Mamie Gummer radiates glamour and grace as a widowed socialite (Joan Marcus)
It’s been a long, action- packed theater season, but make time for “The School for Lies.” A delectable offer ing from David Ives, this is a bright, refreshing sorbet of a show, brought to irrepressible life by actors — led by Hamish Linklater and Mamie Gummer — in perfect sync.
Though it’s billed as being “from Moliére’s ‘The Misanthrope,’ ” this new comedy in rhymed couplets isn’t an adaptation of the 1666 French play.
Instead, Ives — a skilled book doctor for Encores! and the author of last year’s S&M-flavored “Venus in Fur” — used “The Misanthrope” as a starting point, riffing on its characters and key scenes. He does to it what Shakespeare did to the Italian stories that inspired several of his plays: There are similarities, but the fun is in the differences.
Directed at breakneck pace by Walter Bobbie, the action takes place in a parallel universe where Moliére’s uncompromising, truth-telling hero, Alceste, is now a drama critic named Frank (the deceptively sweet-looking Linklater) who falls in love with the witty society widow Céliméne (Gummer, cool, sexy and smooth).
“I can’t explain it. She exalts my soul,” Frank declaims. “She’s single malt. She’s rain. She’s rock and roll.”
OK, so this isn’t your average 17th-century France, either.
Though clad in William Ivey Long’s eye-poppingly colorful period costumes, Frank and company spout modern expletives and references. Canapés and artisanal sushi, anyone?
Céliméne’s tongue is no less sharp than Frank’s. She mocks her friends behind their backs — in Valley Girl speech or as a rap. Pretending to be a male lawyer, she boasts: “Chicks like my build. The way my shoulders pop/I’m like a wedge with just a pea on top.”
But she saves her most pointed barbs for the religious zealot Arsinoé (Alison Fraser). That last braces for revenge, but not before a spectacular conniption in which Fraser rolls on the floor, barks like a dog and generally whips herself into a frenzy — you half-expect her head to turn an “Exorcist”-like 360 degrees.
Ives seems to have had great fun writing in rhymes, and his delight is catching. The cast is uniformly grand, from Rick Holmes as a vain, wart-nosed buffoon to Jenn Gambatese as a good girl gone wild.
Overall, we do lose the cruelty that makes “The Misanthrope” a masterpiece of dark comedy. Ives’ disposition is sunnier here, leading to a final twist that owes more to Shakespeare than Moliére. Audiences will be too busy laughing to complain.
elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com