The Misanthrope

In this delightful comedy about the French aristocracy, told with MoliEre’s signature wit, the atmosphere is frivolous, the morals are loose, the egos are larger than life and everyone is looking for love. Constance Congdon’s verse version of this intelligent satire is both provocative and funny.

Love is all bad sonnets, big fluffy beds and silly preening in the first half of THE MISANTHROPE… Then the gloves come off…and the characters are fighting for their lives.
MoliEre’s 1666 comedy about yearning for truth and love in a world of self-serving hypocrites never falls out of fashion… The play is recast here in a tonic new verse version by Constance Congdon…
This is a world…where words do all the damage.
Playwright Congdon (TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS) has done an exemplary job of making that language count. Her rhymes are not as elegant as those in Richard Wilbur’s standard verse translation, and that’s the point. There’s a lean angularity in her lines, a flashing sense of purpose.

Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle