The neurotic Larry Appleton of TV’s Perfect Strangers, starring Off-Broadway in a 400-year-old Molière farce? Can it be? Not only can it—it is, and the gifted Mark Linn-Baker says it’s his idea. “I had worked with Red Bull Theater in 2015 doing The School for Scandal, and I had a great time with them,” he told Observer, “so Jesse Berger, its artistic director, and I started talking about doing something else together. We settled on The Imaginary Invalid. Jeffrey Hatcher, who did zippy, witty condensations of Gogol (The Government Inspector) and Ben Jonson (The Alchemist) for Red Bull, was brought in to work his usual magic on it, and we were off.”
Condensation is the right word. When The Imaginary Invalid premiered at Paris’ Theatre du Palais-Royal in February of 1673, it was a three-act comédie-ballet with dance sequences, musical interludes and Molière in the title role. At his fourth performance, he suffered a stroke, collapsed on stage and died in a week, but the play he left behind has enjoyed a robust afterlife.
Linn-Baker read various versions of the play, “looking to see how other people interpreted it. There are several British and American translations out there. It may be 400 years old, but it lasts! It’s funny stuff, and Jeffrey got the three-hour running time down to 85 minutes. That’s really fast.”
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Argan, played by Linn-Baker, is centrally located on the stage in a throne-like examination chair with an assortment of positions from upright to prone and usually covered with a fleet of mystified medicos wondering what could be the matter. True to the title, Argan has a galloping case of unbridled hypochondria, undetected by professional eyes.
The malady is also centrally located—around Argan’s benumbed buttocks specifically, which inevitably leads to a motherlode of butt jokes and log-shaped enemas. The only person to puncture his illusion is his snippy, feisty maid, Toinette (played with proper snap and pop by Sarah Stiles). Underlining the redundancy of the medical prognosis is the fact that the very able Arnie Burton manfully plays three of those docs all by himself. So obsessed with his rumored “ailments,” Argan tries talking his daughter, Angelique (Emilie Kouatchou), into marrying a doctor to get 24/7 medical coverage. When she finds a suitor on her own, he threatens her with a convent.
The weekend The Imaginary Invalid opened at New World Stages, Turner Classic Movies aired Linn-Baker’s most fondly remembered film, 1982’s My Favorite Year. He was a young gopher in the early ‘50s who introduced the terror of live TV to a screen swashbuckler he idolized (Peter O’Toole’s Oscar-nominated facsimile of Errol Flynn: “I’m not an actor… I’m a Movie Star”).
By then, Linn-Baker had already launched his stage career with a two-man political comedy with fellow Yalie Lewis Black called The Laundry Room. In 1983, he was in a Broadway version of the Doonesbury comic strip and, a decade later, one of the wits-in-residence feeding the mind of a Sid Caesar-like comic in Neil Simon’s irreverent remembrance, Laughter on the 23rd Floor.
Four times, Linn-Baker has been elected mayor of River City, Iowa. “I did a concert version of The Music Man in New Haven, then I did it at the Kennedy Center for the Encores! series they have there, and I went back to the Muny in St. Louis to do it,” he says. Recently, he stepped into the Broadway production with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster for the last two months of their run so Jefferson Mays, their Mayor Shinn, could do his solo show on Broadway, A Christmas Carol.
“When I did Shakespeare in the Park in 1978, Woody Allen shot a scene for Manhattan, using me in that footage. That was my first film job, and it’s how I got my Screen Actors Guild card. In 2011, I was on Broadway in a third of Relatively Speaking, an evening of one-act plays he did with Ethan Coen and Elaine May.” Off-Broadway, he did A Year with Frog and Toad, a series of plays based on the children’s books by his ex-father-in-law, Arnold Lobel. (Jay Goede was Frog to his Toad.)
Unlike the guy he’s playing, Linn-Baker finds himself sitting pretty, surrounded by a sparkling set of supporting players who return the serve. “We’re having a great time,” he beams. “I love this cast. Every one of them is a gem on stage. It’s fun to be up there with them doing this play.”
He gives himself points, too, adding that he’s “very happy to make it past the fourth performance.” Another lucky note: Molière passed when he was 51. Linn-Baker turned 71 this week.
