Washington Shakespeare’s ‘The Miser’ an embarrassment of riches

Money may not buy you love, but if all you love is money, is the absence of tender affection a thing you even notice? Signs point to “no” in “The Miser,” Washington Shakespeare Co.’s high-yield staging of Moliere’s 350-year old farce about a bitter old usurer whose bottomless callousness and suspicion looms over everyone around him like a vengeful cloud. That greed can spread privation far outside the narrow boundaries of the heart wherein it resides is a resonant message in the post-bailout era. Director Akiva Fox’s spirited, almost too-frenetic production doesn’t belabor the point, instead finding its considerable riches instead in the revealing if outsized behaviors of its game ensemble.

Ian Armstrong’s Harpagon, the miser of the title, is a memorably pitiable creature, sweating and sniffling his way through purgatory, fortune in a cashbox in the garden, spade locked in his desk. He tortures the staff of his dilapidated house. (Tobias Harding’s immersive, tape-on-the-windows shipwreck of a set is almost its own character, hinting at some sunnier, forgotten past for its lord). Far worse, he contrives to arrange marriages for his son and daughter on the basis of how they’ll fatten his portfolio.

His kids have their own silly ideas about whom they would like to wed, and so unwinds an agreeably hyperbolic farce, one that retains its commedia dell’arte sensibility while floating comfortably outside of any specific era. David Ball’s modern adaptation doesn’t skimp on the bizarro zingers: “You look like a cheap lamp!” Harpagon cries to his son Cleante, who has just splurged on flashy clothes. “Extravagance that cries out to the baby Jesus for vengeance!”

Though the show takes a few minutes to find its rhythm, Fox cleverly invites the audience in by literally inviting them in: Sara Barker’s La Fleche smuggles us from the Clark Street Playhouse’s lobby into the performance space, where we meet servants Valere (Joshua Drew) and Jacques (Frank Britton, a comic slugger) at work, tending to their master’s hoards of junk. When Harpagon discovers La Fleche prowling, she submits to the sort of pat-down that probably would get you a private room at the airport, as if aware the intimate proximity of a young woman (a man in most productions) doesn’t even register as a potential source of pleasure.

The cast is uniformly strong, but the ones who fare best are those who seem most in control of their shifts from stillness to exuberance. As Cleante, Rex Daugherty turns in another winning, limber performance. And Heather Haney is a Kabuki-browed, generously upholstered, hairspray-abusing hoot at Frosine, a marriage broker who knows just how to sell Harpagon on a prospective bride — by tallying how much the unlucky lady’s modest tastes and appetites will save him in grocery bills and clothing allowances.

Of course, it’s folly to try to engineer a successful marriage — or any creative project — via calculus. Love and theatre both are messy, unpredictable endeavors involving instinct, risk, work and revision. Fox’s production gets the mixture right: It’s a sexy, spirited, loose-limbed thing that, at a brisk 100 minutes, delivers the laughs and stops on a dime.

Well, maybe make it a nickel.