'I Am Not Tartuffe': American rock & roll vs. French art film

If you've ever wanted to speak to God in real time, now is your chance. On March 15, Yellow Tape Construction Company premieres I Am Not Tartuffe, a play in which God is available via instant messaging. God also happens to be French.

"I can't remember how we came up with that," says Yellow Tape Co-Artistic Director Jonathon Morgan, who wrote and directed the production. "Originally, I think we had the idea that God was a blogger, because (blogging) is kind of navel-gazing, and he's French."

Audience members can bring their laptops and wireless cards to the performances and send an e-mail directly to God, who conveniently has a Gmail account. Some of the responses will appear projected onscreen during the play.

At first, Yellow Tape imagined their spring show would be an adaptation of Molière's classic play Tartuffe.

"We had the idea to do something based off of Tartuffe [by Molière]," recalls Morgan. "But none of us had read it since high school, and then we read it, and it kind of sucks. It would take more than we're able to do to make it relevant; let's just say that."

Morgan chose to depart from Molière's play about a scheming Frenchman who takes over a family's wealth and future to create a play about scheming French people who plot to take over America's future. The result is a battle between the American forces of rock & roll and French art-film fanatics.

"It actually turned out a little more serious than a lot of the shows we've done," says Morgan.

Avram Dodson directed the mock-art-film that shows during the play, in which the character Tartuffe faces an intellectual crisis. "The film itself is equal parts weirdness, pretension, empty symbolism, and, hopefully, humor," Dodson explains.

The show's subject matter lands right in the middle of the Francophile versus Francophobe tension that many Americans feel.

"There are some things about the European mindset that kind of bug me," admits Morgan. "Let's pretend that you can generalize for all of Europe: It's a little bit depressive. Some people would call it realism. Sometimes it borders on cynicism. There can be an apathetic quality to the culture there." Americans, on the other hand, have a different mentality. "You can hope for stuff."

Dodson is less apologetic: "My girlfriend's family is Bengali, and the Bengali are the French of India. Short answer: I hate the French."

At the same time, Morgan and the company acknowledge that traditional theatre audiences often admire Europeans and especially the French for their apparent sophistication and intellectualism. The result is, he says, a play that looks at both sides in a more serious light than they had first imagined. Actors hired for a comedy now found themselves veering into drama.

"We try and push ourselves in both directions. I get the impression that people who do serious work find us a little middlebrow. It's fun. (Our work) communicates really effectively with a contemporary audience."