MOLIERE AT GROVE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL : ‘INVALID’: STRONG LAUGHS, WEAK BITE

Physicians did not take Moliere’s caustic portrayals of their profession lightly. Carried from the stage after a performance as Argan, the title character of his “The Imaginary Invalid,� Moliere and his tuberculosis were boycotted by the medics. You might say, he was murdered by his own satire’s effect.

Is “The Imaginary Invalid� savage enough to deserve such savage response?

It all depends on how it’s played. At the Grove Shakespeare Festival, director Frank Condon has decided to lessen the comedy’s outrageous corrosiveness. The laughs are strong, but not the acid.

Take Argan’s hallowed physician, Dr. Diefendorfer (Benjamin Stewart) and his would-be physician son, Tommy (Bud Leslie). Argan and the doctor are planning to marry off Argan’s daughter, Angelique (Deborah Gates), to the witless Tommy. In the Miles Mallesonc translation, father and son are to be dressed in huge black gowns with traditional doctor’s hats that look like dunce caps. Condon, in updating Moliere/Malleson from late 17th-Century Paris to 1912 New Orleans, has costumer Karen J. Weller dress Stewart and Leslie in evening suits and spats.

One’s instant response is that New Orleans isn’t up to Paris as a funny setting. But in dropping Moliere’s bold strokes in the modernization (as well as the commedia dell’arte of this last of Moliere’s “comedy-ballets�), Condon interestingly chooses to put more emphasis on behavior than looks. So Leslie talks and gyrates like a vacuous cretin of some alien origin.

In this case, the choice works, because Leslie becomes one with his mad creation. He’s a gifted comic actor, which is what Condon needs all the way down the line.

What Condon has, however, are mostly competent actors who don’t always seem aware that they’re in a major shifting of Molierian farce. When Elaine Porter as the clever maid, Toinette, disguises herself as a doctor offering Argan his worst diagnosis (to keep him in bed so he’ll have to cancel the marriage plans), she behaves like Whoopi Goldberg in Jamaican dreadlocks. Silly, which good farce never is.

Gates’ Angelique, on the other hand, seems stuck between centuries--one minute a Southern belle, another minute mildly miffed that her father doesn’t let her marry her real lover, Cleante (Ferdinand Lewis). You’d think that a young woman of 1912 would raise holy hell over such arrangements.

But that would be rewriting Moliere in the way that Charles Marowitz rewrites Shakespeare. Condon’s not out to do that. His transatlantic transposition, though, hits some unruly currents on the way. If many of his actors fail to internalize Moliere’s inflammatory comic mode, and if 20th-Century characters are forced to conform to the manner of 17th century ones, the comedy loses--at the least--its sharp, very French shape.

One actor who doesn’t lose anything along the way is Daniel Bryan Cartmell as Argan. He strikes us as a man who’s seen too many voodoo ceremonies, and his voice is thoroughly stuck in a Bayou swamp. This is an Argan whose belief in his own viability is completely shaken, so he needs “experts� to confirm his own phobias--the perfect image of the noveau riche American naif.

Cartmell’s performance grounds this production so that we almost buy the change of place and era. Carl Reggiardo’s double turn as a shyster lawyer and an imperious doctor works the same magic--very Moliere and very Southern. Argan’s conniving wife is a gold digger for any age, and Cherie L. Brown eagerly milks every moment.

The play’s broad musical finale--Argan’s initiation into the society of doctors--is always a director’s challenge: How to turn a drawing room farce into a comedy-ballet that’s just this side of ferocious? Weller’s capes for the medical society and prop designer John Jockinsen’s oversize medical instruments push things into comic-book lunacy, but also push things further still from the fairly subdued business preceding it.

It displays much effort from the technical staff (including set designer Cliff Faulkner and lighting man Doc Ballard), but it makes us wonder if the whole thing wouldn’t have been funnier in French.

Performances at 12852 Main St., Garden Grove, on Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., until Aug. 15. Tickets: $13-$15; (714) 636-7213.