Last year was Ibsen, and this year, it’s time for Molière. Miguel del Arco directs a new The Misanthrope, a classic which forces us to wonder what honesty truly is. And it does so with humor, and at a dizzying pace.

Our protagonist, Alceste, longs to live in truth. He wants to be honest and sincere, and to be treated the same way by others. But like every other human being, he is chock-full of contradictions. And it is these contradictions – and his inability to strike a balance in life – that lead him to set off into the desert he has been crying out for since his first conversation with his friend Philinte.
Alceste is fighting a desperate battle that I find deeply moving. Perhaps because he is so passionate in a lax era like ours, when it seems that an “anything goes” approach abounds. When it is harder and harder to separate right from wrong, thereby blurring our concept of freedom. When in our attempts to shun black and white, everything has become gray. Alceste sticks his neck out in defense of truth. Because he refuses to accept the prevailing fiction and is willing to lose everything to defend what he believes in. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps he’s not. What I do know is that unfortunately, I don’t know too many men like him.
Miguel del Arco