A new rhyming verse translation of one of the greatest comedies of Golden Age Spain, and the masterwork of the "Mexican Molière," Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, will be given its world premiere production by the Antaeus Company in early 2000.

The Liar -- in Spanish, La verdad sospechosa ("The truth suspected")--is not only his masterwork; it is generally accounted the best comedy to come out of Golden Age Spain and is acknowledged to be highly influential on all succeeding western comedy. For when Corneille read the play he promptly hailed it as the best play he had ever read in Spanish, and almost as quickly produced his own version in French, Le Menteur. Corneille's version so influenced Molière that he confessed he could never have written The Misanthrope without having read it, a sentiment which Voltaire expanded into the observation that without the Corneille play, "there would have been no Molière." (Goldoni in Italy and Steele in England also wrote their own versions.)

Yet for all this, Alarcón--the first American playwright--is barely known by English-speaking readers and hardly ever produced for English-speaking audiences. Even in cultural centers with huge Latino populations like Los Angeles, few students at any level learn about Alarcón in their classes, and even fewer theatre-goers have seen one of his plays. The Antaeus Company hopes to right this wrong with its world premiere production of Dakin Matthews' acclaimed new rhyming verse translation.

"What I have tried to do," says Matthews--a celebrated film, television, and stage actor here in Los Angeles, as well as a playwright, dramaturge, and Shakespeare scholar--"is to translate Alarcón's wonderfully witty seventeenth-century Spanish into contemporary and very speakable English, while maintaining the complex verse-forms of the original. It's a crazy idea, I know, and a little like undertaking a massive crossword puzzle for which there may be no solution; but his plays are so wonderful, his dramaturgy so modern, and his style--at once racy and poetic--so striking, that I felt he deserved the best shot I could give him."

Matthews has been translating Golden Age plays into rhyming verse for six years and has published four of them--two more by Alarcón and one by Moreto--but not without first putting them to the test by bringing them twice --in staged readings with Antaean actors--to the annual conference of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theatre, a group of scholars and experts in Golden Age Theatre that meets at the same time as the International Siglo de Oro Festival at the Chamizal Theatre in El Paso.

The experts were so impressed that the Association and the Chamizal are helping to underwrite the costs of this production and its tour to the Festival in March. And the Los Angeles County Arts Commission is also supporting the Company's effort to bring classical Mexican plays to Los Angelenos by offering a two-year partial support grant.

The Liar is a comedy about a young man thrown into the heady court life of Madrid by a father who doesn't realize that his son is an impulsive and compulsive liar. The boy's lies lead to all sorts of hilarious complications, including an engagement, a marriage, a duel, and lots of mistaken identities. But what glorious lies they are!

The Antaeus production will be directed by Anne McNaughton (who most recently directed Collected Stories at the Old Globe), and will feature JD Cullum as the young liar García, Dakin Matthews as his comic servant Tristán, and other members of the Antaeus Company in the sometimes doubled roles of the young man's rivals and sweethearts, and their befuddled parents. "This will not be a stuffy production," McNaughton promises. "Alarcón wrote very funny plays in surprisingly accessible language about people whose problems and dilemmas all of us can identify with--parents and children alike."