A Romp in the Moliere : Here's director Beth Milles, in Hollywood. There's playwright Moliere, on her pedestal. They pair up for a farcical 'event.'

By Janice Arkatov

March 31, 1996 12 AM PT

Janice Arkatov is a regular contributor to Calendar

‘I love Moliere,” announces Beth Milles. “I’m obsessed with Moliere.”

It’s not starry-eyed nostalgia that’s got this 29-year-old director rhapsodizing about a 17th century French playwright. Moliere is just her kind of guy.

“[In his work], he’s always standing on the edge of a cliff, very funny yet consumed with fear and loathing. That to me is a very tangible world to exist in theatrically,” explains the New York-based Milles, whose innovative staging of Moliere’s classic comedy “The Imaginary Invalid” (1673) opened earlier this month at Actors’ Gang Theater in Hollywood.

“Moliere knew he was dying when he was writing this play,” the director adds. (Ironically, the playwright died onstage--playing the hypochondriacal title character--during its fourth performance.) “He wrote about hypocrisy among professionals, hypocrisy among the family, obsession with appearances. It’s his most complex play, interesting and powerful and about many things--but on top of that, there’s a whole theatrical event to be had.”

One year ago, Milles pitched her concept of the play to Actors’ Gang artistic director Tim Robbins, convinced that this company “would go to that extreme with me.” The result is a colorful and high-spirited romp, “circus-like” (in Milles’ words), a “comedy-ballet” (Moliere’s words) of burlesque and arty stage effects, classical themes and modern sensibilities--plus Moliere’s resurrected improvisational interludes and an original musical score by Marc Antoine Charpentier (earlier adapted by Camille Saint-Saens and now reworked by local composer Laurence O’Keefe).

After casting the show in December (Milles and her dozen actors worked together for three weeks before bringing in the scripts, physicalizing their roles and “developing a common language”), the director went to work on the theater itself, reconfiguring the stage and seating area, filling the airspace with chandeliers and gutting the costume-prop shop to accommodate a separate playing area for a reinstated prologue.

“We cleaned out the shop,” she says merrily. “There’s no backstage anymore, no place to store anything. I’m used to working in 99-seat theaters in New York, so I have space lust. I want to use every corner, every wall.”

Milles isn’t just passionate about Moliere, she’s passionate about theater. And she expects a lot.

“I’m one of the most cynical theatergoers,” admits the director, who made her Los Angeles stage debut two years ago with the HBO New Writers Project. Growing up outside New Haven, Conn., Milles’ father was the company physician at Yale Repertory. “I saw all the plays done there in the ‘70s,” she says. “A lot of Romanian directors, a lot of experimental theater.” From ages 9 to 14, she dabbled in acting; at 16, she made her directorial debut at summer camp, happily taking charge of her counselors and fellow campers.

By 19, Milles was a directing intern at the prestigious Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, later a casting intern at the Manhattan Theatre Club and a production intern at the Yale Summer Cabaret. She’s also a graduate of Cornell (where she has since returned to teach a movement workshop) and of the directing program at Harvard (where she also has been a teaching fellow). She attributes her early success to precociousness and ambition: “It takes a certain fearlessness to make it happen. Directing became about making things happen. I could do it, so I kept doing it.”

Milles also allied herself--as an assistant director--with some notable mentors: Dan Sullivan (“The Heidi Chronicles,” Playwrights Horizons, New York ), Anne Bogart (“Once in a Lifetime,” American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, Mass.), Arvin Brown (“Passion,” Williams-town Theatre Festival, Williamstown, Mass.) and Christopher Durang (“The Air Didn’t Answer,” Young Playwrights Festival, New York).

“I always had the idea that you could learn something from everyone,” she says bluntly. “Whether it’s what you want to do or don’t want to do. After my first 10 years as a director, I’ve learned to trust myself.”

Last summer, she returned to L.A. to direct three plays by Whitney Stafford McKay for the HBO New Writers Project. Her other credits include a workshop staging of Jean Giraudoux’s “The Apollo of Bellac” for the New York Shakespeare Festival, John Ford Noonan’s “A Wet One From East Rutherford” at the Trocadero in New York and a 1987 production of “Twelfth Night” for public television in Ithaca, N.Y. One of the plays she directed for the New Writers Project in 1994, Will Scheffer’s “The Falling Man,” is being developed for a run in New York.

Milles won’t mind going home. Her husband of five months, actor Tony Torn (son of actors Rip Torn and the late Geraldine Page), has been performing on stage there in “The Universe” since December, though they’ve flown back and forth for each other’s shows. In New York, they are artistic co-directors of Sanctuary Theatre, a newly revived company originally founded by Rip Torn and Page. The theater does not have a geographical base, Milles explains, “because you create theater where you can--as a sanctuary.”

“I believe in theater,” she says firmly, “even as we move into this age of the computer, and computer-generated interactive movies. The feeling I have now, creating this play in a town not based in theater, is that I want to do it all the time. Because you can never substitute the live experience.”

“THE IMAGINARY INVALID,” Actors’ Gang Theater, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Dates: Thursdays to Sundays, 8 p.m. Closes April 27. Prices: general admission, $15; senior citizens and students, $12; $10 rush on Thursdays. Phone: (213) 466-1767.