In Christopher Durang’s new play Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them the parallels with Moliere are real.  Durang portrays another gullible head of the household (Leonard played by Richard Poe) who is taken in not by the hypocrisy of the church but by the hypocrisy of a corrupt and unethical government.  It is a modern day farce that skewers the Bush-Cheney paranoid take on the new post McCarthyism boogey-man that is terrorism.  In this case, however it takes the audience and his daughter (played by Laura Benanti) much longer to see through Leonard’s over the top secret vigilante activities and Luella, his Edith Bunker of a wife (Kristine Nielson) never does catch on.  Laura meets her new husband Zamir (Amir Arison) under unusual circumstances.  He claims to be Irish but is clearly of middle eastern descent and (as it turns out) has a few more secrets of his own.  Durang can’t resist his own jab at religion and Reverend Mike, the minister who marries them (John Pankow) ironically is also a porn movie producer.  As is typical in farce, the characters are larger than life and the cast is rounded out by two of Leonard’s co-conspirators: one speaks only in Mel Blanc* cartoon dialogue and voices (David Aaron Baker) but occasionally steps out of the action á la George Burns to address the audience in a narrator voice and the other (Audrie Neenan) is a middle aged woman who has heard the vigilante calling but can’t keep her underwear on (literally, not figuratively).  Staging and revolving sets by David Korins were inventive and allowed the action to flow seamlessly through multiple scene changes.

Considering the strength of the church in his day and the real consequences he suffered as a result, Moliere demonstrated considerable chutzpah for his willingness to write the play that he did…  And while in modern day America we take for granted our civil liberties and don’t usually think it daring to speak our mind on controversial issues, the daily revelations of what was really going on behind the curtain of the Bush-Cheney White House should make us sit up and take notice and tip our hats to playwrights like Christopher Durang.