Stage Extra: Tartuffe this weekend!

By ALAN SCHERSTUHL

Jess Akin (left) as Cleante and Patrick Du Laney as Tartuffe.

These days, there’s no actor in town I look forward to seeing more than Patrick Du Laney.

The odd thing? You’ll mostly see him in academic productions. His current success, one that deserves to fuel months of shows, runs just this weekend.

We’ll get to Du Laney as Tartuffe. First, though, some critical housekeeping. A couple of years ago, when this play-reviewing gig first swallowed my life, it seemed a tricky thing to critique the shows at UMKC’s graduate theater department. I enjoyed most of them, and I admired how these high-end student productions were often more daring than professional ones, but mouthing off in print about young people’s schoolwork always struck me as a little cheap. The bind: I wanted to let readers know about the extraordinary shows mounted at UMKC, but I also fretted, at times, that I should ignore the lousy ones, that the academic nature of the productions meant they weren’t fair game for the kind of bitch-slap I might offer the Rep.

I no longer think that. So, before I carry on about how much I enjoyed UMKC’s Tartuffe, let me just get this into the Googleable public record: I don’t care if your play stars students, amateurs or autistic third graders dressed as Thanksgiving turkeys. If you invite me, I feel free to lay it down and make sweet hate to it.