A SHARP, STYLISH 'MISANTHROPE'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Theater Critic

The costumes are as sharp and angular as the attitudes in Sabin Epstein's razor-pointed new production of Moliere's ``The Misanthrope'' for A Noise Within. Use care when handling this show: It looks plush and sexy, but both the production and its characters are packed with hard, hurtful edges.

Take for instance Alceste (Mark Bramhall), our ragingly xenophobic anti-hero, who sports crisply cut suits and cocks his fedora at rakish angles while launching into another of his bitter tirades against mankind.

Or beautiful, two-faced Celimene (Abby Craden), Alceste's obscure object of desire, flouncing around in fauve-colored dresses and teasingly drawing on cigarettes that her smirky suitors hasten to light for her.

Ruthless stylishness is the hallmark of this impeccably tailored production (the duds are by costumer Angela Balogh Calin), in which men and women dress for daily battle armed not with weapons but with lethal wit. En garde, indeed.

Updating the action from the glittering Louis XIV era to 1949, Epstein's production envisions Moliere's 17th-century courtesans as part of a dying post-World War II French aristocracy desperate for one final fling. After years of hardship and deprivation, we can imagine that these upper-class poseurs have eagerly traded in their dull, Vichy collaborationist drag for more spectacular party-time plumage. Laura Karpman's jazzy background music reinforces the fashionably jaded ambience.

In this context, Craden's Celimene becomes a catty jet-age princess, sharpening her claws on anything within reach - notably her occasional rival, Deborah Strang's Arsinoe, who keeps her own talons in fighting trim. Unlikable and largely unsympathetic until the very end, this Celimene is a bloody-minded survivor who only pretends for strategic reasons to be a ditz.

Bramhall's angrily world-weary Alceste, full of Gallic rectitude, fits the mold of a thoroughly modern philosophe being flogged by his own libido. We can picture him smoking Galloises with Sartre and Camus while pondering human nature into the wee small hours, then promptly losing his head and dignity over a Sorbonne co-ed.

Bramhall's lacerating honesty gets a solid counterpoint in Joel Swetow's beautifully debonair performance as Alceste's easygoing, empathic friend Philinte. Swetow and Hisa Takakuwa, as Philinte's plain-spoken love interest Eliante, help sweeten a production that's always threatening to curdle into a sour cynicism. So do Dan Funk and Stephen Rockwell, who spin fully realized minor characters out of those self-loving comic clotheshorses Basque and Clitandre.

Richard Wilbur's eternally beautiful verse translation sounds as good as ever. Don Llewellyn's simple, utilitarian set consists of a towering rectangular doorway capped with a menacingly tilted chandelier.

When, toward the end, the production finds a clever way to tart up these 20th-century Parisians in ruffles and wigs, it's as if that doorway had become a portal into the long-ago. It's Epstein's subtle way of reminding us that the past, like the present, is a place where people who insist on speaking the ugly truth are often estranged from their times.

The facts

--What: ``The Misanthrope.''

--Where: A Noise Within at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Drive.

--When: In repertory through June 25. call the theater for specific dates and times.

--Tickets: $26 and $30 general admission; $22 and $26 for students and seniors. Call [phone].

--Our rating: Three stars.

CAPTION(S):

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Photo:

Stephen Rockwell, left, Abby Craden, Joel Swetow, J. Todd Adams and Mark Bramhall in ``The Misanthrope'' at A Noise Within.