It's gratifying that a 400-year-old comedy can still provoke, requiring a public warning about sexual innuendo. The playwright Moliere nailed the hypocrite and the impostor with his enduringly hated title character, Tartuffe, a pious conman who gets his comeuppance—but whose model of scheming and conniving seems eternal if constantly updated. Offending powerful people worldwide and delighting the rest of us since 1664, this perhaps sentimental favorite production of the classic play is part of South Coast Repertory’s 50th anniversary theatrical victory lap. SCR's Tartuffe is directed the second time around—five decades after the company first staged it—by the legendary Dominique Serrand and co-produced by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Shakespeare Theatre Company, together easily as illustrious as was Moliere’s original troupe.
Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Tuesdays, Wednesdays, 7:30 p.m. Starts: May 9. Continues through June 8, 2014
