Money, Money, Money

Whatever the hero's flaw, great tragedy holds a mirror up to man's virtues. It girds playgoers with borrowed strength by showing how man may bear the unbearable. Great comedy, on the other hand, holds a mirror up to man's follies and vices. Where tragedy argues that man is a marvel, comedy insists that he is a fool. Tragedy elevates; comedy deflates.

When a tragic hero is blinded, he assumes the grandeur of Oedipus; when a comic hero is blinded, he becomes as ludicrous as a mole. Moliere, the most serious writer of comedy who ever lived, took just such a blind mole and made him the mock hero of The Miser. Harpagon (Robert Symonds) has a singular obsession--money. Like most obsessions, it is not magnificent but malignant. It allows the great 17th century French dramatist to make a central moral point--that a sin is called deadly because it deadens. Harpagon is blind to his children's hope of love, blind to his servants' grievances, and hopelessly blind to any generous stirrings of mind or heart.

Robert Symonds brings this miserable creature to robustious life in his best performance yet with the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater. Although he is always an actorish actor, his tendency to overplay is precisely right for this petty monster of farce. Skittering about like a bespectacled magpie, Symonds' Harpagon is a sprite of the cashbox, an imp of interest rates, a tooth-clacking, raggedy-cloaked, stringy-haired witch of usury. To see him is a pleasure. To see him undone is a delight.

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