David Furst: This is All Of It. I'm David Furst in for Alison Stewart. On today's show, one of the stars of Stranger Things, Gaten Matarazzo, is here to talk about the show. Rosie Grant is the author of To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes. She'll join us to discuss how a tombstone in Greenwood Cemetery inspired her. Writer-director Cameron Crowe joins us to talk about his new memoir, The Uncool. That's the plan. Let's get started. [music]

Tartuffe is finding new life in 2025. The classic satirical comedy was written in the 1600s by French playwright Molière. It tells the story of Tartuffe, a con artist who portrays himself as a devout religious figure. He has the character Orgon completely in his sway, while every other member of his household, and seemingly the world, sees right through his act and how he's taking advantage of the family.

Tony Award-winning Matthew Broderick plays the lead role in a new production of the play, now running off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop. The cast also includes David Cross, Francis Jue, Bianca Del Rio, and Lisa Kron, who wrote the book and lyrics for the Tony Award-winning musical Fun Home. Tartuffe is running at the New York Theater Workshop, 79 E. 4th Street in Manhattan, through January 24. Opening night is actually tonight. With us now in the studio is Matthew Broderick, Lisa Kron, and director Sarah Benson. Welcome.

Lisa Kron: Thank you.

Sarah Benson: Thank you.

Matthew Broderick: Thank you.

David Furst: Matthew, an opportunity to play a real, morally reprehensible con artist. How could you say no?

Matthew Broderick: I couldn't. I didn't. It's a wonderful part, and I have great people with me to con. David Cross is, "I don't con this one."

David Furst: David Cross is who you're really focusing your con.

Matthew Broderick: Yes. He's a delight to play with and to con. I really enjoy it, and it's a wonderful play. So old and so pertinent. Imagine writing something 300 and whatever years ago and still alive as can be.

David Furst: Alive as can be. Tell us about this production. What was it about Tartuffe that made it seem ripe for revival in 2025?

Matthew Broderick: I don't know that I thought that way. Maybe Sarah did, but probably the director has to think things like that, but I did too. I've always liked it. I saw the play when I was very young. I saw John Wood play Tartuffe in the '70s, and I've seen Henry Goodman; I've seen several people. I just always enjoyed it and never thought I would do it. Then, Sarah, I had a meeting with the director and read it. Lucas's adaptation was so good and funny, and I just thought it was worth a try.

David Furst: Let's talk about that. Sarah, Tartuffe, written by Molière, first performed in 1664, I think it is. What does this play have to tell us in 2025? Last I checked, con artists have not gone out of style.

Sarah Benson: Yes, unfortunately not. I think that the play is this fascinating document, looking at what makes someone believe what they believe and the slippery nature of belief itself. This just felt like a very ripe time to be interrogating that and asking those questions. To be doing it inside such a strong comedic envelope just feels like the Frisian between those questions around morality and who gets to define morality inside a comedy just felt like the moment to be doing that.

David Furst: To be doing that. Now, a director has to make a lot of choices when you're working on a production like this. Is the one that you made in this play that you think worked really well, or maybe surprised you?

Sarah Benson: I think when Lucas and I began talking about--

David Furst: Lucas is the person who wrote this.

Sarah Benson: Lucas Hnath is the writer who adapted the Molière. We began working on it together very early on. Yes, we immediately knew that we wanted to locate the language in a contemporary space. We had a lot of conversations around, "Do we rhyme? How do we approach the language?" We landed on this incredible language that Lucas has found, which is rhymed coupler, but has an irregular meter. The comedy is surprising.

I think that was something that really we wanted to find, that you're falling into the comedy, stepping into the comedy, and this incredible company really marry with that way of thinking about comedy. I think that was informing principle of how we approached it initially.

David Furst: Lisa, you portray the maid.

Lisa Kron: Yes.

David Furst: Who was the exasperated--

Lisa Kron: The saucy, exasperated maid.

David Furst: Who is this voice of reason right throughout all of this madness as Tartuffe manipulates this wealthy family? Do you enjoy being the one that gets to put everyone in their place on stage?

Lisa Kron: In life and on stage? I do, yes. We're having a really, really fun time with it. I think the casting of this, I think, is one of Sarah and Lucas's and the workshop's strokes of genius with this. The cast it's got a real cohesion, but people are quite different. People's performance styles and energies are really quite particular, I guess I would say, in a very vivid way that is having a very, I think, delightful synergy, it seems, for audiences and certainly for us on stage.

David Furst: Let's talk more about this cast, Sarah; Matthew Broderick, Lisa Kron, David Cross, Bianca Del Rio. Tony Award winner Francis Jue, Emily Davis, Amber Gray. Quite a collection of characters packed onto that intimate stage.

Sarah Benson: I think we started to think about people who we were just obsessed with in these roles, and it emerged out of people with, as Lisa referenced, a range of performance histories, but that we felt that could really deliver this incredible comedy. I think one of the great things about being in the room with this group is there's so many generators in the company, people who write their own material, create their own material, and so just the minds around comedy have been a very rich, synergistic place.

David Furst: There's a lot of people bringing a lot of experience to this stage and a lot of people who, as you say, write their own material, Lisa included.

Sarah Benson: Yes, exactly. I think it's been an amazing group to interrogate physical comedy, the style of comedy that we're after, and to really find that fine blend of the physical thrill and the relish that is certainly a conversation with farce and satire, but it's really deeply felt. I think that that was something that Lucas and I and the whole company have really rallied behind, that these are people we care about. I think that the pain of what everyone's going through is also what makes it so funny.

David Furst: Matthew, before your character appears on stage, nearly everybody has been talking about you behind your back, detailing what an absolutely horrible person that you are, except for David Cross.

Matthew Broderick: Right, he loves me.

David Furst: He loves you. Between Tartuffe and your portrayal of Richard Sackler in the Netflix series Painkiller.

Matthew Broderick: Not as funny.

David Furst: Not as funny, but you've been taking on some really complicated characters recently. How do you approach a character like Tartuffe? Because on one hand, you might want to go really big with someone like this.

Matthew Broderick: I approach them the same way, if somebody's a villain or not. Most villains don't think of themselves as villains. I don't think Tartuffe-- Tartuffe probably does know he's full of crap beans. Is beans okay?

David Furst: Beans is fine.

Matthew Broderick: I think Richard Sackler thinks he helped a lot of people. I try to approach from their point of view. It's fun to play people who are awful or duplicitous. It adds a layer that's a lot of fun for me. Somebody said, "Wow, it's nice to see you play a villain." I was like, "Well, that's all anybody ever cast me. I'm usually awful, actually." When I was younger, certainly, I was always usually very nice. It's a pleasure to express my less pleasant side.

David Furst: The inner scoundrel.

Matthew Broderick: The inner scoundrel is becoming more outer, which I'm enjoying.

David Furst: Some of the most striking moments of this play involve the scenes where everyone around Orgon, portrayed by David Cross, can see that he is being manipulated by Tartuffe. It seems impossible that this family member can't see through this deception, how he could be so willing to adjust his reality to justify Tartuffe's increasingly impossible to justify actions. Is there a parallel you're shooting for there?

Sarah Benson: I think it's impossible to watch the play today and not relate to the slippery reality that we're all living inside of. The questions of the play around, "Wow, does this person really believe that? How does this person really believe that? How are they getting away with it?" I think those questions feel very pertinent. I think the whole textual history of the play it was initially banned, and over the course of five years. You see Molière wrestling with political authority and the question of who gets to define what morality is, which he changes the play in order to get it produced. Inside of it, you're hearing those questions around who gets to define the moral landscape.

That's one of the reasons textual history is always so interesting to me, because it plays out in the material. You really see that in the characters in Matthew's character and in David's character, particularly.

David Furst: I'm making it sound like it's pretty heavy right there, but there's also this hilarious tug of war going on.

Sarah Benson: Absolutely. How absurd that is, and how hilarious that is, and how wild that is, that how we construct these realities and how beliefs build literally what we live inside of, and how wild and funny that is.

David Furst: We're speaking with Tony Award-winning Matthew Broderick and Lisa Kron, and also with director Sarah Benson. We're discussing their production of Tartuffe. Opening night is tonight. It's happening at the New York Theater Workshop, running through January 24th. Lisa, we spoke about this. This is written in these rhyming couplets. Is it a challenge to perform dialogue with other characters when you're speaking in verse?

Lisa Kron: It's a style. Every genre has its own challenges. It's particularly interesting because Lucas has filled this structure with relatively quotidian language, which I think the audience really is interested in. It's unexpected, and it is, as Sarah says, irregular. It does something classical and timeless, and then also engagingly contemporary at the same time. I think there's a little bit of a very productive dissonance to it.

One of our challenges in making it was to talk very fast. I think it took us-- We had to really learn it. I say, still working to get my lines exactly right every time. Personally, I am doing my best. It doesn't always come out that way, but the speed, how to attack the language as a company, that was a thing that we worked on together. I think over these weeks of previews, I think we've really hit our stride with it. We can all feel this locomotive that we get on with the language.

David Furst: Absolutely. As someone who wrote the book and lyrics for a Tony Award-winning musical, do you sometimes want to break out into song?

Lisa Kron: Always.

David Furst: You're right. The rhythm that you get into, I stop thinking, "Oh, are they going to get to the rhyme?" It really does feel like conversation.

Matthew Broderick: Oh, that's good. I think that's what we want it to do. That you're not just reading a nursery rhyme, that you're talking, and suddenly there's another layer of these surprises coming out. Sometimes you can be formal with it, or really accentuate that it's rhyming. Then other times it seems nice to pretend it's not and just do it very in a natural rhythm and then let those things pop out.

David Furst: Absolutely. It's not like you're going, ta, ta, ta, ta... tah. It's just [unintelligible 00:15:18]

Matthew Broderick: No, it's just occasionally. Occasionally, we'll do that just because it's one that's good and you want it to or something, but it's [crosstalk] [unintelligible 00:15:24] Yes. Mostly, we try to speak as if we're not speaking in verse.

Lisa Kron: Every once in a while, somebody going really fast gets the wrong word, which is somebody else needs to rhyme with. You see this look of panic across the stage, where it's like, "Can I think of another rhyming word? What am I going to do?"

David Furst: Do you all get all compiling lists of, like, certain words that you have at the ready?

Matthew Broderick: Two nights ago, said, "The best thing you can do is throw me out in the street." I'm supposed to say, "Throw me out of this house." Otherwise, there's a very good chance I'll do something bad to your spouse. Spouse and street did not rhyme. I just stood there for a long time while David stared at me, not saying the next thing, just to try to make me think of something that rhymed with street. I, of course, could not until the next day.

Lisa Kron: One early preview, one unforgettable moment, you jumped something, and then you just said, "No, sir." It was a classic moment.

David Furst: I got to say, if you're going to pick a word to change to, though, street does have a lot of rhyming options.

Matthew Broderick: It does, but it's hard when you're under the gun and the clock. It's like being on jeopardy, you know?

David Furst: We are speaking with Matthew Broderick and Lisa Kron, and director Sarah Benson. We have to quick break. We're discussing their production of Tartuffe. It's happening at the New York Theatre Workshop. This is All Of It on WNYC.

[music]

David Furst: This is All Of It on WNYC. Thanks for all joining us today. We're speaking with Matthew Broderick and Lisa Kron, and director Sarah Benson, talking about their production of Tartuffe happening at the New York Theater Workshop. Its opening night is tonight. It's running through January 24th. Sarah, tell us more about this cast because it really is an incredible collection of people.

Sarah Benson: I think one of the amazing things is that we have these incredible comedians in the show. Obviously, David Cross playing Orgon and also Ike Ufomadu who plays Valére, and also the officer and the bailiff.

I had seen both of these comedians perform comedy. I'd seen Ike at Jack, which is this amazing performance space in Brooklyn, and I'd always been like, I want to put him in a play. When we began talking about how do we deal with all these characters who show up in Act 5, we had the impulse that Ike, who has the most incredible Debpan delivery, that it would be phenomenal to see him play all of these roles. Ike was really a North Star as we started figuring out the comedic style of the show.

David Furst: I won't give it away, but that really leads to a fantastic moment towards the end.

Sarah Benson: Yes, exactly. It really was a way to lean into the thrill of the physical comedy and the theater of it. It's been so fun to see these comedians and this phenomenal company of actors learning from each other in the room. The synergy that Lisa referenced has just been really, truly incredible.

David Furst: David Cross, of course, who famous for Mr. Show and lots of movies and standup comedy, all kinds of things. Arrested Development.

Sarah Benson: Exactly, exactly.

Lisa Kron: Also, Bianca.

Sarah Benson: And Bianca Del Rio, the most amazing drag performer, who Lucas really wrote it for her, and we were like, well, Bianca Del Rio would be our dream Madame Pernelle, but would she ever come do it? We asked, and she said yes.

David Furst: This is Orgon's mother?

Sarah Benson: This is Orgon's mother, who bookends the play, and she was one of the characters that got added to create this strong comedic envelope when Molière revised the play to get it produced.

David Furst: Let's talk about that opening scene, if we can, with Bianca Del Rio. This is like a celebrity roast, and nobody on stage is spared.

Sarah Benson: Yes, that's exactly right. I think we began to imagine this as her reading the room, essentially. Her pride has been injured by what's happening in the house, and she takes that out in the form of these roasts of everyone. It's also our introducing the cast of characters for our dialogue, almost--

David Furst: It's a great way to introduce everybody, too.

Sarah Benson: It's incredible. Bianca just brings such amazing comedic instincts. She's a phenomenal grandmother in this. Then she shows up again at the end of the play, so she's this touchstone of what's changed during the course of the show.

David Furst: How much fun is it going back and forth with David Cross as you're just torturing this poor person?

Matthew Broderick: It's great. I love it. Lisa, I can't torture. She's always onto me, which is irritating. That's fun, too. David is great. He's just very, very funny. It's a subtle humor that you don't see coming, but you just find yourself laughing. He's very smart and just always makes it interesting. To watch Ryan, his son, he catches--

Sarah Benson: Ryan Haddad, who is playing Damis.

Matthew Broderick: Is a horrible scene where I basically confess to everything that I'm doing. I say, "Exactly, I'm trying to sleep with your wife. I'm a terrible person." Orgon still is like, "Well, he's only saying that because he's a good guy."

David Furst: You're trying to defend.

Matthew Broderick: I'm trying to confess.

David Furst: You're trying to defend his son in Orgon's view.

Matthew Broderick: Yes, and Orgon takes all of that to mean that the son has done something bad, no matter what happens. Poor Damis, he ends up collapsing onto the table. His head goes down, and it's fun to torture him every night. I like that.

David Furst: We're talking about the comedic potential in some of these scenes, but as you mentioned earlier, there's real emotions here. It's a heartbreaking scene.

Matthew Broderick: Hopefully. All good comedies are like, you're trying to be funny, but not in a blank way or a cartoon. It's funny because it's serious and upsetting sometimes. Being conned by somebody can be very serious. I take their house, basically. It's also funny to watch that happen. It's only funny if you're also believing the serious side of it, I think.

David Furst: Do you have to play that character in a way that doesn't make the audience fall in love with this character so much that they're on your side? You know what I mean? That he's so hilarious.

Matthew Broderick: Yes. I hope they enjoy his horribleness, but somebody said, "Oh, I like that you do it." He's like, "He's a good guy." I'm like, "What are you talking about?" Watch the play with a good guy. Hell, are you talking about?" No, I don't worry about that. I want them to the audience to believe me, that it's happening. I definitely want it to be enjoyable or upsetting or whatever. In a way, that's not my problem, but I just want them to come along and see where it goes.

David Furst: It's a fascinating production, and I wanted to mention that the set design as well. Could you talk about this, Sarah? This has something to do with court tennis, right?

Sarah Benson: Yes. In my research process, I often, when I'm working on something, will do a lot of research, and I came across this scrap somewhere that Molière's company, The Illustrious Theater, used to perform in tennis courts. I got fascinated by, wow, what must that site have done for this idea of the volleys back and forth, and knowing what Lucas's text is like, and this intense volleying that it demands.

I wanted to bring forward that question of, like, what was it to rehearse and perform these plays in that sports context, and in this, the idea of the game would be very vivid. The scenic Collective Dots designed the set, and so it came out of period research for these tennis courts, and that's what we put on stage.

David Furst: Fascinating. There's certainly a lot of volleying going on. Opening night is tonight. What are the plans tonight, and what are the plans for the show? I know it's running through at least January 24th.

Sarah Benson: Yes. We had our party last night, which was fantastic.

David Furst: The party's out of the way?

Sarah Benson: Yes. Now we're really excited to continue to share this with audiences. It's been a phenomenal run already, and we're just getting incredible responses from audiences, and I'm really seeing the actors play with the audience, and that feedback loop, which I live for, is happening. It feels very charged and thrilling. We just want to share it with as many people as we can.

David Furst: I know you've all been involved in so many different productions, but, Lisa, when you get together with a group of actors and directors and producers like this, do you just want it to continue?

Lisa Kron: Yes. I'm certainly excited for the coming weeks. It's funny, you star-- In the first rehearsal, I remember looking around and thinking, in a matter of weeks, we're going to know so much about each other. We're going to be intimate with each other. It's very intimate being in a show. We get dressed together, and we eat together, and we take naps together, and then we're on stage together, which, of course, it's the ultimate trust exercise in a certain way. There's nothing really like it.

David Furst: Our guests have been Tony Award winners Lisa Kron and Matthew Broderick, director Sarah Benson. The production of Tartuffe it's running right now through January 24th at the New York Theater Workshop at 79 East 4th Street in Manhattan. Opening night, again, it's tonight. Thanks, everybody, for joining us.

Matthew Broderick: Thank you

Sarah Benson: Thank you for having us.