prepare yourself: you’ll be hearing about those enemas in detail for the next ninety minutes). Enter Toinette, Argan’s servant (the wily Rachel Bloom), to hear his chorus of complaints. Argan informs her that he has found a solution for his chronic maladies: namely, that his daughter Angelique should marry Thomas Diafoirus, Dr. Purgon’s nephew, who will also be a physician in a few days. Thus, Argan can have around-the-clock care in the family. He threatens his daughter that either she marries Thomas or enters a convent.
In the plot that follows, the various characters connive and conspire to achieve their conflicting goals (marriage, money, etc.) Angelique (the lovely Ava Lalezarzadeh) loves Cleante (the earnest Daniel Croix Henderson), not Thomas. How will she gain her father’s permission to marry her beloved? Then there’s Beline, Argan’s second wife (a saucy Crystal A. Dickinson), who is conniving to have Argan change his will so that he will leave her all his money. She’s hired a lawyer named Bonnefoy (the slick Hiram Delgado) to work out the terms.
Those are the plot lines that drive the action, but it’s Argan’s continuous search for medical care that provides the evening’s non-stop entertainment. There is a hilarious succession of five doctors who come to examine Argan, one more outrageous than the other, all dressed in Karen Perry’s extravagant period costumes.
First there is a pair: Dr. Diafoirus (the larger-than-life Brooks Ashmanskas) in a huge, feathered hat, and his son Thomas, the soon-to-be doctor (Hiram Delgado again) in a goofy wig (hair and wig design, Nikiya Mathis). Together they deliver a diagnosis in pure gibberish (“a distemper in the splenic parenchyma…by means of the vasa brevia, the pylorus, and the ductus choledoctus.”)
They are followed by the even more outrageous Dr. Fleurant (Hiram Delgado yet again), wearing a pirate’s costume with an eye patch, carrying a huge enema syringe. The fourth doctor is Purgon (Brooks Ashmanskas again) in an extravagant black and white costume with a moustache drawn on his face. His equally nonsensical diagnosis warns Argan of the dangerous possibility of “bradyspepsia into dyspepsia into lientery into dysentery into hydropsy”. The fifth and final physician is Toinette, the maid, disguised in a beard and black gown. She attributes Argan’s various ailments to a lung problem and advises that one of his arms should be removed, as well as his right eye.
As Moliere intended, and to the delight of today’s audience, the play is a scathing satire on the practice of medicine. Addressing that, yet another character in the play, Argan’s brother Beralde (a sincere Dylan Baker), offers the voice of reason. Regarding Argan’s doctors, he says: “They know Latin and Greek…but to subject them to science? Or to cure their patients? Does that interest them? Not so much.” Eventually, Toinette conceives of a plan to unmask Beline’s hypocrisy and convince Argon to allow his daughter to marry Cleante, who then promises to become a doctor. Surprise: Argan announces he’ll become a doctor, too! A celebratory ceremony ensues…
Under Brandon Dirden’s spirited direction, the collaborating designers put on a spectacular show on Beowulf Boritt’s elaborate period set. There are all kinds of distractions along the way in this wise-cracking contemporary script, including an opera by Cleante (posing as a music teacher), excerpts from which he sings with Angelique to impress Argan (it’s awful). There are even comments by Argan about Moliere’s plays (“do people actually laugh?”)
Ultimately, leave it to Bill Irwin to deliver Moliere’s cure. Says the raisonneur Beralde: “Art is health, at its best. It is ‘wellness.’ It is breath. It is thought. It is amusement…A true healer knows this. Health is laughter!”
The Imaginary Invalid
At the Todd Haimes Theatre
227 W. 42nd St.
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Through November 22, 2026
